The RAM crisis has caused a spike in the price of PCs, and that's made 2026 a difficult year for creatives and gamers alike. The good news is that you might not have to wait to Black Friday at the end of the month to find a decent discount. Right now, AO has the Acer NITRO 20 N20-101 Gaming PC reduced by £568 to £1,031 – the price of a budget laptop.
The entry-level specs won't interest professional video editors (see our guide to the best desktop PCs for video editors if you're in that category), but dedicated Nvidia graphics mean this budget setup is ready to handle lighter content creation as well as gaming, and it would mark a step up from a laptop with integrated graphics.
Why choose a desktop PC
Whether it's for gaming or content creation, there are two big advantages of a desktop PC over a laptop. Firstly, you tend to get more bang for your buck in the first place. As a rule, you tend to get more powerful internals, in the form of a superior CPU and GPU and more RAM, compared to what you would get in a laptop at the same price point (of course, some of this is outweighed by the fact that you also need to invest in a monitor and peripherals).
But the biggest advantage of a desktop PC is upgradability. If you find you outgrow the RTX 5060 too quickly, or processes are getting bottlenecked and you need more RAM, or more storage, you can buy the additional internals that you need as you need them and upgrade the configuration yourself, potentially multiple times.
