It's a new year and you know what that means—it's only a few weeks until CES 2025, where we'll be treated to all kinds of new CPUs, graphics cards, and gaming laptops. To get ready for the glut of new models, retailers will want to clear their inventory and the result is a deal like this one. An RTX 4070 gaming laptop, all for $850 at Best Buy.
As this one has quite a slim chassis, it's unlikely to be a full-power RTX 4070 (reading around suggests it might be 120 W but I can't tell for sure) but it'll still be more than good enough. That's because the 16.1-inch IPS display has a resolution of 1080p, so the GPU won't need to push billions of pixels around every frame. With a refresh rate of 144 Hz, it'll be kind to your eyes too.
The good news continues with the rest of the hardware—the main processor is an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS APU, so you're getting eight cores and 16 threads, with a boost clock of up to 5.1 GHz. There's only 16 MB of L3 cache but it's fine for this kind of gaming, and those threads will be handy for a spot of content creation.
Even the amount and speed of the system RAM is pretty decent for the money: 16 GB of DDR5-5600. With budget laptops, you normally get pretty slow memory but that's not the case here.
Spoiling the new year celebration is the paltry 512 GB SSD. That's far too small for today's games and if I was getting this laptop for myself or a family member, I'd be swapping it out for a 1 or 2 TB gaming SSD as soon as I could.
But when you're only paying out $850 you can't expect everything and the small default storage is the best compromise you could ask for. It's an easy problem to rectify and while you're saving for an SSD upgrade, you'll be able to fully enjoy this laptop's gaming credentials.
Let's hope the rest of 2025's PC gaming deals are like this!
