Get this HP gaming PC for $550, delivered for the holidays

If you don’t know how to build a PC from scratch, going with a pre-built is a great option, especially if you go with one of the already established brands, such as HP. Luckily, if you’re looking for a great budget gaming PC, HP 15L is an excellent offering from HP, and you can even grab it at a discounted price from HP’s site for $550, versus the usual $780 it goes for. You can even potentially get it before the holidays if you order quickly enough.

Why you should buy the Victus by HP 15L Gaming Desktop

Under the hood, the HP 15L runs an AMD RX 6400 Graphics, which is roughly equivalent to an RTX 1650 Ti, so while it’s an entry-level card, it’s still not too bad, especially if you’re ok with FHD at 120Hz at the most. That said, you can upgrade up to an RTX 3060 Ti or RX 6600XT for $370, although if you’re on a tight budget, the upgrade to the GTX 1660 SUPER for $140. That said, if you want to grab some of the best gaming monitor deals, you might need to go for the RTX 3060 Ti. The CPU is a mid-range Ryzen 5 5600G and is powerful enough to run most processing-heavy games and CPU-intense tasks like editing. So while that should be enough for most folks and more than enough for even the RTX 3060 Ti, you can upgrade to a Ryzen 7 5700G for an extra $150.

As for RAM, the base configuration comes with 8GB, which is ok for most cases and is the bare minimum for a gaming rig, and we encourage you to grab the upgrade to 16GB for an extra $70 for a bit more versatility and quality of life improvement. Storage isn’t too bad at 256GB, although it’s worth grabbing a secondary 1TB HDD for $59 or maybe just one of these external hard drive deals to supplement it. Finally, while the 15L comes with a WI-Fi and Bluetooth card, we encourage you to upgrade to the better one with Wi-Fi 6 for $10, especially if you plan to connect your PC wirelessly.

Overall, the 15L base specs are pretty good for a budget gaming PC to build, and you get a lot of customizability if you want to add extras. With the deal from HP bringing it down to $550 from $780, it’s worth spending some of that extra $230 in savings on a couple of upgrades.