We’ve been monitoring the best Black Friday gaming laptop deals in the run-up to the big sales event in a couple of weeks, and this is the best deal we’ve seen on a gaming laptop yet. to $1,599you get this MSI Vector GP68HX gaming laptop with an RTX 4080 card stuffed inside, and the rest of the laptop looks great too.
The RTX 4080 is the highest-performing laptop GPU we recommend here at PC Gamer. That’s because we’ve tested a ton of RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 machines, and often find that there isn’t enough between them to recommend the best of the best, the RTX 4090. The RTX 4080 is a much better value proposition than this laptop proves.
This isn’t a pale imitation of the RTX 4080, but a full 175W version stuffed into the MSI Vector. This is right up there with the most high-performance RTX 4080 cards we’ve tested this year, like in the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 and Acer Predator Helios 16.
You can also run DLSS and Frame Generation with the RTX 40-series GPU, which will boost performance slightly in supported games. You’ll get one of these for free with this laptop – the Alan Wake 2 code is included, which I think is the best way to show off what the RTX 40-series GPU can do.
As for the CPU, it’s a slightly older Intel chip. Although I won’t let that bother you, it’s still one of Intel’s hybrid architecture designs, and one of the best of its generation, the Core i9 12900H. I don’t think you’ll lack any oomph in CPU-dependent workloads, like rendering or multi-threaded workloads, and it will do wonders for gaming. We tested this same chip inside the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 and MSI Stealth GS66, both from 2022, and it topped the charts against its contemporaries for single-threaded performance in Cinebench R23.
As for memory, the Vector offers 16GB of DDR5-4800 memory, which will be quite useful for us in gaming. It also comes with a 1TB SSD, which is decent enough for a boot drive, although it will get very full very quickly if you’re not careful. Depends on what you’re playing, but it does Adequate Space to work with, while 512GB tends to be quite small nowadays.
Although this laptop’s resolution is slightly limited at 1920 x 1200, it comes with our favorite laptop aspect ratio of 16:10. That little extra screen height makes a real difference in desktop browsing and gaming, and with the RTX 4080, you don’t have to worry about the extra pixel count impacting performance so much. It’s also an IPS panel, but we’d expect nothing less at present.
Top the whole thing off with plenty of connectivity options, including Thunderbolt 4 and Wi-Fi 6E, and you’ve got yourself a great gaming laptop for not a huge amount of money. If that’s still too expensive for you, we’ve got plenty of cheap gaming laptop deals you can check out too, most of which come with an RTX 4060 or RTX 4070 at their core.
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