If you want a beefy laptop and don't care how much it costs, check out this beast from MSI

If you've got lots of cash and a burning need for basically the best laptop money can buy, then allow me to present to you the MSI GE66 Raider, an absolute beast of a machine that you can pick up right now for $2,999 on Amazon—$500 off the regular price.

The GE66 Raider (11UH-227) rocks an Intel Core i7 11980HK CPU, Intel's fastest mobile CPU, with a whopping 32GB RAM—enough to play Icarus at a recommended spec! For storage you've got a 2TB NVMe SSD, and capping it all off is the pièce de résistance, an RTX 3080 GPU, pushing a 15.6-inch 4K 120Hz display.

The laptop is powered by a 99.9 Whr [Watt hour] battery, which is apparently the largest battery that's legally allowed on airplanes, and cooled by MSI's Cooler Boost 5 technology, with "larger fans and wider heatpipes." And because this is a gaming laptop, there are plenty of lights—Mystic Light, as MSI calls it, "a panoramic aurora ... designed to give users the ultimate RGB setup."

All the best Black Friday PC deals you can grab today.

Now look, Black Friday is generally a time for deals—an opportunity to throw our money at things that are normally a little too expensive to justify. And this is certainly a deal, in the technical sense if nothing else: A $500 discount ain't nothing, and this is far and away the lowest that the GE66 has ever gone on Amazon. Still, it's a $2,999 laptop. For most of us, myself included, that makes it only slightly less unaffordable than it was last week.

At the same time, this is an absolute beast of a laptop, the sort of thing that will take pretty much anything you want to throw at it and throw it back at you in smooth, 4K glory. If that's what you're after, and if you're willing to spend the bucks to make it happen, then I think this might be for you.

If, on the other hand, you're looking for more options, we can help with that, too: Here's our full list of the best Black Friday gaming laptop deals of 2021.

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.