I've beaten the best Prime Day gaming PC deal with a rig built completely from Big Deal Days parts

With Amazon Big Deal Days now in full flow, there are lots of great pre-built offers going around, like this Lenovo Legion system, with an RTX 4070 Ti Super and coming in at a cent shy of $1,600. That got us all chatting in the office about whether you could buy an equal or better system for the same money.

Big vendors like Lenovo pay less for all its parts because it buys them in bulk so I expected it to be tricky to beat. But never one to back away from a challenge, I dove into the Prime Day sales and I reckon I've come up with a better gaming PC rig than what Lenovo is offering.

Not only is my total cost less ($1,593.14 vs $1,599.99) but it's also faster and has twice as much storage. It...ah...doesn't have an operating system, though. But hey, gaming on Linux is pretty good these days!

AMD Ryzen 7 7700X | 6 cores, 12 threads | AM5 socket | 5.4 GHz boost | 32 MB L3 cache | 105 W | $399$244 at Amazon (save $155)
When it comes to gaming, eight cores are all you really need and the Ryzen 7 7700X is an absolute peach of CPU. Thanks to supporting 16 threads, it's pretty handy at content creation too. Other than tending to run quite hot, there's little to not like here. 

Ryzen 7 7700X price check: Newegg $244

I know PC gaming enthusiasts would love a 3D V-Cache chip in this build but have you seen how expensive they are? Yeah, that's really not going to happen with this tight budget but don't worry, the Ryzen 7 7700X is still a really good processor.

Not only is it top-notch in gaming (check our review for the stats) but it's also pretty handy for content creation workloads. I've built a few systems with a Ryzen 7 7700X now and it's a solid, all-round CPU.

AMD systems can be a little twitchy at times and they can take a while to settle down with drivers and settings, but once all sorted, they run cool, fast, and stable. Zen 4 chips tend to have quite high core temperatures when under load but don't worry about it, as they're designed to be like this.

ASRock B650E PG