Dave James
Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.
Latest articles by Dave James

Judge me by size, do you? I say 14-inchers make the best Black Friday gaming laptop purchase
By Dave James last updated
If I'm looking to buy the best gaming laptop, I'm spending my money on a 14-inch machine.

I use this microphone every single day, and at just $35 it's a Black Friday deal, it's a steal, it's the sale of the [expletive deleted] century
By Dave James published
The Razer Seiren Mini is cute, cheap, and surprisingly good.

Our favorite gaming monitor and a mighty OLED at that is as cheap as we've ever seen it for Black Friday
By Dave James published
At $800, this superb OLED gaming monitor is the same price it was discounted at for Prime Day, and a great deal versus some other OLED panels.

For just $750 here's a high-spec all-AMD gaming laptop with a rare Radeon GPU that will smash any RTX 4050 machine
By Dave James published
Sitting between an RTX 4050 and RTX 4060 in terms of gaming performance this 1200p gaming laptop punches well above its weight class.

Nvidia RTX 4060 vs RTX 3060 and its 7 other biggest rival GPUs
By Chris Szewczyk last updated
Head-to-head Here's how the GeForce RTX 4060 stacks up against the previous generation, its Ada compatriots, and its AMD rivals in our tests.

PC Gamer is hiring! We're looking for a talented hardware writer to join us on the team
By Dave James published
JOBS You love PC tech, could talk about it for hours, and want to play with the latest hardware and tell the world about it. And we want you.

Let me show you how to grab an RTX 4070 Black Friday gaming PC for less than $1,000 right now
By Dave James published
All it takes is a little light screwdriver action at the end.

This is the spiritual successor to the best graphics card ever made
By Dave James published
News Galax has listed a single slot beauty on its China pages, and I really want to get my hands on one.

'The next thing we're working on moving forward is Steam Deck 2,' but Valve has yet to see silicon offering the leap it's looking for
By Dave James published
News "That's not going to happen next year or the year after that. It's probably going to be more than that."

SteamOS will be coming to other handhelds before you can install it on your PC 'because right now, it's very, very tuned for Steam Deck'
By Dave James published
News "Oh, man, it's very high on our list."

Valve knows people will jam the shiny new OLED panel into old Steam Decks 'but it's probably not going to go well'
By Dave James published
news It says Steam Deck OLED "parts are not swappable" with the original LCD version.

Valve is committed to bringing Steam Deck OLED 'battery life improvements to the LCD models as well'
By Dave James published
news A post-launch BIOS update will see all the firmware and software improvements of the new version brought to the original Steam Deck.

Steam Deck OLED vs Steam Deck LCD: what's inside
By Dave James published
Innards We've cracked open both the new Steam Deck OLED and its OG LCD version to see what's change. Spoiler, it's a lot.

Valve just unveiled 'the definitive first generation Steam Deck' with an OLED screen and new Sephiroth APU
By Dave James published
news The more efficient HDR panel, bigger battery, and 6nm APU all add up to between 30 - 50% longer game time.

Lenovo LOQ 15APH8 gaming laptop review
By Dave James published
LOQ'd not loaded Lenovo's budget-oriented LOQ feels like a rare miss from the company's laptop makers.

Powerful $750 gaming laptops to OLED gaming monitors to $48 1TB SSDs: these are the top ten early Black Friday deals this week
By Dave James published
Deals We've been digging through the best PC gaming deals this side of Black Friday.

Yaaas, AMD's FSR 2.2 has finally been patched into Baldur's Gate 3
By Dave James published
news I am in handheld gaming PC heaven right now.

It's not Prime Day or Black Friday but this RTX 4060 Ti gaming PC is the price of a discounted RTX 4060 system right now
By Dave James published
Deal Less than $900 for a bona fide gaming PC.

Amazon Big Deal Days PC gaming deals
By Dave James last updated
Prime Day Deals The second Prime Day of the year is done, but there are still some deals lingering around like the sweet smell of capitalism.

Psst, the best Prime Day gaming monitor deal is still live: Alienware's glossy OLED has never been cheaper
By Dave James last updated
deal At $800, this superb OLED gaming monitor is the same price it was discounted at for Prime Day, and a great deal versus some other OLED panels.

Amazon Big Deal Days gaming laptop deals
By Dave James last updated
Prime Day Deals The full Big Deal Days schtick over, but there are still a surprising number of laptop deals across all the big retailers.

Prime Day live blog: the best Big Deal Days PC gaming deals still around today
By Dave James last updated
Still live! It's the second day of Amazon's Fall Prime Day event, but with every other retailer jumping on board the discounts aren't just going to die at midnight.

The best Fall Prime Day gaming laptop deals are these heavily discounted RTX 4080 and RTX 4060 Lenovo Legion machines and neither are from Amazon
By Dave James published
Deal Lenovo has it sewn up at the top-end, with its RTX 4080-powered beast and at the budget end with an AMD Ryzen and RTX 4060 Legion Slim.