Thank Alder Lake for last-gen Black Friday gaming PC gems like this RX 6900 XT system
It's definitely worth looking at gaming PCs with last-gen CPUs inside them if they come with current-gen graphics cards.
We may have given the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT short shrift when we first reviewed it almost a year ago, but in a world where prices and availability are the real benchmarks of a GPU's worth it's a different story. That's why this $2,599.99 iBuyPower gaming PC we've found over on Newegg has caught our attention.
With a saving of $900 on its original list price, this Trace5MR system (I'm sure the name makes sense to someone in iBuyPower's stock room) will deliver an outstanding PC gaming experience to anyone lucky enough to sit it on their desktop.
AMD's most powerful graphics card is hard to come by right now, and is selling on Ebay for around $1,500 or more. The fact you can bag one inside a full gaming PC with this sort of supporting spec at this price makes it a mighty tempting offer. This is proof positive that your best shot at getting your hands on the latest GPU tech is inside a full gaming PC.
iBuyPower Trace5MR | Core i9 11900KF | RX 6900 XT | 32GB RAM | 1TB SSD | $3499.99 $2,599.99 at Newegg (save $900)
This is a tasty pile of PC hardware for a great price. The RX 6900 XT is AMD's most powerful GPU to date, and easily a match for the RTX 3080 in standard gaming performance. It's also matched with a large chunk of memory, a high-end CPU, and a 1TB SSD.
But it's not just that graphics card that shines out of this system either. With the Intel Core i9 12900K having just released, systems with older chips, such as this Core i9 11900KF are starting to ship with decent discounts. This is still a decent eight-core, 16-thread CPU, even if it's not on par with Alder Lake. But, what is?
Supporting that CPU/GPU combo is a healthy 32GB of DDR4 RAM and a chonky 1TB SSD to jam your Windows install and a good chunk of your Steam library onto.
And if you were worried about it shipping with Windows 10 and not Windows 11, don't forget that's still just a free upgrade away. Though it's probably still worth holding off until the Spring update in our opinion, so starting on Windows 10 might well be the better option anyways.