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This isn’t so much a new deal as much as the going price for the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i, but I wanted to highlight it as we absolutely love this laptop. It’s a tremendous mix of performance, screen and size. For gaming, you can expect RTX 4090 (mobile)-beating performance in some games, and the 32 GB of DDR5 RAM means it’s a dab hand at more demanding jobs like editing lots of video.
It’s the morning, and this is a Dave inexpertly tapping words out on a blank-faced keyboard with an equally blank-faced stare on his face. Man, I need some more coffee. And cake. Anyways, I’m in here bright and early checking out the gaming laptop deals to see what’s what on this second day of Prime Day: Prime Day – the Revengeance.
It’s probably not a huge surprise that a lot of the same deals are still sticking around into this second day, and I wouldn’t get too worried about anyone’s calls for ‘there’s only xx hours left of Prime Day’ because the big retailers are still going to be discounting into the rest of this week, too. So, even if Jeff’s members deals on Amazon have ceased, there will still be discounts aplenty.
Like this one! Segue!
Best Buy hasn’t been the absolute best place for gaming laptop deals this Prime Day—and I still haven’t forgiven it for dangling an amazing Zephyrus G14 OLED deal in my face on Friday before rug-pulling it on Monday—but it has cut the price of what was already a decent Razer Blade 14 deal.
Another $200 has been lopped off the price, making it a massive $1,000 discount on the MSRP. That puts it even cheaper than the RTX 4060 version on Amazon.
It’s a stunning little laptop, with a hell of a lot of power, and now missing the massive Razer price premium on top. I kinda want one.
Time for another deal highlight, and it’s one of my favorite from all the laptop deals we’ve spotted this year. This one’s from Best Buy rather than Amazon, is $420 off (😏) and less than $700 all told, which is… pretty dang cheap for a gaming laptop, especially in this era of inflation. This is a machine you could safely buy on a tight college budget and do some light gaming on while saving the rest of your money for more important things.
Book, of course. I mean books.
Budget laptops tend to skimp on memory, but thankfully you’ve got 16GB here, even if it’s on the slower side for DDR5. But neither the memory or the SSD are soldered in this laptop, so you can absolutely open it up and pop in some faster sticks or another SSD (it even has two M.2 slots, so you can add to the base 512GB instead of replacing it!). That’s a pretty flexible system for the price, as long as you keep your graphics expectations in check.
Wondering if you should skip over all these AMD & Intel gaming laptops in favor of one of the new models running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X ARM processor?
Pertinent question—the power efficiency of the Snapdragon X was hyped up at Computex just a few weeks back, and it really marks the first time Windows on ARM has been a thing, after some false starts in the past.
From what we’ve seen, performance and compatibility both have a ways to go with the Snapdragon X, especially for games. Give them another year, though, and they may be a strong threat to Chromebooks, offering better performance and 15+ hour battery life. For gaming, though? AMD and Intel probably aren’t sweating too hard.
Hold on a second, that’s not a laptop. I know it’s not! But hear me out:
A gaming laptop deserves a gaming mouse as a companion. I can play weeks of Slay the Spire with a trackpad just fine (and some of the other entries in our list of the best laptop games, which I curate). But for most games—and especially doing any amount of work on an extended trip—I really want a mouse.
The Logitech G305 has been my trusty travel companion for years: it’s cheap and very light, coming in at under 100 grams even with a AA battery inside. And that battery is rated for 250 hours, which is realistically good for months if you just use it in short doses while traveling. The G305 has the same 12,000 CPI Hero sensor on board as Logitech’s more expensive gaming mice, so you’re not sacrificing on performance.
Crucially, it also has a little slot on the inside for storing the USB dongle so you won’t lose it. Easily the best gaming travel mouse at this price, in my opinion.
Hey there deals shoppers, this is senior editor Wes Fenlon taking the reins from Jacob, who apparently has to eat to stay alive. 🙄 What do you mean you can’t subsist on an all-SODIMM diet!?
The deals highlighted above cover the best prices for Prime Day right now, but there are a lot of them, so how about some more curated recommendations? I’m 100% with our hardware lead Dave James on 14-inch gaming laptops being the sweet spot. Check out his round-up here:
Of the three models highlighted in Dave’s post, this is the one I’d go for myself:
Here’s why I chose this laptop: You’re probably thinking why, why oh why, am I recommending an RTX 4070 that’s hundreds of dollars more expensive than many others on sale today?
The answer, whether you choose to accept it or not, is because it’s made by Razer.
Razer has a certain knack for designing amazing gaming laptops, culminating in the delectable Razer Blade 15 before you here. This is the laptop design that may be Razer’s best, despite the company actually ditching it in favour of 14- and 16-inch designs in 2024.
Yep, the 15-inch Blade is no more, replaced by chunkier models. This is the last vestige of a bygone era. Or something like that. The 15-inch chassis is thinner than the newer models and that’s why it’s limited to an RTX 4070, but that’s honestly a trade-off we’re completely fine making.
Don’t fret that this is a slightly older model of laptop, either. The 13th Gen Intel CPU inside this Blade 15 is near enough the same as the newer 14th Gen models and the RTX 4070 is yet to be replaced by anything fresher. It’s effectively all the same up-to-date silicon and it will perform like it, too.
What to look for in a gaming laptop: So, you’re thinking about buying a gaming laptop. Here are three things to look out for:
1. Check for single-channel memory: We tend to avoid laptops with 8 GB of memory—only the most budget machines are worth considering with such little RAM available—though there’s another, often more hidden specification to look out for. That’s whether the RAM is dual-channel or single-channel.
Laptop CPUs are able to make use of two channels for RAM, the total available bandwidth split between them. If you have a laptop with a single stick of SO-DIMM memory within it, it will only be utilising a single channel. That’s bad news for performance in any application, including games, that are memory limited. The good news is that even single-channel memory can still perform well most of the time, but when you’re buying a new laptop in 2024, why run the risk of your favourite game falling foul?
While some laptops will say whether they come with two sticks of RAM, i.e. “2 x 8 GB”, others will not. That information isn’t always made available and you might have to dig around to be sure what you’re getting. Otherwise, you can always upgrade your RAM to dual-channel memory.
2. Get the balance right between screen and GPU: Most laptop manufacturers are pretty good at getting this balance right, but if you’re buying an RTX 4090 gaming laptop and your choice of laptop comes with a 1080p screen, you might not be getting the most out of it. You probably want a 16:10 2560 x 1600 resolution screen rated to 240 Hz or something similar. That’s the sweet spot.
Similarly, a 4K screen on a tiny 14-inch gaming laptop with a chunky GPU inside it is not as awesome of a combination as it may seem. While potentially handy for accelerating Blender or AI workloads, for gaming, the tiny screen will crush many of the benefits of 4K while sapping performance, and generally the high-end GPUs consume enough wattage to send 14-inch laptops over the edge for thermals.
3. All gaming laptops sound like a jet engine while gaming: We just haven’t cracked the technology to keep our gaming laptops cool while actually gaming. There are some heartening moves to make solid-state cooling a thing, though hardly a shipping laptop to show for it today.
I’m not trying to put you off buying a gaming laptop—quite the opposite, I think they can be great—but I want to be upfront about what you can expect. Some gaming laptops choose to prioritise lower-wattage GPUs and power-savvy CPUs to reduce the need for chunky cooling, such as the compact Zephyrus G14, though even these need fast, loud fans to keep cool. In all my years of testing I’ve never found a gaming laptop that’s significantly quieter than any other, only a bit less… annoying?
Here’s why I chose this laptop: Any gaming laptop with an RTX 4070 under $1,200 is going to get my attention, but since I’ve seen at least five of said laptops, here’s why I’m suggesting this one.
For starters, this machine comes with the Ryzen 7 7735HS at its heart. An eight core, 16-thread CPU, it importantly shares many of the same attributes that make the desktop variants so popular, too. That includes the superb Zen 3 architecture, a power-savvy design when required, and a 680M iGPU. That last one is important as it means you don’t necessarily have to stick with the power hungry RTX 4070 in this machine when you don’t need it. That’s good for battery.
The screen is a smart pairing here. A 2560 x 1600 resolution panel with a 16:10 aspect ratio leaves plenty of room for working and gaming. It is also rated to 165 Hz, which should more than suffice for most games.
The one downside to this laptop is the 512 GB SSD. That’s miniscule for today’s Steam libraries, especially once you factor in the size of the Windows 11 OS these days. Luckily, I’ve done some digging and found you should have a spare NVMe slot in the undercarriage for an easy upgrade with a bigger drive—and without removing the old one—though you’ll need to be comfortable taking the bottom panel off.
Hey, Jacob here. I’m senior hardware editor here at PC Gamer. I’ll be your guide for the next two days’ festivities.
I’m scouring the web for the very best gaming laptop deals as you read this, so stay tuned here for my top recommendations.
