Skytech's Nebula is an absolute bargain in the Prime Day gaming PC sale, and while the RTX 4060 Ti is not a DIY GPU upgrade, it is a great graphics card as part of a full system under $1,000. It is comfortably faster than the RTX 3060 Ti, which is finally available for gaming PCs in this price range, but it falls just short of the gaming performance of the older RTX 3070.

Combined with the Intel Core i5 12400F, it makes an excellent budget gaming PC, and the Skytech Nebula costs just $999.99 on Newegg. Core components are well supported with 16GB of DDR4-3200 and a 500GB SSD. Frankly, this is the biggest disappointment about this rig: it's a real shame that system builders are skimping on storage when a good 1TB SSD can be had for around $60.

The older 12th generation Intel CPUs are solid 6-core, 12-thread processors that can continue to supply enough data to game the RTX 4060 Ti to its limits.

But that's also where the $10 cheaper MSI Codex R machine comes in. This machine has an RTX 4060 graphics card and can struggle to deliver RTX 3060 Ti level gaming performance. The difference here is that it is a more well rounded product and also a fully next generation product. [The Core i5 13400F is a 10-core, 16-thread CPU that also has faster DDR5 memory. [MSI also includes a 1TB SSD.

However, if we are talking straight gaming performance, the Skytech Nebula with RTX 4060 Ti has the edge. Both machines, however, are great bases to start your PC gaming journey or to replace an aging Theseus PC that has reached the end of its useful life.

However, if you can stretch your budget, this Yeyian machine has my heart; the Yeyian Shoge costs only $1,289 at Newegg and is a beast.

This is a true no-compromise gaming PC; forget that it doesn't have DDR5, and you get the best cheap gaming CPU, a Core i5 13400F, and a 12GB RTX 4070. At its worst, this graphics card will give you RTX 3080-level gaming performance, and with support for DLSS 3 and Frame Generation, it may even give you more than that.

At this $1,300 price point, just a few months ago, one could only dream of assembling a gaming PC at this price. Even a few weeks ago, it would have been difficult to find something as powerful at this price.