5 Cyber Monday laptop deals between $450 and $1000

(Image credit: Asus)

Some of the best Cyber Monday gaming laptop deals have sneakily carried over from Black Friday, but I'm not complaining: I still marvel at gaming laptops with actual dedicated GPUs being available for as cheap as $500. We've collected an ample selection of laptops at the link above, ranging from those bargain bin models up to high-end Razer Blades on sale for more than $2000. But considering how many gaming laptops there are out there—and how hard it can be to find the exact one you want—I figured I'd highlight the five cheapest deals we've found for Cyber Monday.

These obviously aren't going to be the fanciest laptops you can get: they're cheap for a number of reasons. Build quality will be more plastic, less premium metal than higher-end systems. You'll probably be compromising a bit on weight, SSD storage space, RAM, and screen quality. And you'll definitely be looking at a weaker GPU than a snazzier laptop with an RTX 3070 or above.

All that said, it's amazing what you can get for less than $1000 these days. Any of these gaming laptops can easily play esports-oriented games like League of Legends and CS:GO at high framerates. Their CPUs are powerful enough for everyday work while still being far more power efficient than the laptop chips of a few years ago.

We're curating all the best Cyber Monday PC gaming deals right here.

Most laptops are somewhat upgradeable these days, too: you can likely unscrew the back panel of whatever you buy and pop in another RAM stick or NVMe SSD to expand your storage. Those kinds of upgrades can make a budget laptop feel much snappier and give them a couple extra years of longevity. If you're shopping on a budget for yourself or picking up an affordable system for a student, any of these willl serve you well.

MSI GF63 Thin | Nvidia GTX 1650 | Intel 11400H | 15.6-inch | 1080p | 60 Hz | 8GB RAM | 256GB NVMe SSD| $599 $449 at Walmart (save $150)
This is about as cheap as gaming laptops possibly get. You're not going to do any heavy duty gaming on a GTX 1650, but it's much better than integrated graphics; it'll drive a game like The Witcher 3 at 1080p no problem, with some tweaks. You've got a trusty 11th gen Intel CPU at the helm. While the RAM and SSD are undersized, they can both be upgraded if you fancy opening the laptop.

Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 | Nvidia RTX 3050 | AMD Ryzen 5 6600H | 15.6-inch | 1080p | 144Hz | 8GB RAM | 215GB SSD | $1,000 $631.98 at Amazon (save $369)
This is actually the 2022 model of this laptop, with a pretty up to date AMD CPU tucked inside, and backing a 2nd generation Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics card. It may not play your favorite games at super high speeds on ultra settings but it's cheap, cheerful and will get the job done on medium settings. Lenovo has skimped a little on the storage, but you get DDR5 RAM and a mouse and headset with it.

Dell XPS 13 | Intel Core i7 1250U | Intel UHD | 13-inch | 1920 x 1200 | 16GB RAM | 512GB SSD | $1,349 $999 at Dell (save $350)
Okay, I fibbed slightly: this one isn't a gaming laptpop. But the Dell XPS 13 has long been one of the best office notebooks around, and I'm even typing this from a 2016 model, still going strong. This one comes with DDR5 and a relatively capacious SSD, too. The CPU only has a pair of Performance Cores, but with a further eight Efficient Alder Lake cores there's a lot of multithreaded performance baked inside that slim chassis. The built in Iris Xe graphics aren't especially powerful, but they'll easily handle some great laptop games like, say, Slay the Spire.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).