Now, our long national (gamer) nightmare finally looks to be coming to an end. Not only are PC gaming components, peripherals, and other products finally available to buy, they’re going on sale. If any of this sounds like you, now’s your time. Not only are cards in stock everywhere, but they’re selling for MSRP! That’s great, you say…but it’s not a deal. Well, hold onto your gaming seats, because Zotac has dropped one of the most powerful cards out right now, the RTX 3090, to $140 BELOW MSRP. Keep in mind that this is a card that was, at the peak of the scarcity, selling for $2,650. Pour one out for the pitiable souls that bought one then, and don’t don’t tell them the same card is now available for about half of what they paid. The model’s understated design, detachable microphone, and tank-like build quality mean you can feel confident tossing it into a bag to bring to a LAN party or friend’s house. The lack of RGB lighting also provides 20 hours of continuous runtime. While this may not stand up to some newer entries, few of those can provide the same level of sound quality as the G Pro X’s huge 50mm drivers. This rare discount drops the price of one of the best wireless headsets from one of the most trusted manufacturers out there very close to its lowest ever. Thanks to being a few years old, the Viper Ultimate has seen more and more discounts. You can usually find the mouse (without its excellent dock) for $80 on any given day. However, it’s rarer to see the RVU with its dock under $100, and almost unheard of to see one of the color variants like this one discounted at all. The Mercury White edition has been selling at full price long after the standard black model had dropped to double digits. Thanks to this Prime Day sale, you can pick up the gorgeous, ultra-clean Mercury White Razer Viper Ultimate, with its color-matched dock, for just $90. The ultimate evolution of SSD technology to date is the NVME form factor. This interface, that’s barely bigger than a stick of gum, provides a plug-and-play way to get the fastest drives on the market into your system. This drive in particular, the WD_Black SN850, is capable of “Irrationally fast read/write speeds up to 7000/5300MB/s.” While actual speeds will vary depending on the job and types of data being copied, the fact is this is one of the fastest consumer drives out there, period. The 1TB model is more than enough for most people. It can hold your operating system and a ton of apps and games, while bulkier media storage is offloaded to a slower SATA SSD or an HDD. Or, if you’d prefer a little more headroom, the 2TB model is on sale as well for the best price I’ve ever seen. The X12 gaming mouse weighs in at a relatively lightweight 75g. While it’s not the most feather-light mouse, it does sport some features not seen on anything short of flagship offerings from companies like Razer and Logitech. Among these are an ultra-fast 8K Hz polling rate, 3-zone RGB lighting, adjustable lift-off distance (LOD), and support for NVIDIA’s REFLEX analyzer. The mouse was already a bargain at its full asking price with all of this packed in, so dropping it down to $15 is just insane. Get it while you can. MSI’s Tomahawk series is a perennial favorite amongst system builders thanks to its solid build quality, understated aesthetics, and shockingly sensible BIOS interface. It’s the kind of motherboard people that have been building PCs since the dawn of time (or at least since the 90s) would opt for. This deal drops one of the most solid options for a Z690 board down to a price that would have seemed laughably impossible just a few months ago, putting it lower than some aged Z590 boards bargain seekers may have been considering if they could stomach the idea of going with a previous Intel generation. Big-name PC gaming peripheral makers are often frowned upon by some mechanical keyboard snobs. One of the main reasons for this is their lack of support for customization and reliance on proprietary components. The EVGA Z15 avoids all of those pitfalls by providing “hotswappable” switch sockets (meaning you can swap in any switch you’d like, without soldering) and a standard, full-sized layout for any keycap set you could possibly want to showcase. The board’s steep discount makes it a great entry point into the hobby and an excellent test bed for enthusiasts wanting to try out switch combinations, keycap set combinations, and more. It even ships with a keycap puller, a key switch puller, and eight extra Kailh Speed Silver switches for those that want linear switches (rather than the Speed Bronze clicky key switches) in their WASD cluster. Both the wired Kone Pro and wireless Kone Pro Air feature the aforementioned RGB lighting, Owl-Eye 19K DPI optical sensor, Titan Optical switches, and heat-treated, pure PTFE glides. You just need to choose if you want the battery-free Kone Pro with its barely-there PhantomFlex cable, or the completely wireless Kone Pro Air that somehow retains the same 66g weight as its wired counterpart, despite a built-in battery capable of a 100+ hour runtime. Either way, you’ll save $30. For hardware, I chose products that I’ve either owned, reviewed, or would purchase for myself. I’ve been building PCs and gaming on them for more than two decades, giving me a broad view of what makes a good deal on PCs, components, and peripherals. For games, I chose the most popular and steeply discounted games available, prioritizing recent titles that are still in many gamers’ backlogs. I also know that buyers have vastly different budgets, so I tried to include deals at various price points for those with a bit less or a bit more to spend on our favorite gaming gear. Finally, be sure to check out ZDNet’s Prime Day tips and tricks hub, where you’ll find additional information on how to score some of the best discounts around during one of the biggest shopping days of the year.
