Live: The best Prime Early Access PC upgrade deals so far
Throughout today and tomorrow, October 11–12, Amazon will be pumping out PC upgrade deals. In fact, it's early doors and I'm already seeing lots of deals on top components—including CPUs, RAM, coolers, motherboards, SSDs, and, yes, even graphics cards—but I expect even more deals to appear as the shopping event continues.
You don't have to stay on top of every great deal throughout the event, however. I'll be collating the best PC upgrade deals right here as the team finds them. This page will automatically refresh with the latest updates, so hang tight.
Cast a wider net with our best Amazon Early Access PC gaming deals round-up.
I'm searching Amazon for the best Prime Early Access deals, but, as ever, these sorts of prices reductions tend to spill over to other major retailers. They have to stay competitive with Amazon's prices, after all, and while they'd usually wait around until Black Friday to try and get stock out the door I suspect we'll see some great deals across the web over the next 48 hours. So I'll keep my eye on those, too.
Buying advice: graphics cards
Graphics cards might be the hottest ticket in town right now, and we're actually looking at the possibility of some great graphics cards deals as we head into the buying bonanza season. There's a glut of graphics cards with retailers and distributors, and this is stock that Nvidia and AMD will want to shift as best it can.
The big question is: What's a great price for a graphics card nowadays? For most of today's graphics cards, the manufacturer recommended price went up in smoke in a matter of days, perhaps even hours, after their release. So while I am optimistic about deals, I'm also going to stay sceptical of these so-called 'deals' at times. You shouldn't be paying over MSRP for a card that's nearing the end of its life, and the RTX 30-series and RX 6000-series are on their way out. That's truer of the high-end graphics cards today—the low-end from Nvidia and AMD are both going to be sticking around until at least some point early next year, if not much later than that.
Still, you shouldn't pay top dollar for even a budget GPU. Here are some resources we've put together to help you know whether a graphics card deal is really as good as it seems.
GPU performance
Here's a list of the manufacturer set retail prices (MSRP), or recommended retail price (RRP), for most the latest graphics cards. For the most part, these are the set prices for the stock or reference versions of these cards, if applicable, and not representative of overclocked or third-party graphics cards, which may well be priced higher.
Good morning, Jacob reporting for duty.
PowerColor RX 6600 Fighter | £259.98
Let's start off with this £260 RX 6600 that's currently live over at Ebuyer. That's £30 off the original price, and a greater saving that any I can see on Amazon right now, and certainly not a bad saving on this 1080p-capable card today.
PowerColor RX 6600 Fighter | 8GB GDDR6 | 1,792 shaders | 2,491MHz Boost | £289.99 £259.98 at Ebuyer (save £30)
The Radeon RX 6600 isn't a bad GPU for the right money, and this reduction to below £260 makes this one of the cheapest options around. The performance isn't far off Nvidia's RTX 3060, which means you're hitting silky smooth frame rates at 1080p without having to hack the settings. This is a quiet running card too.View Deal
WD_Black SN850 1TB | £98.30
WD has a habit of making SSDs that we absolutely love. That's not just for performance reasons—though note that this SN850 is no slouch at up to 7,000MB/s and 5,300MB/s read and write, respectively—but for the price you'll often find them going for. This 1TB SN850 is a rapid PCIe 4.0 drive with a heatsink (important if you want to use it in a PS5 though also handy if your motherboard has none) for under £100.
WD_Black SN850 NVMe SSD with heatsink | 1TB | PCIe 4.0 | 7,000 MB/s reads | 5,300 MB/s writes | £257.99 £98.30 at Amazon (save £159.69)
The SN850 is arguably the PCIe 4.0 drive to beat, and consistently gives the Samsung 980 Pro's performance a run for its money. It's our favourite high-speed SSD, and this is the lowest it has ever been. That price is even more impressive given it comes with that chunky heatsink.View Deal
I'll let you in on a little secret: I'm checking Amazon's best prices for a product using a tool called CamelCamelCamel. It essentially shows you a handy graph for a product's historical pricing, like so.
I highly recommend, for any deals you come across, you do the same. That way you can be sure you're not being messed around by 'deals' that aren't what they seem. CamelCamelCamel is both a Chrome plugin and a free-to-use website.
Samsung Odyssey G7 | £419
Samsung makes a mean monitor, from massively ultrawide behemoths to compact speedy things like this G7. The G7 is a 1440p, 27-inch panel with a 240Hz refresh. So yeah, it's quick. We were pretty impressed with the G7 at launch, noting it as proof that VA panels can indeed by very speedy, though its HDR implementation could be better. It's also extremely curvy, so bear that in mind.
All said and done, the Samsung Odyssey G7 is down to £419. That's very nearly the lowest price we've seen this monitor going for on Amazon, which was back in mid-2021 when this monitor was going for £412. Still, it's a lot cheaper and well worth a look if you love speed.
Samsung Odyssey G7 | 27-inch | 1440p | 240Hz | VA | £549.99 £419 at Amazon (save £130.99)
The Samsung Odyssey G7 is extremely quick at 240Hz, so you'll need a decent graphics card to get the most out of it. This isn't the cheapest it's been, but is still a decent price for this panel.View Deal
Corsair 16GB (2x 8GB) 3200MHz C16 DDR4 RAM | £59.99
DDR4 RAM is essentially always on offer right now. The stuff is seriously cheap. A 16GB stick shouldn't cost you anything over £60 right now, and that's exactly the 'deal' I'm about to highlight. It's not really a deal in that it's actually discounted by any amount, but this kit is at one of its lowest prices to date right now.
At 3,200MHz, the kit below will be a good fit for any AM4 AMD CPU (Ryzen 5000-series and older) or Intel CPU up to the latest 11th Gen chips.
Corsair DDR4 RAM | 16GB (2x 8GB | 3,200MHz | C16 | £59.99 at Amazon
If you're still rocking 8GB of memory, now might be the time to upgrade. We're in a transitionary period between DDR4 and DDR5 right now, and if you don't plan on ripping your DDR4-compatible CPU and motherboard out of your PC anytime soon, get some more memory while it's cheap. View Deal
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