DinoPC leaps into Black Friday action with AOC

The technology business is all about partnerships. Two or more companies combining resources to open a market or make new deals. For the US-imported retail holiday known as ‘Black Friday 2015', UK-based system builder DinoPC has formed a WWE-style Tag Team with monitor giant AOC. KitGuru casts an eye over the ensuing melee.

Testing product is one thing (and we spend 365 days a year doing that in the KitGuru Lab), but at some point we all stop evaluating and decide on what to buy. That's when Xmas, Black Friday and the various other retail holidays come into play. If you still need to decide what you want/need, then we recommend more research, but if you're anywhere near ready to rock, then Black Friday is as good a day as any to find yourself a bargain.

We've spoken a lot about living room gaming over the past 12 months and the launch of Steam Machines etc will keep that argument boiling away. At £269 DinoPC has a small form factor PC called the Black Hole complete with GTX750Ti and Microsoft Wireless Gaming Controller. Depending on the brand and clock speed, the GTX750 Ti should deliver a comfortable 30fps on your HD TV for most games (with a little adjustment to the IQ settings). At that price, you'll be exploring the wonder that is Linux Gaming (Steam etc have options here) or you can install Windows yourself later.

Maybe you're thinking of a complete new gaming rig, but don't want to spend too much more. Around £469, AOC joins the party with a 24″ E2470SWH screen that has a 1ms refresh rate. That's combined with a 2GB Radeon R7 370 and Core i3 processor, 8GB of Crucial DDR4 and a 1TB SSHD from Seagate (hybrid mechanical/SSD). To complete the Black Friday deal, there is a Tt eSports Commander LED keyboard and mouse. Ironically, DinoPC are calling this system bundle the Black Mamba.

It says something about the way the PC market has progressed, that the top-of-the-range spec for a Black Friday rig from DinoPC would only be £699. At this price, you move up to a Core i5 6400 processor, 2GB GTX960 graphics card and an improved 24″ AOC G2460FQ screen with 144Hz refresh.

You'll get a Gigabyte Aivia Osmium mechanical keyboard with a Corsair M95 gaming mouse and the whole thing boots off a 240GB Kingston SSD. Having built the rig into an Aerocool Dead Silence windowed white chassis, DinoPC again hit the irony button hard by calling this unit the Black Ice. The gaming ‘cherry on the cake' with this one is that you also get a Heroes of the Storm Kaijo Diablo Bundle free.

Let us know what you think over on Facebook.

KitGuru says: The big difference in getting a Black Friday deal from a specialist system builder or from the high street, seems to be ‘where' the money has been spent. We've scanned over hundreds of deals in the high street and one thing comes up time after time: High street specs stress main memory, hard drive capacity and CPU – while specialist PC companies put the onus on visual processing. For gaming, we know which way we would lean.

 

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