Black Friday week has already yielded some tempting deals on Nvidia’s latest mid-range graphics cards, the RTX 4060 and the RTX 4060 Ti. Up at the top of the GPU pyramid, meanwhile, AMD cards are getting in the act as well. Like, say, this £200-off deal on the MSI Radeon RX 7900 XTX Gaming Trio Classic, bringing it down to £900. Still a lot of money, sure, but the RX 7900 XTX is the absolute crème de la crème of the current Radeon lineup, with native 4K performance on par with that of Nvidia’s RTX 4080.
Here's a quick one: you probably need this USB-C to USB-A cable. Everyone needs a good-quality USB-C cable, right? Whether you're charging off a power bank, topping up your VR controllers, connecting a phone to your laptop or hooking up your TV to a USB drive full of legally obtained video downloads, having a reliable cable that can do it all is incredibly handy. This one from Monoprice doesn't cost a lot either, as it has been discounted from $10 to just $3 for Black Friday.
It's a fast option too, sporting 10Gbps data transfers and rapid charging at up to three amps. In fact, it hits the USB 3.1 Gen 2 standard (what a great naming scheme) and it's a simple, pocketable one metre or 3.3 feet long.
This sure is a blast from the past. The LG 27GL83A and the slightly more expensive GL850 were the first two Fast IPS monitors to hit the scene, offering significantly better motion handling than IPS monitors up to that point - which excelled in terms of colour and viewing angles, but struggled with fast-paced action. Now the 27GL83A is back once again, and at a new low price - $200, a nice $100 reduction from its usual asking price.
Wireless headsets are great, but there's always the risk that you forget to charge them. Imagine sitting down for an evening of gaming with your pals, wrapping the earphones over your skull, and instead of hearing the roar of battle in Call of Duty or the pleasant ambience of Minecraft, you're left to contend in silence with your own terrifying thoughts. "Fool," they hiss like the many-headed hydra in the dead earphones of your chargeless headset. "If you'd picked up the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless in this year's Black Friday sale, then with its astonishing battery-life, none of this would be a problem!"
Nothing is more crucial to the feel of PC gaming than a good mouse. Modern consoles might be able to provide great visuals and a wide library of games (though still both inferior to the PC) but no controller can match the precision and reactivity of your keyboard's smaller, nimbler sidekick. Whether you're playing fast-paced RTS' like StarCraft 2 or twitchy shooters like Apex Legends, a great mouse can be the difference between virtual life and death. And for Black Friday, one of the very best gaming mice is going cheap, rather than squeak.
Modern PC gaming is a constant battle for drive space, what with having to store huge games like Call of Duty: Warzone and similarly massive videos like my fail compilations in Call of Duty: Warzone. Hence, I'm always on the lookout for discounts on storage, and when it comes to reliable SSDs, you'll struggle to find a better balance of quality and price than WD's Blue SN570. That goes double when the best NVMe SSD for gaming is on sale, and right now you can get substantial savings on the 1TB SN570 this Black Friday.
Today in Big Numbers news: HP have launched a Black Friday sale in their own store, with a particularly mahoosive cut to the RTX 4080 version of their Omen 17 gaming laptop. It’s been struck down from £3800 to £2100 in the UK, a saving to the tune one £1700 – one very Big Number indeed.
Another Omen 17 variant, still with an RTX 4080 GPU (but trading an even more powerful Intel chip for less RAM and storage), is also getting the Black Friday treatment in the US. Albeit with a $500 saving, which I understand is not as Big a Number, and is thus less deserving of going in the headline.
In the death throes of last December, I wrote about all the games I wanted to review in 2022 but eventually ran out of time for when we finally packed up the Treehouse for Christmas and took our annual turkey nap. It was quite a long list, all things considered, I will probably still end up making another one by the time this year's annual meat snooze rolls around, too. 2023 has arguably been stuffed with even more good games than we had last year, and I will be the first to admit that my eyes are, indeed, frequently too big for what I can feasibly hope to play in any given month.
But I also thought it would also be fun to get ahead of the game slightly by turning some of my remaining supporter posts for the year into a kind of extended I'M SORRY: 2023 Edition series, talking about games I have actually liked and played, but which a) didn't end up making it onto my personal GOTY list (just to keep you Advent Calender guessing gamers on your toes), and b) we also weren't able to review on the site, either due to lack of time, code or, well, no, it's really just time. Time is our eternal enemy. And the first game I'd like to talk about is Tron: Identity.
Nvidia don’t really make budget graphics cards anymore, so it’s up to the Black Friday sales to provide the next best thing: price-slashed mid-rangers. This RTX 4060 deal is just the ticket, with Amazon UK trimming down the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4060 Windforce OC to £274. That’s less, by the way, than most last-gen RTX 3060 cards are currently going for, even those partaking in Black Friday themselves.
A very recent addition to the RPS best gaming monitor list has shed some cash in the Black Friday – and happily, it was already pretty good value to begin with. MSI’s MAG 274UPF doesn’t skimp on picture quality, despite having one of the lower RRPs for a 4K monitor, and now that it’s dropped to £449 / $380, it’s an even better proposal to PC owners who are as sensitive to expenditure as they are hungry for pixels.