5 Inexpensive Stocking Stuffers For PC Gamers

With the holiday shopping season comes the process of figuring out what gifts to buy the various loved ones in your life. Depending on exactly how open or even pushy they've been about what they want, shopping for them can sometimes be quite difficult. One or two big items might be more obvious, but what about smaller and cheaper items that can be used as stocking stuffers at Christmas or Chanukkah gifts across each of the Jewish gift-giving holiday's eight consecutive nights? Even if you know a friend or family member's likes and dislikes, it can be difficult to pin down what kind of less consequential gifts they might be interested in.

Case in point: If the defining gift-buying trait of the person you're shopping for is that they're a PC gamer, how exactly do you settle on something small and relatively inexpensive? The obvious gifts, like new games, component upgrades, and peripherals for hardcore gamers (like, for example, mechanical keyboards), aren't exactly cheap, and their physical size covers a wide range. That's where we come in: Leave the thinking to us as we go over five different stocking stuffers that any PC gamer should appreciate.

A hardcore geek can never have too many USB cables, especially since we're still transitioning from the older USB Type-A connector (traditional full-sized USB) to USB Type-C, meaning that it's best to have different types of cable floating around. Depending on their origins, though, the cables lying around the house might not be great quality. If you've ever tried to charge your phone and were flummoxed by it refusing to enter fast charging for no apparent reason, you've encountered why it's best to use USB cable and USB hub brands that tout certification by the USB Implementers Forum or USB-IF for short. If a cable isn't entirely up to spec, it might not be everything you need it to be.

To make sure that the PC gamer or other geek in your life always has some quality USB cables and hubs, why not get them some spares from brands with good reviews that tout USB-IF certification in their promotional copy? Among the brands you can trust to provide USB-IF-certified cables for reasonable prices at Amazon are Anker, Cable Matters, JSAUX, and Amazon Basics. Exercise a lot more caution for brands that are using generic photos and have seemingly random, alphabet soup names.

A quick caveat before we continue: This applies to gift recipients who either don't wear prescription eyeglasses or wear contact lenses without the attributes discussed below.

Extended periods in front of a computer screen are not healthy for us. Even setting aside the issues of prolonged periods of sitting at a desk in and of itself, extended monitor use, especially at night, can cause eye strain, light sensitivity, and sleep issues. Depending on the particular brand, some of these issues can be addressed with lenses that have had special coatings painted onto or baked into them. Generally speaking, anti-glare coating and blue light filtering are pointed to the most as what can provide the biggest assist.

According to studies cited by the Mayo Clinic, blue light filters don't do much to correct sleep issues. However, the anti-glare coating has a proven history of helping combat eye strain among power users. Glasses with anti-glare coatings on non-corrective lenses tend to be pretty inexpensive. Plenty of the top-rated choices on Amazon tend to run $20 or less, sometimes much less if purchased in a multi-pack.

Many PC gamers prefer using traditional computer peripherals like keyboards and mice for gaming input as opposed to console-style gamepads, often shelling out big bucks for the best mechanical keyboards with the fastest response times. However, keyboards present a problem that's much more pronounced with them than with a mouse or gamepad. It's easy for them to get filthy, and what makes the problem worse on keyboards is how easy it is for debris to fall between the crevices and under the keys.

There are various ways you can try to suck all of that dirt out of the keyboard, but the best and easiest is arguably pressing a piece of cleaning gel/slime against the keyboard and then lifting it up. Usually colored bright blue or a yellowish/greenish hue, you can find containers of this cleaning gel under brand names like ColorCoral — the current Amazon's Choice label bearer — and Super Clean, but they're all pretty similar and equally inexpensive.

If you're old enough to remember Nickelodeon Gak, the toy slime popular in the 1990s, you may have played with cleaning slime without even realizing it. Online recipes for making both at home show that cleaning slime and Gak can be easily made with a mix of water, school glue, borax laundry detergent, and food coloring. So if you get someone some cleaning slime, not only is it useful, but it's fun to play around with. It's cheap and small, which qualifies as a great stocking stuffer.

Over the last two decades, Valve's Steam has become the premiere online retailer for downloadable PC games. At a time when consternation over increasingly draconian forms of copy protection was palpable, Steam streamlined the PC gaming experience with a great user interface buoyed by constant sales that made it easy to get all sorts of great deals. Steam's ballooned to massive proportions as the years passed by, featuring tens of thousands of games covering everything from indie games to major PC exclusives to cross-platform AAA titles to, more recently, even some of Sony's first-party PlayStation games. In 2022, Valve changed the game again with the launch of the Steam Deck, which changed the face of handheld PC gaming.

Naturally, with how the tides have shifted, if you're looking for gifts for a PC gamer, that PC gamer is almost surely using Steam. So why not buy them a Steam gift card? Physically, it's a perfect stocking stuffer, for starters. Steam gift cards are also incredibly easy to find in a pinch, with official retail resellers in the United States including 7-Eleven, Speedway, Best Buy, CVS, Walgreens, Dollar General, GameStop, Walmart, Sam's Club, and BJ's Wholesale Club. If it's a major store with a gift card section, there's a good chance it stocks Steam gift cards.

Any gaming rig worth its salt will have a pretty hefty power supply — even a budget build using an older card generally needs at least a 450W to 500W PSU. Modern desktop CPUs may be a lot more efficient than they used to be, but modern graphics cards use a lot of power and probably always will, so getting the right power supply is an important part of building a gaming PC. "Just enough" power is not enough: You want to have headroom for unforeseen events, miscalculations, and/or potential upgrades. As the component that feeds everything in your computer, it's the first potential point of failure and something that your computer can't live without.

For anyone building and modifying PCs, a power supply tester is a great accessory to own and, thus, a nice potential stocking stuffer for most PC gamers. Thermaltake, a name brand among PSUs, has the Dr. Power II for about $40 if you can find it in stock, but there are also plenty of generic ones on sites like Amazon with good reviews for $20 or less. In a compact package for a pretty low price, these are very useful pieces of diagnostic equipment that can definitively tell you whether or not you need to replace your PSU. Even if the gamer you're buying presents for prefers to get pre-built PCs or have someone else do the work for them with components, PSUs are trivial to replace, making these good gifts for even non-builders.