Imagine me making my best "what the... hell" face this morning as I stumbled across this Black Friday deal on HP's website. An RTX 5060 gaming laptop for $950 is already a deal worth shouting about, but when it came to the CPU specs, I did a genuine double take.
Sitting at the heart of this machine is the AMD Ryzen 9 8940HX. It's not quite the most cutting edge of mobile CPUs, being a Zen 4 Dragon Range chip, but make no mistake—it's a monstrous processor for any modern machine.
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A quick tour through the specifications sheet reveals why. It's got 16 cores, 32 threads, 64 MB of L3 cache, and a max boost clock of 5.3 GHz. Those are high-end specs by anyone's standards, making this a bizarre CPU to throw in a budget gaming laptop.
It'd be tempting to call this a massive win for those of you looking for a searingly fast productivity machine for less than $1,000, but there are a couple of flies in the ointment. One, it's only got 16 GB of RAM, and two, the SSD is a weeny 512 GB model.
Both are fine to get started with, and both are relatively easy upgrades to perform later on, especially as it's got a spare M.2 slot for an extra NVMe drive—although on the RAM front, you'll be paying a pretty penny given the current memory pricing crisis. Still, a chance to own one of AMD's mega mobile chips for less than a grand? I'd still say it's a fantastic deal, even if the chip is likely to spin those fans up something fierce.
And of course, I can't forget about the GPU. It's this that'll make the most difference to your gaming performance, and luckily, it appears to be a 115 W full-fat variant of the RTX 5060. I say appears, because HP doesn't list the exact wattage on its specs page, and reviews of this particular model are hard to find.
HP Omen 16 machines with more modern AMD chips have the 115 W version, though, so I'd say it's a good bet that's what we're looking at here. In combination with a 1200p 144 Hz screen, I'd say that was a nicely balanced combination. Low-wattage RTX 5060 mobile chips can struggle when combined with a high resolution panel, but at 1200p, you should have little issue keeping frame rates smooth in most games, even if this doesn't turn out to be the top spec. And there's always DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation for the demanding stuff, too.
So yes, this is a huge amount of gaming laptop for under $1,000, no matter which way you look at it. I've rubbed my eyes, slapped myself around the face, and dunked my head in cold water, and yet this deal seems to remain. That's more than good enough for me—and plenty good enough for you too, I reckon.
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