This gaming PC is exactly the sort of deal you should be avoiding this Black Friday

Everyone is getting in on the Black Friday deals fun these days, and that includes Microsoft. Pop over to its deals page and you'll find a range of its own Surface tablet/laptops on offer as well as hardware from other manufacturers. 

Microsoft was responsible for one of the best deals around this week, with a CyberPower Gaming PC kitted out with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 for under $2,000. Unfortunately, that sold out yesterday. I was eager to see what it was going to replace that with. Man, was I disappointed.

• Check out our Black Friday deals roundup for the best we've found from across the web.

Don't get me wrong, the Corsair One i164 was a great PC. It boasts an impressively compact design that gives the tired old gaming PC concept a really good shakeup. It's also packed with, what at least it was on release, top tier hardware. And boasting a $500 saving on its original price tag, you may be wondering why we're not singing the praises of this deal?

Simple: It's still too expensive and it's way too old.

The Corsair One i164 is an enthusiast-class gaming PC. With an original price of $3,499.99, this is no budget marvel. So even though it's enjoying $500 off at Microsoft site right now, it'll still set you back (deep intake of breath time) a penny under $3,000. Ouch.

For that, you get an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and an Intel 9th Gen Intel Core i9 9900K CPU. This was a top of the line build when it came out, so it's no surprise to see a healthy 32GB of RAM and a 960GB SSD as well as 2TB of hard drive storage. All in that impressively compact chassis.

That RTX 2080 Ti was a stunning offering when it first came out and was as good as Nvidia's Turing GPUs got. Problem is, the latest 30-series cards wipe the floor with it, and now the decidedly middling $499 RTX 3070 beats the $1,200 RTX 2080 Ti in plenty of games. The RTX 2080 Ti got very old very, very quickly. 

That 9th Gen Intel Core i9 isn't looking too clever either. Intel has just launched its 12th Gen Alder Lake hybrid architecture, spearheaded by the Intel Core i9 12900K. That's the high-end equivalent of the Core i9 9900K in the Corsair One—that chip is now three whole generations out of date.

Had the price cut been deeper, maybe it would have been worth considering. As it is, you can simply get a lot more for a lot less. Like this one from iBuypower:

Check out our picks for the best Black Friday 2021 gaming PCs if you're in the market for a new PC. In the meantime, we'd recommend avoiding this 'deal' as it simply isn't one at all.