I was looking for a great deal on a gaming PC at the Prime Day event this morning and found this monster at Walmart, and at just under $580, you might be tempted to buy this as a gift from someone looking to get into PC gaming, and let's face it, it's a really cool machine It looks like a really cool machine. But looks can be deceiving, and this is one of the worst “deals” I've ever seen.

First, the graphics card is an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super. This GPU is five years old now, and while it may not seem particularly old, it is far less powerful than the RTX 4060 or RTX 3060. It was fine for 1080p games then, and it will still be fine for many games now, but you really shouldn't buy a new one for this amount of money.

But exacerbating the problem is the CPU, an Intel Xeon, especially one from 2012 with the older Ivy Bridge architecture. Sure, it has 4 cores, 8 threads, and a boost clock of 3.9 GHz, but that's very inadequate for today's games.

There's absolutely no raison d'etre in modern gaming PC deals, but at least you don't have to struggle to find something much, much better.

For $120 more, you can buy a Skytech Gaming Nebula gaming PC. It has the best budget gaming CPU available today, the Core i5 13400F, with RTX 4060 for brilliant 1080p performance. It doesn't have the latest DDR5 RAM, but 16 GB of DDR4-3200 is much faster than the Novatech rig's 16 GB of slower DDR3.

Double the budget and you get an iBuyPower Tracemesh machine with a 20 core, 28 thread Core i7 14700F processor and RTX 4060 Ti. It is a bit more expensive than other 4060 Ti PCs I have seen, but the CPU is not as powerful and the system RAM is often DDR4 instead of DDR5.

And while it is quite unfair to compare a $580 gaming PC to a $1,700 gaming PC, the CyberPowerPC machine is a great bargain. It boasts the best gaming CPU you can buy at the moment, an RTX 4070 Ti Super (awkward name but great performance), tons of DDR5 RAM, and liquid cooling.

It costs 3x more than Novatech's “bargain” but is 3x faster, handles 1440p and 4K games with ease, and with the DLSS performance enhancer enabled, it even increases fps in supported games. This is true for any of the three bargain gaming PCs I found, but not for the GTX 1660 Super.

This GPU can only use AMD's FSR 3.1 system, which is roughly equivalent to Nvidia's DLSS, but not quite the same for some games When the AI giant designed this graphics chip, it used the RTX 20 series Turing architecture as a baseline as the baseline, but the Tensor and ray-tracing cores were all removed

.

This made the GPU much cheaper, but also meant that there was no feature set of RTX models these days.

Events like Prime Day are great for getting solid deals like the above and saving big on hardware that is a generation or two old. But that Novatech PC is a classic example of vendors doing their best to clear out old inventory, the kind of thing that should be avoided in a sale, no matter how cheap it may seem.

That's why we scout out the best PC gaming deals on desktops, laptops, monitors, and components to make sure only the good stuff gets to you. These are not “gaming PCs” with old processors like the dinosaurs used to use.