It’s Been a Weak Prime Day for Gaming Laptops, With This Exception

This has not been a good year for Prime Day gaming laptop deals. We’ve been collecting the best Prime Day deals all week (and liveblogging the whole event) There’s a lot of outdated, previous-gen laptops flooding the virtual Amazon store shelves, most of which are not discounted enough to be worth buying with the new RTX 50-series graphics having just come out.

There’s one diamond in the rough though—and it’s a laptop I tested out recently, the Asus ROG Strix G16. It’s one of the best gaming laptops you can buy. But hold tight, because there are a number of configurations on sale, and as often in tech, the devil’s in the details.

The biggest discounts are on the lower end configuration. It includes an RTX 4070, 32 GB of RAM, and 1 TB of storage, which is identical physically to the model I tested and was quite impressed with. It’s 22 percent off, bringing the price down to $1,800—the lowest price I’ve ever seen it.

Now, there’s also an RTX 4060 configuration on sale for $1,360, which is 20 percent off the retail price. It has the same storage and display, except with just 16 GB of RAM. That’s a really solid deal for the price. Importantly, both of these laptops come with 2560 x 1600 resolution display and a 240-Hz refresh rate.

These are, of course, last-gen Nvidia GPUs. But as has been well-documented, the increase to the newer RTX 50-series wasn’t as big of an improvement in raw performance as we all hoped for. One of the biggest limitations was in VRAM. Both the RTX 5070 and 5060 still only come with 8GB of VRAM. There’s no getting around that limitations of these GPUs, which can cause some performance issues in some modern, AAA titles. You can get 12 GB of VRAM in the RTX 5070 Ti, but normally, you won’t find a gaming laptop with that GPU for under $2,000. Nvidia may have stated that we’d be able to buy them starting at $1,600 when they were announced, but that has not played out over the past few months. For example, I tested an AMD version of this laptop with the RTX 5070 Ti, but it costs $2,500.

For Prime Day, though, Amazon is selling a brand-new version of the ROG Strix G16 with an RTX 5070 Ti for $2,000. That’s $400 off the retail price. It has a slightly streamlined shape over the previous model, and comes with a new tool-less design that gives you easy access to upgrading or swapping out RAM or storage. I haven’t reviewed this newer model myself yet, but I did see it at CES earlier this year, and the tool-less system really is neat.

For more recommendations, check out our full list of the best Prime Day laptop deals we’ve come across so far.

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