It's a painful and now universal truth that Nvidia's higher-spec mobile GPUs don't come cheap. So, if you want a laptop with, say, the RTX 4080 chip for a reasonable price, you're going to have to make compromises. In return, you'll get stellar in-game frame rates.
Enter the MSI Vector GP68 HX 13V, yours for $1,729 with the aforementioned and rarefied Nvidia silicon from Newegg. That's over $250 cheaper than the next most affordable 4080 portable in our current Black Friday round up.
Your first question is probably to query whether this is some hideously gimped, wattage-starved implementation of the 4080. Actually, no, MSI rates the chip at 175 W, which is a bit higher than the 150 W top spec Nvidia publishes.
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As it happens, the CPU isn't too shabby either. OK, it's a last-gen chip. But the Intel Core i7 13700H is still a very, very capable gaming processor. The 16 GB of RAM is likewise adequate, though the 1 TB SSD arguably less so. Certainly, it won't take many modern games to fill that up.
Thus, it's actually the screen where this otherwise pretty pleasing portable slightly pulls its punches. It's a 16-inch panel, which is nice. The resolution is 1,900 by 1,200, so, it's a 16:10 aspect of fairly low resolution by today's standards. And it runs at 144 Hz.
How much of a problem that latter figure is, well, that's up to you. Personally, I'm fine with it. I'm not an esports aficionado and even with a 4080, you're hardly going to be hitting over 144 fps much of the time at high detail settings in the latest and most demanding games.
That aside, you also get a Thunderbolt 4 port, another pair of USB-C sockets and a 90 Whr battery, which is pretty generous at this price point and bodes reasonably well for operation away from the mains.
Of course, this is not actually a svelte portable. It's nearly 3 cm thick and clocks in a 2.67 kg. I suspect the 330 W power supply is a bit of a brick, too, and that it makes a bit of a racket under full load. But the proposition here is clear enough. The wattage spec for the RTX 4080 makes it clear enough that you're going to get the full high-end Nvidia experience in terms of frame rates.
That also means that you're buying into a reasonable level of longevity, at least as far as laptops go. As we've dicovered before, the top RTX 4090 laptop GPU often isn't much if any faster than the 4080. So, you're getting close to peak portable gaming PC performance for a price mere mortals have an outside chance of meeting.
So, it's not the most elegant laptop out there. It doesn't have the best screen. But by current standards, what it is is one heck of a lot of gaming bang for your hard-earned buck. And that makes it a clear Black Friday highlight.
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