Fake discounts are rampant even before Amazon Prime Day's kick-off

As Amazon Prime Day creeps ever closer, there's already a good deal of Karen-baiting going on when it comes to PC gaming deals. While filling up the deals hubs, myself and the rest of the hardware team have spotted some sellers manipulating a product's original pre-sale price tag, in order to make the so-called discounts they're running look more enticing. Some will, at the same time, increase the discount price so they can charge more while still having it look like a good deal.

Frankly, it's upsetting to see, especially when so many of us are struggling money-wise. Don't worry, though, I have heard your earnest calls for someone who is good at the economy to help you budget. Your family need not starve in the face of your needing a current-gen gaming laptop.

Thankfully there are a few ways to get around fake discounts, but the first step is getting wise to the official recommended retail price of whatever product you're looking to buy. There are several sources to find the RRP of a product, including the boxouts in each of our reviews, so go ahead and double check when you spot something that's meant to be discounted. 

• Check out the best Amazon Prime Day gaming deals

Once you're armed with that knowledge, you can cross reference it with the retailer's reference price, and with the age of the product. A big factor in whether a product is still worth the RRP is whether it's been superseded by a cheaper, better product. Our buying guides will keep you up to date there.

There are a couple of less involved ways to see if the price tracks, or if its been artificially inflated, which we'll talk about in a moment. First lets go over some examples so you know what to expect.

MSI GF65 Thin | Nvidia RTX 3060 | Intel Core i5 10500H | 15.6-inch | 1080p | 144Hz | 16GB | 512GB SSD | $1,999.99 $839.99 at Amazon (save $1,160)
It's getting harder to recommend RTX 30-series machines in the face of the newer RTX 40-series, especially without a good discount. And while the CPU is a couple of generations old in this MSI machine, the rest of the spec is decent for a $772 gaming system. Don't believe that discount figure though, this RTX 3060 machine would've never sold for $2,000. More like around $1,100 or less.

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This MSI laptop packs one of Nvidia's last-generation portable GPUs—a low-end one at that. Since Nvidia's RTX 40-series is now in full swing, we're seeing plenty of the current-gen laptops getting nice discounts. 

Our Jacob had to put a disclaimer at the bottom of the deal block, in case anyone is under the false impression this machine is currently worth the $2,000 'before' price stated. It wasn't at any point, but especially today with a 10th Gen Intel CPU backing it up.

SSDs are constantly changing price, too. They're one of the most reliable sale products as we know there are always going to be great discounts when deals season rolls around. Storage prices have been improving quickly over the years, so it was a bit of a shock to see this year-old 4TB drive's reference price back at its initial RRP.

WD Black SN850X | 4TB | NVMe | PCIe 4.0 | 7,300MB/s read | 6,600MB/s write | $699.99 $299.99 at Newegg (save $400)
This is the highest-capacity version of our most beloved SSD for gaming right now. Sadly it doesn't come with a heatsink for the price, but it's not required for use in a PC and this SSD runs pretty cool. It's still a great deal for zippy read/writes and uber-high-capacity storage.

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Sure it's technically still a discount, but this SSD hasn't sold for $600 since last year. Here's what it was prior:

WD Black SN850X | 4TB | NVMe | PCIe 4.0 | 7,300MB/s read | 6,600MB/s write | $359 $290.55 at Newegg (save $68.45)
This is the highest-capacity version of our most beloved SSD for gaming right now. Sadly it doesn't come with a heatsink for the price, but it's not required for use in a PC and this SSD runs pretty cool. It's still a great deal for zippy read/writes and uber-high-capacity storage.

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My favorite way to out Amazon for this kind of behaviour is to use a little Chrome extension called Keepa. It's great because it actually embeds a graph right into whatever Amazon page you're looking at, and automatically checks the current price against the previous months. If you see a big uptick, you know the price has been artificially inflated.

We also use something called CamelCamelCamel a lot. It's a price checker that lets you paste a product name into the browser, feeding back a list of potential products and graphs depicting their Amazon pricing history. It also includes third-party price history so you can see if it's been cheaper elsewhere, whether that be for new or used models. 

There's a Chrome extension for CamelCamelCamel, too, to save you a bit more time. Generally though, since we've already been through most of this for you, your best bet is to check through our many Prime Day deals hubs. That'll save you a whole heap of brain power.