How to buy the right gaming laptop this Black Friday without breaking the bank

Gaming laptops are a great way to play the latest games when you’re away from home, and they’re getting more powerful enough to make great desktop PC replacements for many gamers.

It’s no wonder, then, that gaming laptops are some of the most popular deals during Black Friday, especially since many of the best gaming laptops are also quite expensive. This is even more true for laptops with RTX 3080 GPUs or high-resolution, high-refresh displays from top brands such as Razer, Gigabyte, and Alienware. But with some good Black Friday gaming laptop deals, these laptops could see some dramatic price cuts, sometimes over $500 / £500.

But even if you’re looking for something more in the mid-range or budget category, there will still be some great cheap gaming laptop deals, and in many cases you’ll be able to find plenty, like the HP Victus 15, that won’t let you. force to sacrifice too much when it comes to hardware or performance.

However, there are some laptop deals you’ll want to avoid, and not just at the lower end of the price spectrum where you’d expect to see some of the lower-end products. There will be plenty of high-end gaming laptops out there that look great at first glance, but are much less of a deal when you dig deeper into the specs.

While we’re all gearing up for the holiday sales event, there are a ton of reasons to expect great deals this year, and we’ll help you figure out which ones to look for and which ones to avoid.

What should you look for in a Black Friday gaming laptop deal?

So what should you pay attention to when you go shopping for Black Friday? There are some important points to remember when it comes to buying a gaming laptop.

First off, we’re already pushing the boundaries of what a great gaming laptop really needs to play the best PC games, as nearly every modern AAA game focuses on console compatibility first rather than trying to maximize what’s best. gaming pc can. therapy. The days of asking “But can it run Crysis?” have come and gone, frankly.

As such, there’s little reason to turn your nose up at a 12th Gen Intel Core i5 or an AMD Ryzen 6000 series CPU paired with an Nvidia RTX 3060 GPU, as this kind of gaming laptop is more than capable of handling it all. currently available at pretty high settings at 1080p.

And since 1080p is what even high-end gaming laptops generally stick to to maximize screen refresh rates, you don’t need much more than this now and they’ll see some great price cuts this Black Friday.

Second, keep in mind that on a laptop, a 4K display won’t really get you much more than 1080p in terms of sharpness. Yes, you’re doubling the pixels per inch, so images will be twice as sharp, but the images will also be much smaller on a 14- or 15-inch screen than on the best gaming monitors that push 32 or 42 inches wide. .

Our eyes just can’t appreciate the fine detail of something as small as a gaming laptop screen, especially when things blow over in an action-packed title like Doom Eternal or some competitive shooters. Look for 1440p at most if all you care about is PC gaming. You won’t miss much by settling for 1080p, but you’ll probably save a lot of money.

There are also some Black Friday specific considerations to mention. Firstly you will see a lot of high end laptops with very gaming-specific hardware, you’ll get some eye-popping price cuts this Black Friday.

Here’s an example from last year:

If you’re looking for a laptop that can play the latest games with the highest possible graphics fidelity, you can find great deals on the best mobile workstations for creative professionals that all have the same hardware as the most premium gaming laptop, but come with benefits like OLED 4K displays that gaming laptops generally lack.

The downside is that these displays will default to 60Hz refresh rates, as that’s not the kind of thing creatives really need for their work. Non-OLED screens can also have terrible pixel response, making them less suitable for fast gaming.

That said, if you want to sniff out the eye candy at a leisurely pace, a creative workstation might be a smart way to get a lot on very powerful hardware. However, if you want to play competitively, you’ll want to stick to good gaming laptops with more responsive displays with a higher refresh rate.

Gaming laptops across the board will see price cuts

We’ve been doing this for many, many years and we have a lot of experience watching the Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday sales events go. Recent years have certainly turned things upside down with the coronavirus pandemic and ensuing supply chain problems.

However, there are still some pretty consistent through-lines, namely that the cadence of gaming laptop releases provides enough incentive for retailers to clear out some inventory and make way for newer products with cutting-edge hardware.

These latter gaming laptops tend to be the least likely to see price cuts, but they will still happen, so don’t expect the only gaming laptops to go on sale to be the ones that are a generation or two behind everyone else.

In addition, most of the latest mobile computing hardware, such as new mobile processors and GPUs, will be announced early this year, usually around CES. And since most laptop hardware has been on the market for several months, if not more than a year, we expect AMD, Intel, and Nvidia to announce or at least tease new mobile CPUs and GPUs in January.

That means demand for the current generation of technology is likely to decline this Black Friday as people wait to see what’s revealed next year. As a result, the prices of current-gen gaming laptops will have to drop lower to compensate, and you should definitely take advantage of these deeper price cuts.

One of the best ways to see what kind of gaming laptop deals to expect this year is to take a look at what we saw last year. Thanks to the magic of the internet, we can bring you some highlights from our Black Friday coverage in 2021 to illustrate.

No matter what kind of gaming you plan on doing, there are some things you’re likely to see this Black Friday that you’ll want to avoid unless the price is absolutely unbeatable.

Don’t look for less than 8GB of RAM at first unless you’re only planning on casual gaming. Windows 11 is going to take up a lot of RAM, so you won’t have much to work with for your other programs, and gaming generally requires quite a bit of RAM to run smoothly.

If you’re looking at high-end devices, make sure you’re not paying extra for “premium” hardware from two or three generations ago. If you see a $2,000 gaming laptop with a ninth-gen Intel Core i7 in it, you can get new hardware elsewhere for about the same price, and you definitely should.

Another thing you might be seeing a lot of right now is a “gaming” Chromebook. Look, don’t get us wrong, we love Chromebooks, but Chromebooks don’t usually have the specs needed for locally installed games (and could run almost none of them, even if they did), and cloud gaming is viable, but Still questionable on a Chromebook. Check back with us next year when we’ve had a chance to really push the new line of gaming Chromebooks to see what they’re capable of before we make that leap.

Finally, there is the issue of MacBooks. Typically, MacBooks aren’t seriously thought of as slot machines and that hasn’t really changed even with the latest Apple silicon.

There are plenty of games you can play on a Mac, mind you, and some of us are quite optimistic about the Mac’s gaming potential in the coming years. Capcom just released Resident Evil Village on the Mac and other developers will likely follow suit in the coming years, but we’re not there yet and the future of Mac gaming remains to be seen. If you want to play all the latest PC games straight awayyou still need a Windows laptop.

Gaming Laptop Specs Spear Sheet

One of the most overwhelming things about buying a gaming laptop on Black Friday is trying to understand the completely incomprehensible specs that manufacturers often throw at customers. If you’ve never bought a gaming laptop before or you’re buying one for someone else and you’re not a gamer yourself, it can seem like you’re reading a foreign language.

Luckily, we’ve tested so many gaming laptops that we’ve learned what’s worth buying and what to avoid. We’ve broken down the types of specs to focus on for premium devices, our suggested specs for the best balance of performance and price, and the minimum specs to focus on if you’re looking for a more budget option but want nevertheless that the laptop offers a solid gaming experience.

Today’s best gaming laptop deals

If you don’t want to wait for Black Friday, check out some of the best gaming laptop deals available right now.