Technologies

Best Gaming PC Deals: See the Holiday Sales at Best Buy and Newegg

For the gamer on your holiday shopping list, here are the biggest discounts on gaming desktops right now.

If you aren’t up for the challenge of assembling the parts and then building your own gaming rig, a prebuilt system is a quicker and easier route to a new gaming PC. You can find some reasonably priced, off-the-shelf gaming desktops right now with Nvidia’s GeForce 3000-series GPUs. PCs with Nvidia’s next-gen RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 GPUs are starting to roll out, but they are prohibitively pricey. Thankfully, there’s a wide range of desktops with the previous-gen — and still highly capable — RTX 3000-series GPUs, many of which can be found at a discount. And we even found an RTX 4080-based system on sale for a reasonable sum.

PC gamers will find the lowest prices at Best Buy and Newegg right now. After taking a look at the gaming desktops on each site, here are the best deals I’ve found — from a desktop discounted to $790 with RTX 3050 graphics to fully loaded beasts with RTX 3090 and RTX 4080 GPUs.

Check back regularly; I’ll keep this list updated as I find new deals on RTX 30-series gaming desktops.

How to choose a good gaming PC deal

There are thousands of gaming PC deals to choose from, but not all of them are worth your hard-earned cash. As with any pricey purchase, it’s worth assessing your needs before diving in and spending big bucks. When it comes to gaming PC deals, that means looking at how demanding the games you plan on playing are, how your new PC will fit into your existing setup (how many displays it will be driving, for example, and at what resolution and frame rate) and of course, your budget. If you want multimonitor 4K gaming, you’re probably going to struggle with a budget of $1,000, so it’s best to be realistic with your expectations here.

Once you’ve considered those factors, it all comes down to the price-to-performance ratio on offer. The main considerations here are the processor, graphics card and RAM as these will have the most impact on your overall experience. Newer and more powerful parts are going to push the overall price up — just take a look at our list of the best graphics cards for gamers and you’ll see that these don’t come cheap — so consider machines with recent previous-gen components to save some cash.

Should I buy a prebuilt gaming PC deal or build my own?

Depending on how technically savvy you are, the proposition of building your own gaming PC will either excite you or strike fear into you. The main benefit of building a PC yourself is you get to choose every component, shop around for deals on individual parts, and ultimately get more bang for your buck. The downside is that it takes a lot of research, effort and a decent amount of technical savvy. There’s also the risk of something going wrong in the build process, which means you’ll end up damaging parts or pulling your hair out trying to figure out why things aren’t working as expected. With prebuilt gaming PC deals, you get to skip some of the more time-consuming and frustrating parts of the process, but you’ll pay for the privilege and likely spend more money overall.

Shopping for a new computer?

Use the CNET Shopping extension to compare prices of your favorite models at different retailers or add promo codes to your cart with a single click.

Technologies

The FCC Just Approved Charter’s $34.5B Cox Purchase. Here’s What It Means for 37M Customers

Technologies

Spotify Expands Into Audiobook Rankings With Weekly Charts

The feature is available to both free users and Premium subscribers. Wuthering Heights is reaching the heights on both the US and UK charts.

If you’re a Spotify user, you may be familiar with features like the year-end summary Wrapped, as well as your daily usage stats. Now, the service has a new popularity chart tracking audiobooks.

Spotify’s audiobook charts are now available to free and Premium users within the service’s Audiobooks hub. While only Premium users receive 15 hours of audiobook listening per month, the company offers a larger selection of titles you can buy.

US charts and UK charts are both available now.

Read more: Best Music Streaming Services for 2026

Spotify says that the audiobook charts will help customers discover new and popular titles in real time.

«As we’ve proven with Music and Podcasts Charts, when content is easier to access, discover, and enjoy, the demand grows,» said Duncan Bruce, Spotify’s director of audiobook partnerships and licensing, in a statement on Friday.

Spotify launched audiobooks in 2022, and has since added features such as the AI catchup tool Recaps and PageMatch, which lets you swap more easily between a printed book and the audio version.

Spotify Premium currently costs $13 a month and includes more than 100 million songs, as well as audiobooks. Spotify Premium is currently CNET’s Editors’ Choice for best music streaming service.

The current US audiobooks chart lists Emily Brontë’s romantic classic Wuthering Heights as the top listen, followed by James Clear’s self-help book Atomic Habits and Freida McFadden’s psychological thriller The Housemaid. Audiobook popularity is also broken down by genre, with charts for romance, mystery and thriller books, self-help, science fiction and fantasy, biography and memoir, business and careers, teen and young adult, religion and spirituality, history, and parenting and relationships.

Powered by its blockbuster movie adaptation starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, Wuthering Heights also leads the overall chart for the UK.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for Feb. 28, #523

Here are hints and the answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle No. 523, for Saturday, Feb. 28.

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Connections: Sports Edition is a tough one. Chicagoans and southerners, you might have an advantage, at least with the blue and purple categories. If you’re struggling with today’s puzzle but still want to solve it, read on for hints and the answers.

Connections: Sports Edition is published by The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by The Times. It doesn’t appear in the NYT Games app, but it does in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can play it for free online.

Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Puzzle Comes Out of Beta

Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Fore!

Green group hint: Take me out to the ballgame.

Blue group hint: Alma mater.

Purple group hint: Bear down.