It's tough to find a good price on a gaming laptop right now but this $900 RTX 4070 HP Victus is a tall glass of water in a desert of deals

An HP Victus gaming laptop showing the Call of Duty Black Ops 6 splash page on a teal deals background — (Image credit: HP)

HP Victus | RTX 4070 | Ryzen 7 8845HS | 16.1-inch | 1080p | 144 Hz | 16 GB DDR5-5600 | 512 GB SSD | $1,499.99 $899.99 at Best Buy (save $600)
Laptops at the more budget end of the market can be plasticky, ugly affairs, but this one has a better chassis than many. Sure, it's no Asus ROG Zephyrus G16, but with an 8000-series AMD mobile chip crammed inside and a 120 W RTX 4070 handling the graphics duties, it's still a speedy performer that won't look out of place at your next meeting. It's a shame about that small SSD, but it's a simple upgrade at least.

Price check: Newegg $1,334

It's a tough time out there for those of you looking for a good discount on a gaming laptop. Or me, if I'm honest, as I regularly update our cheap gaming laptop deals page with the best deals I can find and it's becoming a difficult game to play. That's thanks to retailers consistently clearing out stock over the past six months to make way for RTX 50-series machines, which are soon to make an appearance. Still, even in a desert of gaming laptop discounts, this RTX 4070-touting HP Victus still stands out for a mere $900 at Best Buy.

There are a few reasons for that. First, while we know that RTX 5070-equipped laptops are on their way, you can be sure you won't find a good one for anywhere near $900 for a while. I'm also not expecting the RTX 5070 mobile chips to be that much faster than a decent wattage RTX 4070 mobile GPU in general, although it is worth noting they'll be able to use Multi Frame Generation, which should be something of a boon.

If latency issues don't kerplunk the entire endeavour. Anyway, the point is that this 120 W TGP RTX 4070 machine exists now, and regular DLSS and Frame Generation is very good. So rather than holding out for ages waiting for RTX 5070 machines to drop to sub-$1,000 prices (or waiting for an RTX 5060 mobile GPU or similar) I'd be seriously tempted to pick up this lappy instead.

It's a lot more svelte than your average budget gaming laptop—and while I wouldn't go as far as to say it's a hyper-portable style machine, I reckon the chassis is actually pretty nice for such an affordable lappy. It's got a decently quick 144 Hz 1080p display, 16 GB of DDR5 5600, and... too small of an SSD.

Yep, 512 GB is too tight for a gaming machine in 2025. Still, it's enough to get going with, and upgrading it later on with a cheap 1 TB SSD in one of its two M.2 sockets is no great effort, so I wouldn't be too put off here—as long as you know which end of a screwdriver to hold.

Plus, it's got an eight-core, 16-thread 8000-series AMD CPU under the hood to pair with that beefy mobile GPU. For $900, this budget wonder is going to deliver a serious slab of gaming performance, and the sort of bang for your buck that I think will become hard to find when the RTX 5070 machines do eventually make their appearance.

So there's the here and now, and there's the waiting game. Should you need a sub-$1,000 laptop with proper gaming get up and go, I reckon you can't do much better than this right now—and potentially not for a while to come, either.

Andy built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 12, when IDE cables were a thing and high resolution wasn't—and he hasn't stopped since. Now working as a hardware writer for PC Gamer, Andy spends his time jumping around the world attending product launches and trade shows, all the while reviewing every bit of PC gaming hardware he can get his hands on. You name it, if it's interesting hardware he'll write words about it, with opinions and everything.

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