For my dollar the best gaming laptop for the money right now is HP's Omen 15, provided you make a couple of configuration changes on the product page. If you do, you can walk away with the least expensive laptop around to feature an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 GPU, priced at $1,289.99. That's a heck of a bargain for the hardware.
The base laptop runs $1,099.99 and pairs a Ryzen 5 5600H processor with a GeForce RTX 3060 GPU and 8GB of RAM. That's decent, but if you bump up the CPU/GPU combo to a Ryzen 7 5800H and GeForce RTX 3070 (+$140) and double the RAM to 16GB (+$50), you're still under $1,300. I've poked my head at various retailers like Best Buy and Newegg and the majority of what I found with a GeForce RTX 3070 runs several hundred dollars more.
In this case, the cheapest RTX 3070 that is in stock at Best Buy appears to be this same HP Omen model, except it's selling for $1,699.99.
This brings up the possibility that it is a pricing error on HP's part, and perhaps the system builder will cancel orders. But that is not a foregone conclusion. The absolute cheapest RTX 3070 laptop at Best Buy is an out-of-stock Asus TUF Dash model with an Intel Core i7 11370H, 16GB of RAM, and 1TB SSD for $1,449.99, which is a little closer in price to the Omen.
The other caveat is we don't know how the RTX 3070 is configured. It could be a Max-Q configuration with a lower TDP and clock speed, but even if so, I wouldn't hesitate to pounce on this if I was in the market for a new laptop.
The only thing I might change is the default storage option—HP has it set to two 256GB NVMe SSDs in RAID 0, giving you 512GB of storage. If one of those drives fails, your data is kaput. The benefit of RAID 0 is faster speed, but for the most part, the real-world benefit is likely to go unnoticed. If you'd rather player safer with a single 512GB NVMe SSD, it'll cost $20 more.
