Last week we thought the Katana X10 gaming PC was a bargain, and now that Newegg has dropped the price of this RTX 3060 Ti rig to under $950 (open in new tab), it looks like it could be even better value.

Sure, it's a last-gen machine in terms of overall hardware, but it's a machine that delivers excellent 1440p gaming frame rates for less than the price of some RTX 3050-based systems. And seriously, that card sucks.

Most important to PC gamers is the performance of the RTX 3060 Ti (open in new tab) graphics card. This is one of the best cards in Ampere's entire series, and it's not just a slightly faster RTX 3060, it uses a completely different GPU: the GA104 has the same chip as the RTX 3070, but cuts out some shaders to make it more affordable and The result is a graphics card that is both more affordable and more impressive.

Even with the graphics preset slider turned up to the top, the latest games can enjoy speeds well above 60 fps at 1440p. Certain ray tracing effects are excluded, however, as they can be taxing on high-end cards. However, being Nvidia, it can still benefit from DLSS and is fully capable of 4K gaming.

CPU components are several generations old, with the Core i5 11400F (open in new tab) being an older style processor from Intel. That is, it only uses high-performance cores and does not have the multi-threading capability of more recent 12th and 13th generation chips. Nevertheless, it is still a 6-core, 12-thread CPU, capable of boosting up to 4.4 GHz.

And that's plenty for gaming and most casual productivity tasks.

The rest of the specs are equally solid, with 16GB of DDR4-3200 and a 500GB NVMe SSD as the boot drive; a 650W 80 Plus Gold power supply is also included, which should keep it at this level for a while after upgrading. Also, if LAN cables are out of reach, Wi-Fi 5 support is available from the B560 motherboard.

In short, for under $1,000, these specs and price are great for a new gaming PC. Especially in today's world where it can be prohibitively expensive to get into PC gaming.