Well lather me up and call me a belated Christmas turkey, there might—might—be some hope left for reasonably priced gaming PC in this RTX 50-series generation. Assuming, that is, some of the first prices for RTX 50-series laptops are anything to go by.
Asus has just revealed prices for a bunch of its new RTX 50-series laptops at its own store and Best Buy (via Wccftech), and if these initial listings bear out in reality, decent high-end mobile gaming might not cost an arm and a leg this generation. Just an arm, perhaps—we're not talking miracles, here.
I'm talking primarily about the ROG Strix G16 with an RTX 5070 Ti mobile for $1,900. This is, dare I say it, a pretty reasonable price for a laptop with a GB205 GPU, the same as will be in the RTX 5070 desktop, albeit with a handful fewer CUDA cores. This new G16 is $400 cheaper than an RTX 4070 version of the G16 2024 (or $100 cheaper including the current discount).
To put this into perspective, the RTX 5070 Ti mobile will have 5,888 CUDA cores, versus the RTX 4070 mobile's 4,608—that's almost a 30% increase. Which of course doesn't include architectural improvements and new AI wizardry.
The comparison isn't one-to-one, though, as the RTX 5070 Ti version of the laptop has a worse screen and just 16 GB of RAM. But at the very least this price makes me hesitantly hopeful for affordable RTX 50-series gaming laptops.
You'll have to forgive this hesitancy, and I'm sure many of you share it. The Nvidia RTX 50-series graphics cards we've got our hands on so far—the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090—haven't been bad performers by any stretch, but they haven't exactly been the paragon of generational improvements once you remove DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation from the mix. That makes high price tags a little hard to swallow.
The other Asus ROG laptops seem relatively in-line with the previous-gen ones, expensive as they are. The ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025), for instance, is listed at $3,400 and has an RTX 5080 mobile inside, and you can pick up a ROG Zephyrus G16 with RTX 4080 mobile for $3,297 at Newegg right now. Although, saying that, you can get one with an RTX 4090 mobile in for $3,300 at Best Buy—but the 4090 is pretty nerfed in laptops due to power and thermal restrictions.
Nothing to get particularly excited over at the high-end, then, but most gamers will be looking around the RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti level for their next gaming laptop, and on this front things are looking somewhat hopeful. Especially when you throw in that 4x frame generation the 50-series can offer.
With that on the playing field, we're surely talking seriously top-end performance for under $2,000. Again, assuming these prices stick. And assuming there are any in stock. "Coming soon" doesn't seem to mean much, lately.
