honestly i wouldnt count on a 50-series sale. new tech usually stays full price for a long time, especially since nvidia knows people will pay for the latest stuff. since your budget is 800 for the whole tower, the 50-series might actually eat up half your money, which doesnt leave much for the rest of the parts. its probably safer to look at cards that are out now and have a solid track record for reliability.

• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 8GB GDDR6: super safe pick for a beginner. it runs cool, doesnt use tons of power, and the drivers are really stable for minecraft shaders. downside is it only has 8gb of vram which might feel small in 2026.
• AMD Radeon RX 7600 8GB GDDR6: usually cheaper than nvidia and gives great raw performance. the big con is that nvidia is usually better at the lighting tech used in shaders. i'd definitely focus on getting a reliable power supply like a Corsair RM750e 750W 80 Plus Gold Modular so you dont have issues later. let me know if you need help picking the other parts!

@Reply #2 - good point! honestly everyone here is right... sales on brand new cards are super rare. if youre dead set on that 50-series for 800 bucks, youll need a killer deal on other parts. maybe check out the AMD Ryzen 5 7600 6-Core Processor and a Kingston NV2 1TB NVMe SSD to keep costs low. minecraft shaders will look fantastic! you got this tho...

In my experience, new cards dont usually see big Black Friday drops. I've been building for years and usually only the old stock gets discounted. With an 800 budget, fitting a 50-series card and a whole tower is gonna be tough, tbh. You'll probably be looking at a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 8GB GDDR6 or its successor to stay under budget while still running shaders.