You’re going nuts trying to find a desktop graphics card with some serious chops as the endless GPU shortage stretches on. Have you considered picking up a gaming laptop instead? Intel’s Gamer Days sales are still going strong, and Amazon has some sweet deals on high-end gaming laptops—but until midnight on Thursday evening Pacific time.
The Alienware m17 R4 with a 10th-gen Intel Core i7 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 graphics is $1,970, down from the $2,200 to $2,300 it’s sold for in recent weeks. If that’s too much, take it down a notch with the MSI GS75 Stealth. It also wields a 10th-gen Core i7, but steps back to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 in exchange for a smaller $1,400 price tag today—much less than a sticker cost that usually jumps between $1,500 to $1,600.
The Alienware features a 17.3-inch 1080p display with a 360Hz refresh rate and a 5 millisecond response time. The CPU is the gaming-grade Core i7-10870H, paired with 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD for onboard storage, and that awesome GeForce RTX 3060. It’s also packing Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1. This thing will just rip on any AAA game out there, and with a 360Hz display 1080p display with 100 percent sRGB fidelity, who needs 4K?
MSIThe MSI GS75 Stealth, meanwhile, boasts a slightly faster Core i7-10875H chip—and by slightly better we mean it boosts to 5.1GHz instead of 5GHz. Both CPUs are screaming fast. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 handles graphics duties on this notebook, while 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD round everything out. The display is again 1080p, but with “only” a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it 240Hz refresh rate. Again, this laptop should just rip on any triple-A game out there given its HD resolution.
But if you get tired of 1080p gaming, both laptops also rock Thunderbolt 3 and HDMI ports for using a larger external display. These gaming notebooks could just be the cure to your GPU hunt headaches…if you hop on the deep discounts before they disappear.
[Today’s deals: Alienware and MSI laptops for $1,970 and $1,400 respectively on Amazon.]