As Amazon Prime Day approaches, there has already been quite a bit of Karen's baiting regarding deals on PC gaming. While filling up the deals hubs, I and other members of the hardware team have discovered sellers manipulating the original pre-sale price of their products to make their so-called discounts look more attractive. At the same time, some sellers are raising the discount price and charging more while making it look like a great deal.

Frankly, this is infuriating to see, especially when many of us are struggling financially. But don't worry. I hear your desperate cry for someone who is good at economics to help you budget. Your family doesn't have to starve just because you need the latest generation of gaming laptops.

Thankfully, there are several ways to avoid fake discounts, but start by knowing the official recommended retail price of the product you are about to buy. There are several sources for knowing a product's suggested retail price, including the unboxing in our review.

Once armed with that knowledge, you can check it against the retailer's reference price and the age of the product. A major factor in whether a product is worth its MSRP is whether it has been superseded by a less expensive, superior product. Our buying guide provides up-to-date information on.

There are several less complicated ways to check if a price is reasonable or has been artificially inflated. First, let's look at a few examples to get an idea of what can happen.

This MSI laptop is powered by one of Nvidia's previous generation portable GPUs, a low-end one at that; Nvidia's RTX 40 series is now in full swing, and the current generation laptops are heavily discounted.

Our Jacob had to include a disclaimer at the bottom of the deal block in case anyone mistakenly thought this machine was currently worth the listed $2,000 "before" price. But even more so now that it has a 10th generation Intel CPU.

SSDs are also constantly fluctuating in price, as SSDs are one of the most reliable sale items and always find themselves heavily discounted when the bargain season arrives. Storage prices have improved so rapidly over the past few years that it was a bit of a shock to see the reference price of a 4 TB drive from a year ago back at its original MSRP.

While certainly still technically a discount, this SSD has not sold for $600 since last year. My favorite way to do this is to use a little Chrome extension called Keepa, which is a little Chrome extension called Keepa that allows you to use the Amazon page to see your Amazon page. It embeds a graph on the Amazon page you are looking at and automatically checks the current price and the prices over the past few months. If you see a large increase, you know that prices have been artificially inflated.

CamelCamelCamel is another one I use often. It's a price checker that shows you a list of candidate products and their Amazon price history in a graph when you paste the product name into your browser. It also displays third-party price histories, so you can check to see if the item, whether new or used, is cheaper elsewhere.

There is also a Chrome extension for CamelCamelCamel that saves you a little more time. But in general, since we've already gone through most of this for you, your best bet is to check our many Prime Day deals hubs. That way, you'll save yourself the headache.