Fight me: 14-inch is peak gaming laptop and these are the only Prime Day gaming laptop deals I'd personally consider buying today
If I'm buying a gaming laptop it's because I want something portable and for me only the 14-inch form factor truly delivers.
![HP Omen Transcend 14 and Asus Zephyrus G14 gaming laptops](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/uVh2Vu4D6B6yfbuogmqdwW-320-80.jpg)
I'll be honest, Best Buy has kinda broken my heart. Just a few days ago it had the mother of all 14-inch gaming laptop deals, with the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 OLED—our absolute favorite compact gaming laptop—on sale for just $1,100. Sadly, by Monday the Zephyrus G14 was back up to $1,600. That's still not bad for such a gorgeous gaming laptop, one with a full unibody aluminum chassis, great performance, and striking looks. But it's not great.
What is pretty great, however, is the number of other 14-inch Prime Day gaming laptop deals there are. The compact gaming laptop is the ultimate portable notebook that will still deliver high-end frame rates, and without any truly tangible downsides.
- We're curating the best Prime Day PC gaming deals right here.
Acer Predator 14 | RTX 4070 | Core i7 13700H | 14-inch | 250 Hz | 1600p | 16GB DDR5 | 1TB SSD | $1,999.99 $1,149.99 at Amazon (save $850)
It's not the prettiest gaming laptop you'll ever see but underneath the cheap-looking exterior is a pile of really nice hardware. That Intel CPU has 14 cores, 20 threads, and the GPU is a 140W RTX 4070. Backing them up are 16GB of DDR5 RAM and, unusually for this price, a full 1TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD. Even the 2560 x 1600 screen is good, with a 250 Hz refresh rate and mini-LED backlighting. There's very little to dislike here and it'll be down to whether the lightweight nature or 14-inch panel just aren't right for you.
Price check: Newegg $1,595
HP Omen Transcend 14 | RTX 4060 | Core Ultra 7 155H | 14-inch | 120 Hz | 2880 x 1800 | OLED | 512GB SSD | 16GB DDR5-7500 | $1,729.99 $1,279.99 at HP (save $450)
This lovely 14-incher is pretty expensive for an RTX 4060 but it's still one of the best compact gaming laptops around. You get an excellent OLED panel as standard and a 65W GPU that will still deliver a quality gaming experience. The 512GB SSD is a bit small, but you can configure the machine with a 1TB drive if you're willing to spend a bit more. Shame the battery life isn't so good, but that's small gaming laptops for you
Asus ROG Zephyrus 14 | Nvidia RTX 4060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS | 14-inch | OLED | 1440p | 120 Hz | 16GB LPDDR5X-6400| 1 TB SSD | $1,599.99 at Best Buy
If you don't want a hulking gaming laptop, let me introduce the glorious 2024 version of the Zephyrus 14 (see our review): the best 14-incher and one that can game without busting your bank balance or your shoulder when lugging it around. It's no-nonsense specs in a delightful package. This is the latest version with the sexy aluminum unibody chassis. It's a very smart package, though obviously not the most affordable RTX 4060 machine by any stretch.
Price check: Newegg $1,669.99
Razer Blade 14 | RTX 4060 | Ryzen 9 7940HS | 14-inch | 2560 x 1600 | 250 Hz | 16 GB DDR5 | 1 TB SSD | $2,399.99 $1,994.99 at Amazon (save $405)
The Blade 14 is the only Razer laptop to get the AMD APUs inside it, which makes them rather special straight out of the gate. But they're also great-looking and beautifully compact, too. This is only the RTX 4060 version, and is rather expensive for such a relatively low-spec GPU, but the Razer premium is definitely a thing. This is the last-gen AMD model, but its practically identical to the latest Ryzen 8000-series model, which is $500 more expensive.
And, for me, the 14-inch laptop is realistically the only form factor that I would reasonably consider purchasing. Well, unless I was genuinely looking for a desktop replacement with a hoofing big 18-inch screen anyways.
These are the pick of the lot, and while the Asus G14 isn't on the receiving end of a big discount anymore, it's still an absolutely worthwhile purchase. The $1,150 Acer Predator 14, however, is arguably the best deal of the lot if you're just after raw performance, containing as it does the RTX 4070 GPU.
But, the one I would actually buy? Well, that would be the $1,280 HP Omen Transcend 14. It's not the most powerful, or the cheapest, but that chassis is lovely, and the OLED screen just a delight. A genuinely portable gaming laptop, with a great aesthetic. In my time reviewing it, I did fall a little bit in love.
There's also the Razer Blade 14, which I do still have a soft spot for... but even with a hefty discount it's $2,000 for an RTX 4060 Blade 14 gaming laptop, and that is honestly very, very hard to recommend over any of the others.
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Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.