Black Friday is almost upon us, and this time of year is a great time to pick up a new gaming laptop. Between early Black Friday deals, the day itself and the following “Cyber Week” there are tons of deals to sift through.
The below list offers up just a sampling of some of the best deals at various price points.
Some things to take into consideration: The more important components you should be looking at with a gaming laptop are the CPU and GPU. You can usually upgrade memory and add more hard-drive space down the road, but you’re stuck with the processor and graphics card you have (barring an external GPU).
At the low end of the scale, you’ll find laptops with Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 graphics cards. This is actually a nice step up from previous years when we saw a lot of older Nvidia chips in Black Friday deals. The GTX 1050 may not be the most powerful GPU ever, but it can get the job done.
Also of note this year is the prevalence of SSD hard drives, which not only use less power and make less noise, but also are quite a bit faster than traditional hard drives. In other words, even the most budget gaming laptop on this list is a fair bit faster and more powerful than deals from years past.
On the upper end of the scale, there are laptops with massive 17-inch screens boasting the latest RTX 2080 GPUs from Nvidia, fully capable of the latest ray-tracing tech and sure to handle any modern game with relative ease.
Here are some of the best deals for Black Friday 2019 gaming laptops, priced from low to high.
HP Pavilion 15.6” gaming laptop with Intel Core i5 CPU, GTX 1050 GPU, 256 GB SSD, 8 GB RAM
HP Pavilion gaming laptop.
This isn’t a bad deal at all, and Walmart unsurprisingly offers up the cheapest unit on our list. You get a perfectly capable gaming laptop with a fifteen inch screen for under $500 (save $250) at Walmart. Will it handle the most demanding modern games at full settings? Of course not. But if you want to play Fortnite and Minecraft and don’t mind turning down some settings on Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare you’ll be in good shape. You just might need to tack on an external hard drive for a bit more storage. (Like this 1TB Seagate USB 3.0 SSD drive for $114.99–$45 savings.)
For another hundred bucks, Newegg’s MSI gaming laptop for $599 will get you a slightly faster GPU and twice the hard drive space. The only catch here is that part of the discount comes in the form of a $100 mail-in rebate.
HP Pavilion 15.6” gaming laptop with Intel Core i5 CPU, GTX 1050 GPU, 256 GB SSD HD, 8 GB RAM
HP Pavilion
Target’s lower-priced gaming laptop doesn’t require a mail-in rebate but isn’t nearly as good a deal as Walmart’s which is basically the same model with the same specs. Then again, not everyone likes shopping at Walmart–so if Target is your retailer of choice, this is still a pretty inexpensive gaming laptop on sale for $600 (save $220) at Target.
