The Dell XPS Desktop (8950) is the best desktop PC you can buy right now, hands down. And it’s on sale for Prime Day, which is great for a PC that just launched earlier this year. The configuration Amazon is selling isn’t worth the price, though, and you can get a much better value by shopping on Dell’s website for the same PC.
- Check out the best Prime Day deals
- Going mobile? See our roundup of the best Prime Day laptop deals
The Amazon deal in question knocks 15% off the latest XPS Desktop, bringing the list price of $1,400 down to $1,189. Not bad, but the specs don’t check out. The machine comes with a powerful Intel Core i7-127000 processor and 32GB of the latest DDR5 memory, but it’s missing a discrete graphics card. You don’t need a discrete graphics card, but the configuration Amazon is selling is $300 more expensive than a very similar configuration from Dell.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
The base model for the Dell XPS Desktop is only $882, and it too comes with the same Core i7-12700 processor. It doesn’t have the same 1TB hard drive as the Amazon model, and it cuts the RAM down to 16GB. But both of those upgrades are easy to do, and they’ll cost you less than $100. You’re throwing away money on Amazon’s Prime Day deal
You can get a significantly better configuration for around the same price as the Amazon deal, too. For $90 more, you can pick up the machine with the same Core i7-12700 processor, the same amount of storage, and an RTX 3060 Ti discrete graphics card. The RTX 3060 Ti is one of the best graphics cards you can buy, and it’s $500 or more on its own.
It’s one of the worst Prime Day deals I’ve seen, and the deals this year have been pretty solid overall. For example, graphics cards are available for below list price for the first time in nearly two years, and there are half a dozen excellent deals on gaming PCs for Prime Day.
Just because Amazon has a bad deal doesn’t mean you should avoid the XPS Desktop. As you can read in our Dell XPS Desktop 8950 review, it’s a fantastic PC that’s suitable for everyone from remote worker to gamers, and very few PCs can cover such a spectrum.
Don’t wait for Prime Day to end, though. Dell is running its Black Friday in July shopping event at the same time as Prime Day, and both the deals above are part of the sale. They’re a much better deal compared to what Amazon is offering, but they’ll only last until the end of the day.