Winner winner chicken dinner? Aldi is now selling a semi-decent gaming PC
Aldi is selling a semi-decent gaming PC, so you can pick up a new rig with your weekly shop. Is it worth it, though?
Aldi's got a reputation for selling the cheapest veggies, meats, gaming PCs, and household goods available. Wait, what? No, that isn't a typo; for reasons that are quite beyond us, Aldi is now selling a Medion desktop gaming computer for £949.99. Even more bafflingly, it's not a bad one either. Although it probably won't go in our guide to the best gaming PCs any time soon, it's a good entry-point to the world of PC gaming nonetheless.
While its Intel Core i5-9400 Processor is perfectly serviceable - if at the lower end of any list for the best CPU for gaming - the graphics card is very respectable. This system packs a Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060. That's a cheap way into ray-tracing, can manage most modern games at medium-to-high settings, and is probably one of the best graphics cards available right now. The rest of its specs are pretty solid, too. For starters, there's 16GB DDR4-2666 RAM (not the quickest, but still good enough) and a 1TB PCIe SSD which is fast enough and large enough for all gaming tasks. Better still, it doesn't look like the last chicken in Aldi. The case is a futuristic black number with eye-catching blue accents, sort of like the exhaust of a spaceship from Star Trek. You even get a USB keyboard and mouse for your trouble (but they'll probably not be great, so we'd recommend checking in with our page on the best gaming keyboard and the best gaming mouse instead).
Medion gaming PC | £949.99 at Aldi
With an i5-9400 and a GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card, this rig is pretty good value for the price.
Are we likely to see more gaming PCs popping up amongst the sausages or in the canned goods aisle, then? It certainly seems that way. Perhaps the supermarket will begin putting out the best gaming laptops while it's at it.
If this isn't cheap enough for you, check back in November for our Black Friday gaming PC deals.
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As the site's Tabletop & Merch Editor, you'll find my grubby paws on everything from board game reviews to the latest Lego news. I've been writing about games in one form or another since 2012, and can normally be found cackling over some evil plan I've cooked up for my group's next Dungeons & Dragons campaign.