I’m contractually obligated to inform you of the best early Prime Day deals on PC gaming hardware, even though Prime Day 2022 isn’t until July 12th. Aaaaand then continues over until June 13th. Jeff, lad, that’s two Prime Days. Regardless, Amazon’s Prime Day landing page is already a gateway into some decent discounts on peripherals, SSDs, gaming monitors and the like, so take a look if you’re of a more urgent mind. Unlike the bulk of actual Prime Day deals, the ones you’ll find listed here don’t even need an Amazon Prime account to access.

Previous Prime Days have driven competing retailers to knock down some of their own prices, and this year looks to be no different, so I’ve included some good sales from non-Amazon retailers as well. For the 12th and 13th we’ll also post a full anti-Prime Day deals guide (like last year's), so you can still make some savings even if you’re avoiding Amazon specifically.

For now, read onwards for all the best early Prime Day deals I’ve found, as well as everything you need to know about Prime Day and some tips on finding the best Prime Day deals for yourself.

While you don’t need a Prime account for any of these early deals, you will for the (likely better) Amazon deals that launch on July 12th. And it’s not just hardware – Prime members can currently download a selection of indie games, including Death Squared, Fatal Fury Special, and Rain World, for free. During this two-day Prime Day, Prime members will also be able to get Mass Effect: Legendary Edition at no extra charge.

If you’re not already a Prime member, you could be cheeky and sign up to Amazon’s 30-day free trial, then cancel your membership after Prime Day is over. It’s £8 / $13 per month if you want to stick with it.

Here’s the full list of the our early Prime Day deal picks, for both the UK and US.

On the UK side we have some money off the WD Blue SN570, our top overall best SSD for gaming drive. Those with PCIe 4.0 compatible motherboards/CPUs can also take advantage of savings on the silly-fast Kingston Fury Renegade, while the SanDisk Ultra – one of the best microSD cards for the Steam Deck – is on sale too.

Several of mine and Katharine’s best gaming monitor picks are on early Prime Day deals. As are a bunch of LG UltraGear models – these use relatively fast IPS panels that, whenever I’ve tested them, seem to handle motion a little better than the average IPS screen.

The ever-brilliant Logitech G502 Hero leads these early Prime Day gaming mouse deals, and although I’ve yet to see any meaningful discounts on it in the US, our stateside chums do get the Razer Basilisk V3: an excellent alternative, and the mouse I use myself.

This list is a who’s who of the best gaming keyboards, from the luxurious Logitech G915 Lightspeed Wireless to the affordable (and spill-resistant) SteelSeries Apex 3 TKL. The US also has one of the lowest prices I’ve seen for the superb Roccat Vulcan 120 mechanical keyboard.

You’ll likely have to wait until Prime Day proper for a fuller selection of cheap headphone/mic combos, but there are still some good headsets on offer here, including a couple of the best PC gaming headsets we've tested. The AOC GH300, in particular, is a fine budget model that’s become even cheaper.

Fair warning: while sanity is reasserting itself in the GPU market, with even the very best graphics cards dropping back to RRP level, they’re still in high demand. The shelf life of these deals is therefore likely to be quite short, so if one takes your fancy – and you’re not fussed about waiting for any of the new Nvidia, AMD or Intel graphics cards that are all set to launch later this year – then you’d best pounce on them quickly.

There are disappointingly few CPU deals up for grabs so far; if anything a lot of prices have recently shot up, which could be a sign of sellers trying to pull a fast one by "lowering" their prices back down later. Still, I have found some discounts on the Core i9-12900KS: the fastest Core CPU Intel has ever made. This is a mighty powerful but very expensive gaming processor, so any price cuts are definitely welcome.

Things might change as we get closer to Prime Day itself, but right now Corsair’s Vengeance memory dominates the early RAM deals. You can get these in smaller or larger kits, though 16GB is the sweet spot for gaming, and you definitely won’t need more than 32GB.

Big sales events are often an opportunity for sellers to shift any gaming laptops with out-of-date internals, but even these early Prime Day deals can get you something with the latest CPUs and GPUs. Here, there are discounts on a variety of gaming laptops with graphics chips going up to the RTX 3080.

Prime Day isn’t just a single day, but a 48-hour sale where Amazon open up special deals to Prime members – though non-Prime members will be able to take advantage of the occasional saving as well. It’s become one of the better times of the year to grab PC hardware at lower prices, so if you’ve been considering a new SSD, monitor upgrade or a change to your mouse and keyboard, it could well be worth investigating.

Prime Day 2022 technically runs from July 12th-13th, though since Amazon is still using GMT times, it actually starts at 01:01am BST on Tuesday and doesn't end until 00:58am BST on the morning of Thursday the 14th. But nobody wants to be up past midnight doing internet shopping, so let’s just say July 12th-13th.

For all of Amazon’s best deals, yes you will. Rival retailers will no doubt offer their own sales to compete, and there may even be lesser discounts available on Amazon to non-Prime members, but to make the absolute most of Prime Day you will need a Prime subscription. You can sign up through Amazon UK and Amazon US.

Ah, now. There is indeed an Amazon Prime free trial available to first-time customers, which you can also sign up for via the links above. During this trial period you get all the benefits of a full subscription, so you could just activate the 30-day trial and cancel it before the subscription costs kick in.

You can save time and energy, as well as cold hard cash, by picking your desired PC hardware in advance. Whether it’s through your own research our best hardware guides, if you know what you’re looking for before Prime Day begins, you’ll only need to check during the event whether those specific items are on a discount. You could even add them to your basket in advance, and any savings should still be applied when you log in on the 12th/13th to check.

Keepa is a Chrome browser extension that can save you from dodgy deals. Once installed it displays the price history of an Amazon item on the item’s listing page, so you can tell if it really is on a discount or if the seller is just fudging the numbers.

Unfortunately, this is something that happens very often. Sellers, including Amazon themselves, might raise the price of a product just so they can lower it back down and call it a “saving.” Keepa will help you spot these false deals; and I’ve certainly found it extremely helpful when putting together these deal hubs.

Just because Prime Day is an Amazon event doesn’t make you beholden to Amazon. Again, competing retailers of PC gaming hardware – like Currys and Ebuyer in the UK, or Best Buy and GameStop in the US – will be making their own price cuts concurrently. Don’t worry, then, if a piece of gear you want isn’t on sale on Amazon, as you could well find a better deal elsewhere.

In addition to the main 48-hour sale, Amazon will be running brief Lightning Deals across Prime Day. These tend to offer the meatiest discounts of the whole event, though be warned: they don’t focus on PC hardware by any means, and you’re more likely to see Lightning Deals on backpacks and electric razors than you are a nice gaming peripheral. They also – hence the name – appear and disappear quickly, so your best bet is to keep an eye on Amazon’s Prime Day Lightning Deals page across the event. Here's the Amazon UK and Amazon US pages.

If you’d rather ditch the guides – GEE, THANKS – and search for deals alone, be sure to make use of the search filters down the left side of the screen. Besides letting you hide all the phone stands, shower heads and testosterone supplements that may also be on sale during Prime Day, these will let you manage your budget by only showing items within certain price ranges. You can also filter for how deep the price cuts go, between 10% off and 70% off.

James retired from writing about Dota for RPS to write about hardware for RPS. His favourite watercooler radiator size is 280mm and he always takes advantage of RGB lighting by setting everything to a solid light blue.

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