On November 6, Best Buy sold an iBuyPower Slate with a Ryzen 5 8400F, an RTX 5060, 16 GB of DDR5 and a 1 TB SSD for $899.99. Buying the same parts yourself costs around $1,150 before Windows.
That’s backwards from how PC buying normally works. The memory shortage has pushed RAM, SSDs and graphics cards far above their launch prices, and the companies that build prebuilt PCs bought a lot of those parts on contracts signed before prices took off. For now, a prebuilt can be the cheap way to get a gaming PC.
Three days later the same Slate was back at around $1,400, more than its parts are worth. That’s the other half of the story: a prebuilt can be a great deal one day and a bad one the next, so you need to know what it’s worth before you look at the price tag. This guide gives you the numbers and the five things to check.
What a prebuilt is worth
The Slate makes a good worked example. Here’s what its parts cost bought separately in November 2026:
| Part | Cost to buy it yourself |
|---|---|
| RTX 5060 | $460 |
| Ryzen 5 8400F | ~$150 |
| 16 GB DDR5 (2 × 8 GB) | $180–250 |
| 1 TB NVMe SSD (cheapest in stock) | $148 |
| A620 motherboard, 650 W power supply, case | ~$215 (my estimate) |
| Total, without Windows | ~$1,150–1,225 |
Start from the graphics card, because it decides what the PC can do and takes the biggest share of the price. Using the same method, these are the prices at which a complete PC with Windows beats building it yourself:
| Graphics card | Good for | A real deal |
|---|---|---|
| RTX 5060 / RX 9060 XT 8 GB | 1080p | Under $950 |
| RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB / RX 9060 XT 16 GB | 1080p, light 1440p | Under $1,300 |
| RX 9070 XT / RTX 5070 Ti | 1440p | Under $2,300, with 32 GB of RAM |
| RTX 5080 | 1440p high refresh, 4K | Under $2,600, with 32 GB of RAM |
These move with parts prices. Our parts price guide has the current graphics card, processor and RAM prices if you want to redo the sum for a specific machine.
Five checks before you buy any prebuilt
A prebuilt maker has to hit a price, and the parts that don’t appear in the listing title are where the savings come from.
- The exact graphics card and its memory. “RTX 50-series” or “RTX 5060 Ti” isn’t enough: the 5060 Ti comes with 8 GB or 16 GB, and the difference matters more than anything else in the box. If the listing doesn’t say, assume the cheaper version.
- How the RAM is fitted. 16 GB is enough for now (here’s why), but it should be two sticks, not one, so it runs in dual channel. Speed matters too: DDR5-6000 on AMD, not 4800. With RAM this expensive, a single slow stick is the easiest place to cut costs.
- The “F” processors from the 8000 series. The Ryzen 5 8400F and Ryzen 7 8700F look newer than the 7600 and 7700, but they’re laptop-derived chips with half the cache. TechSpot measured the 7600X about 20% ahead of the 8400F in games, and the 8400F connects the graphics card at PCIe 4.0 x8. That’s fine with an RTX 5060. It’s a bottleneck if you later fit a much faster card.
- The power supply. If the listing gives only the wattage, or nothing, the power supply is probably an unknown brand. It decides whether you can upgrade the graphics card later, and a no-name unit is the last part I’d gamble on. Look for the brand and an 80 Plus rating in the full specs or the manual.
- The SSD. Expect a cheap QLC drive in budget machines. For games that’s fine. Check the capacity instead: with 1 TB and games at 100–200 GB each, you’ll be adding a second drive soon.
Ignore the “was” price
Retailers’ reference prices on prebuilts are even less meaningful than on parts. Best Buy advertised the Slate’s sale as $500 off its ~$1,400 price, and $1,400 is more than the parts inside are worth. The discount was real; the reference price wasn’t a fair one.
Price history doesn’t help as much as usual either. An iBuyPower machine with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and an RX 9070 XT sold for $1,649.99 last December and $2,249.99 in November 2026. In a normal year the second price would be a bad deal. This year it’s still about $350 below the parts, because everything inside has gone up. Compare the price with what the parts cost today, not with what the PC cost before.
Build or buy?
For a new PC under about $2,500, I’d look at prebuilts first while the shortage lasts. If one is under its threshold, I wouldn’t wait for a better price: prebuilt prices are low because of parts bought before the shortage, and that stock runs out. If memory stays expensive into 2027, as most forecasts expect, the next batch of these PCs will be built from parts bought at today’s prices, and priced accordingly.
Building still makes sense if you already have a case, power supply and SSD to reuse, or if you’re spending more than about $3,000, where prebuilt makers’ margins outweigh their parts discount. And if you want a quiet or compact PC, building is still the only way to choose every part that decides how it sounds and how big it is.
Black Friday 2026: the PCs people are searching for
These four are the prebuilts with the fastest-growing searches in the US this month. Prices change daily, so the useful number is the last column. Black Friday is November 27, and Cyber Monday is November 30.
| PC | Key parts | Recent price | Buy at |
|---|---|---|---|
| iBuyPower Slate (SBA5N5601) | Ryzen 5 8400F, RTX 5060, 16 GB, 1 TB | ~$1,400 (Nov 9), $899.99 on sale (Nov 6) | Under $950 |
| iBuyPower Slate/Trace 9800X3D | Ryzen 7 9800X3D, RX 9070 XT, 32 GB, 2 TB | $2,249.99 (Nov 4) | Under $2,300 |
| ViprTech Reaper 2.0 | Ryzen 7 8700F, RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB, 16 GB, 1 TB | Varies by version | Under $1,300 |
| Stormcraft Phantom RTX 5080 | Core Ultra 7 265F or 9800X3D, RTX 5080, 32 GB, 2 TB | $2,499–3,099 | Under $2,600 |
The 9800X3D machine is the one I’d buy. The RX 9070 XT is the graphics card I’d pick for 1440p this year (it’s in our 1440p guide), and the 9800X3D is still one of the fastest gaming processors you can buy. iBuyPower sells it as the black Slate and the white Trace; check both.
The Slate RTX 5060 is a good 1080p PC at its sale price and a bad one at full price. It isn’t a good base for a big graphics card upgrade later, because of the 8400F and the 8 GB card.
The Reaper 2.0 is a name, not a specification. ViprTech has sold it with a Ryzen 7 7700 and an RTX 4060 Ti, and with 16 GB or 32 GB of RAM, so check the full spec table of the exact listing. A liquid cooler on a 65 W processor is money spent on looks.
The Stormcraft RTX 5080 (Core Ultra 7 version on Newegg) is a good deal at $2,500, when the graphics card alone costs $1,580–1,860, and a poor one at $3,000, where the 9800X3D machine above costs $750 less. Check the memory speed: reports of the same listing give it as DDR5-6000 and as DDR5-4800.
We’ll update this section with the actual Black Friday prices.
Sources: 9to5Toys on the $899.99 Slate Doorbuster (November 6, 2026), Mixed on the 9800X3D + RX 9070 XT machine (November 4, 2026), Slickdeals on its December 2025 price, TweakTown on the Stormcraft RTX 5080, ViprTech Reaper 2.0 listing, BottleneckPC’s prebuilt vs DIY comparison (September 2026), CheapestSSD (November 9, 2026), TechSpot’s budget Ryzen 5 comparison, Tech Insider on RTX 5080 prices. Graphics card, processor and RAM prices are from our parts guide (November 4, 2026). The Slate’s November 9 price was checked at Best Buy.
