Gaming laptops can often be expensive things. If you're in the market for anything under $1,000, it can be difficult to find something with a properly muscular GPU—and while the mobile RTX 4060 is a perfectly decent 1080p gaming performer, it still feels like much more powerful RTX 4070 lappys are determined not to drop below that magic thousand buck figure.
Which makes this RTX 4070 gaming laptop deal so special. I've found this HP Victus 16.1-inch model for $900 at Best Buy, and while it's not a perfect machine, it's very difficult to argue with the graphics horsepower it provides for the cash.
Let's kick off with a caveat: it's not the full beans 140 W TGP RTX 4070, but a 115 W version instead. While that might initially sound like a disappointment, it'll still outperform a mobile RTX 4060 GPU by some margin—and it's much better equipped to deliver high frame rates to that 144 Hz display.
Speaking of the panel, that refresh rate is pretty decent for a laptop at this price point. It's only a 1080p unit, but that should at least mean that RTX 4070 will have plenty of grunt spare to reach those 144 frames per second you desire.
It's not like the rest of the components are underpowered, either. The Ryzen 7 8845HS is a Zen 4 eight-core 16-thread CPU with plenty of go in it, and it's been paired with 16 GB of DDR5-5600, which is faster RAM than I'd expect to see at this price.
There's a final caveat though, and it's the storage space. Unfortunately, once you get below the $1,000 mark in the gaming laptop market you often only see 512 GB of storage, and that's the case here. Still, an SSD is arguably the easiest thing to upgrade on any machine, so I'd spend 10 minutes with a screwdriver and stick in a cheap 1 TB or 2 TB unit to give myself some breathing room.
There's only one SSD slot here by the looks of the repair guide (PDF warning), so you'll need to do some drive cloning unless you want to install Windows from scratch. A bit of a shame, but again, not the hardest procedure in the world.
That GPU for this price point though? Well, it's simply the cheapest RTX 4070 gaming laptop I've seen this side of Black Friday. And that makes this a deal worth shouting about, even if it's got some drawbacks. Properly cheap and powerful gaming laptops can be tricky to find right now, so I reckon if you're in the market this one is well worth some serious consideration.
