Holy portable chips, an RTX 4060-powered gaming laptop for less than the price we'd have expected to pay for an RTX 3060 gaming laptop of the last GPU generation just a few short months back. And with more storage than we've seen in other cheap RTX 4060 notebooks recently. Right now, the MSI Katana 15 is just $1,029 at Newegg, which is a saving of $170 down from its original $1,199 price tag.
Not long ago you'd have found yourself paying the same price for a similarly specced gaming laptop with just 8GB of RAM and a measly 512GB of storage. Instead, this Katana's rocking fully 16GB of DDR5-4000 memory and a capacious 1TB NVMe drive. What that tells me is that we can finally really start to recommend cheap 40-series gaming laptops with no qualms, as we move away from this strange intermission between the 30-series and 40-series portable GPUs.
Aside from the RAM and storage upgrades, you're looking at a 1080p IPS screen running at 144Hz; a bar that the RTX 4060 will have no trouble hitting. You might even consider doubling up with one of the best gaming monitors around, if one 15.6-inch screen isn't going to be enough for your gaming shenanigans.
Most importantly though, the RTX 4060 in its mobile form really benches. Hard. And paired with a 12th Gen Intel CPU, you'll have no trouble with using it as a workstation either. It may not be a current generation processor, but the Core i5 12450H will still perform admirably today with eight performance cores and a total of 12 Alder Lake threads for the ol' number crunching.
