Here's an AMD Ryzen gaming laptop with a GeForce RTX 3060 for $880

Here's an AMD Ryzen gaming laptop with a GeForce RTX 3060 for $880
One of the best values in the sub-$1000 range. (Image credit: Lenovo)

If you're looking to spend less than a grand on a gaming laptop, more often than not, you're looking at a mobile GeForce RTX 3050 Ti or 3050 for the GPU. Both are serviceable, but there's a sizable performance leap between those GPUs and the GeForce RTX 3060, and you can still have it while still saying under a thousand bucks with this deal.

Through its eBay account, Antonline (which has been on a roll lately) is selling a Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 laptop discounted to $879.99. That's $80 less than if buying it at the retailer's site. Sure, that only amounts to around an 8% savings, but the relative value was already high to begin with on this laptop.

Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 | 120Hz | Ryzen 5 5600H | GeForce RTX 3060 | 8GB RAM | 512GB SSD |$959.99$879.99 at Antonline (save $80)
Sub-$1,000 Laptop ...

Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 | 120Hz | Ryzen 5 5600H | GeForce RTX 3060 | 8GB RAM | 512GB SSD | $959.99 $879.99 at Antonline (save $80)
You don't often see the GeForce RTX 3060 in gaming laptops that cost less than a grand, yet here it is, along with a 6-core/12-thread Zen 3 CPU and a fast refresh rate.

Looking at Best Buy, for example, the least expensive gaming laptop with a GeForce RTX 3060 is an MSI GF65 configuration priced at $1,099.99. From there, pricing quickly jumps into $1,500 territory.

This is a much better bargain. The IdeaPad Gaming 3 sports a 15.6-inch display with a fast 120Hz refresh rate, powered by the aforementioned GeForce RTX 3060 and an AMD Ryzen 5 5600H processor. That's a 6-core/12-thread CPU based on Zen 3, with a 3.3GHz base clock, 4.2GHz max boost clock, and 16MB of L3 cache.

You also get a 512GB SSD (decent) and 8GB of RAM (meh), the latter of which is the least exciting thing about this laptop. However, it wouldn't cost a whole lot to bump it up to 16GB of RAM (an upgrade that is offset by the 8% savings), at which point you'd have a well-rounded gaming laptop that still costs less than a grand.

Paul Lilly

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).