The Skytech Nebula is the absolute star of the Prime Day gaming PC sale. The RTX 4060 Ti isn’t a great DIY GPU upgrade, but it’s a great graphics card as part of a full system under $1,000. That’s comfortably faster than his RTX 3060 Ti, which has just landed on a gaming PC in this price range, but falls short of the gaming performance of the older RTX 3070.
Paired with an Intel Core i5 12400F, it makes a great budget gaming PC. Skytech Nebula is just $999.99 on Newegg. The core components are well supported by a 16 GB DDR4-3200 and a 500 GB SSD. That’s my biggest regret about this rig, to be honest. You’ll quickly run out of storage space. It’s a real shame that system builders are so skimping on storage when good 1TB SSDs are available today for just $60.
Older 12th Gen Intel CPUs are no slouch, a solid 6-core, 12-thread processor that can keep the RTX 4060 Ti fed with enough data to push your games to the limit.
But here comes the $10 cheaper MSI Codex R machine. Also on Newegg, the price is $989.99. Running the underpowered RTX 4060 graphics card can sometimes struggle to deliver RTX 3060 Ti levels of gaming performance. The difference here is that it’s a more rounded product and completely next-gen.
The Core i5 13400F features the Raptor Lake chip and is a true upgrade over the Core i5 12400F. It’s a 10-core, 16-thread CPU, and it also has fast DDR5 memory.
MSI also offers a full 1TB SSD.
But if we’re talking about straight-up gaming performance, it’s the Skytech Nebula powered by the RTX 4060 Ti. However, both machines make a great base to start your PC gaming journey or replace Theseus’ aging PC at the end of its useful life.
But if you can stretch your budget, this Yeyian machine wins my heart. Yeyian Shoge is just $1,289 on Newegg and is pretty awesome.
A true gaming PC with no compromises. Forget the fact that it doesn’t have DDR5. You get the most affordable gaming CPU with a Core i5 13400F and 12GB RTX 4070. This is your graphics card. at the worst case With DLSS 3 and frame generation support, it delivers RTX 3080 level gaming performance, and in some cases well beyond.
At $1,300, this is a gaming PC you wouldn’t have dreamed possible just a few months ago. Hell, even a few weeks ago you would have struggled to find something this powerful in such a small size.
