Nvidia's RTX 3060 Ti (opens in new tab) was one of the best graphics cards of its generation. It was not necessarily the fastest, but at its initial price, it offered excellent value for money. Not so much in the pandemic/chip shortage era, and now that the prices of competing, faster AMD Radeon GPUs have started to drop, I would not recommend it as a drop-in upgrade GPU. However, if you can buy a full gaming PC for under $1,000, we'll bite.

We featured this Yeyjian Katana X10 gaming PC late last year. It was priced first and foremost at the time, but now it's well under $1,000 and even better. [But the $949 RTX 3060 Ti gaming PC at Newegg (opens in new tab) is pretty good. [It has a 6-core, 12-thread Intel processor to keep feeding data to the RTX 3060 Ti GPU. While not the latest hybrid 12th generation style chip, the Core i5 11400F, which is in Intel's mid-range, is a CPU that is more than capable of being the heart of a dedicated gaming PC.

The RTX 3060 Ti also offers excellent high-end 1080p gaming performance and 1440p frame rates. It can also enable ray tracing in well-coded titles thanks to the benefits of DLSS. Backing up the [core CPU/GPU components is the required 16GB of system memory (DDR4-3200 in this case) and a 500GB NVMe SSD. The storage manufacturer and PCIe generation level are not stated, but at half a terabyte capacity, this SSD would be the only one you would want to update right away.

But SSD storage, whether it be 1TB or 2TB of game library capacity, has never been more affordable (open in new tab).