Gaming laptops are expensive—I know, stop the presses. But it's for that reason I limped on for over ten years with an exceptionally elderly Acer gaming laptop. It could just about run The Sims 4, so I was happy…until it couldn't anymore. One day the recovery partition simply said 'NO MORE,' and I knew I couldn't rely on my corporate macbook—it was finally time to dip into my hard-earned savings.
It's my sincere hope that you won't need to save up for a decade to pick up your next gaming machine—and today's deal somewhat validates that perhaps slightly naive hope! Turns out the exceptionally snazzy 2025 version of the Asus ROG Strix G16 is enjoying yet another deep discount, making it one of the cheapest Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti laptops you can get your hands on right now for only $1,550 from Best Buy.
Seems like only the other day we were raving about a deal on this machine—because our Andy was. Another 60 bucks have since been lopped off the price tag since, and you're still getting a portable machine with all the gaming grunt of the 140 W variant of the RTX 5070 Ti plus a healthy dose of RGB lighting under the keyboard. Yeah, there's nothing subtle about this capital G gamer laptop.
Mind you, under the hood you've only got 16 GB of DDR5 RAM to play with. That's not the end of the world in itself, as you'll be set for Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater and Silent Hill F. That said, 32 GB is what's recommended for DOOM: The Dark Ages. Thankfully, it's not impossible to upgrade…though the RAM is one of vanishingly few aspects you can upgrade in this laptop.
To be clear, you can upgrade the Strix G16's RAM all the way up to 64 GB, and you can slot one of the best gaming SSDs into the M.2 slot to give you a little more room to play with beyond the 1 TB SSD this gaming laptop already offers. But! As you may already suspect from a gaming laptop, you can't upgrade either the honking great big 16-core 32-thread AMD Ryzen 9 CPU or the already many times mentioned RTX 5070 Ti GPU.
I mean, for the money, you probably won't want to for some time to come anyway. Though you may have spotted another arguable area for improvement—the 1200p, 16-inch screen. Indeed, you may be asking "What would be the point in upgrading my RAM for DOOM if I can't get the full 4K experience?" To be fair, you raise a good point with that very specific example. I'd still counter that the 16-inch screen is pretty decent for what it is, generally freeing up your GPU and CPU to deliver a buttery smooth experience.
At 16-inches, a 1200p resolution image won't leave you wanting, plus that 165 Hz refresh rate definitely doesn't hurt either. Couple that with the 5070 Ti's DLSS 4 and its snazzy Multi Frame Generation tech, and you're looking at high frame rate gaming that really glides. But does that make it worth smashing open the piggy bank? Only you can answer that.
1. Best overall: Razer Blade 16 (2025)
2. Best budget: Gigabyte G6X
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 17-inch: Gigabyte Aorus 17X
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