Save $500 on PC Gamer's pick for best gaming laptop this Cyber Monday

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Razer Blade 15 | Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti | Intel Core i7 12700K | 15.6-inch | 1080p | 360Hz | 16GB RAM | 1TB SSD | $2,999.99 $2,499.99 at Best Buy (save $500) (opens in new tab)
The Blade 15 is our pick for the best gaming laptop, and this is about as good a price as you're going to get on a spec that you would actually want on Cyber Monday. It's got a genuine RTX 30-series GPU, a lightning-fast 1080p screen, and a quality 14-core, 20-thread Intel CPU.

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Laptops make the world go round: or, at least, are much more a part of my PC life than they used to be. I got my very first laptop in the early 2000s and, while it was fine for writing and internet-ing, the idea of a gaming laptop just didn't exist in the same way it does now.

If I'm buying a Black Friday gaming laptop (opens in new tab), my personal choice, simply because it's the machine I use, is always going to be some configuration of the Razer Blade. PCG's hardware team reckons the latest model, the Razer Blade 15, is the single best gaming laptop (opens in new tab) you can get right now: my model's a few years older than that, but I well believe it.

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The Blade line packs enormous power into a slimline and (for Razer) surprisingly tasteful chassis, and the performance is simply spectacular: to the extent I often pass over my powerful desktop machine and play games on the Blade in bed. 

The downside with the Razer Blade is, of course, the price. Even with a big discount like this, these machines may be worth it but they cost an absolute packet. If you want a laptop that's going to give peak gaming performance you're going to have to shell out a decent amount, but there are alternatives with comparable specs for less.

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MSI GP66 Leopard | Intel Core i7 11800H | Nvidia RTX 3080 | 15.6-inch | 1080p | 144Hz | 16GB RAM | 512GB SSD | $2,399 $1,509.99 at Walmart (save $890) (opens in new tab)
Yep that's an RTX 3080 GPU in there, though the two obvious drawbacks here are an 11th Gen Intel CPU and less in-built storage. Don't get too down though: this will still game like a beast, and save you around $500 over the Blade.

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Another alternative is the Asus G14, one of the only laptops that has ever threatened my love of the Razer Blade. This configuration comes in at an even lower price than both the above options, and the AMD RX 6800S card is roughly equivalent to an RTX 3070.

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Asus ROG Zephyrus 14 | AMD RX 6800S | AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS | 14-inch | 1600p | 120Hz | 16GB RAM | 1TB SSD | $1,899.99 $1,399.99 at Best Buy (save $500) (opens in new tab)
The G14 is a lovely machine, especially in Moonlight White, and this combination of top-end Ryzen mobile CPU and performance Radeon GPU is a great one. The RX 6800S will handle more-or-less anything, the rest of the spec is also deeply impressive, and the 120Hz 2560 x 1600 resolution screen is gorgeous.

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