Gaming laptops have, in the main, been hard to find for good prices for most of the year. However, in my weekly hunts for the best deals, I did notice heavier and heavier discounts from summer onwards as the RTX 50-series machines started to mature. Then came the Amazon Prime Days, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Cyber Week. The bargains were flowing, and I was a happy boy.
- Join us on WhatsApp for daily deals, direct to your phone.
It's not quite as cheap as we were finding it for over the peak sales period, granted. But this is still the best price you'll find on a great RTX 5080-touting gaming laptop right now, and it's a massively powerful machine well worth considering for the cash.
Alongside the proper, full-fat, 175 W variant of Nvidia's high-end mobile GPU, you're also getting the 24-core (eight Performance, 16 Efficient) Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX, which is one of the fastest laptop CPUs we've ever tested. It's all trussed up with 32 GB of DDR5 (watch that become a rarity as the memory pricing crisis continues to bite), and a 1 TB SSD, contained within a stealthed-out, handsome chassis design.
The screen is no slouch, either, being a 240 Hz 1600p panel. It's an IPS unit, not a lovely OLED, but you really can't have everything for this sort of price, and a good IPS display will still look fantastic.
Actually this one is particularly good, as our Ian found in his HP Omen Max 16 review. The keyboard is great, too, and while this 16-inch machine isn't the smallest gaming laptop around, it's still slim enough to slip inside a backpack without too much issue.
Now, the downsides. Given all the high spec hardware inside, the Max 16 can be very noisy under load, and sometimes struggles to keep all of those components cool—which means it did throw the odd head-scratching performance figure in our testing. You can keep temps and noise in check with the Balanced performance profile in HP's software, but you will lose a fair bit of gaming performance as a result.
Luckily, this Omen Max 16 has such a lofty specs sheet that I'd say those quirks were worth putting up with, especially when you can find this portable gaming monster for hundreds of dollars cheaper than almost all of its nearest competition at the moment.
It's not a perfect machine, and it's not the cheapest deal I've found all year. But right now? It's the best of the lot, and a lappy worth some serious consideration. I'm no Nostradamus, but given what's happening to component prices overall at the moment, I'm expecting a tough 2026 for all hardware deals, cheap gaming laptops included. Dare I suggest it might be worth getting in while the going's still good?
1. Best overall:
Razer Blade 16 (2025)
2. Best budget:
Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen 10
3. Best 14-inch:
Razer Blade 14 (2025)
4. Best mid-range:
MSI Vector 16 HX AI
5. Best high-performance:
Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10
6. Best 18-inch:
Alienware 18 Area-51
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
