I know I shouldn't be sitting here recommending you buy an RTX 3060 gaming laptop in 2023, not when you can get faster RTX 4060 machines for less than $1,000. But if I was looking for a great budget Prime Day gaming laptop deal I'd be sorely tempted by this Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 for just $800 at Best Buy.
It's not sporting the latest in either AMD Ryzen processor stock or Nvidia graphics card silicon, but the Asus design is so damned good that I can absolutely forgive those slight performance sacrifices. And it's probably the one I'd spend my own money on.
And I'm not normally the sort of person to do that. My Steam Deck is sat on my mantlepiece while I use the moderately janky AOKZOE A1 Pro because I know it's more powerful. Even if I'm actually just playing Dredge on it.
- We're curating all the best Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals right here.
The 14-inch scale of the Asus Zephyrus G14 is what really sets it off for me, and you will usually have to pay well beyond the $1,000 mark for the privilege of what is still a relatively rare gaming laptop form factor. That makes it super portable, and more like an actual laptop you'd use out and about on a daily basis rather than something that has to be constantly plugged into the wall to be of use.
That 1080p, 144Hz screen is a great pairing for the RTX 3060 with it's last-gen Nvidia architecture. It will still game quite comfortably at that resolution, even if it's a bit behind the new RTX 4060 machines. Likewise, the Ryzen 7 5800HS isn't the latest AMD design, but it's an eight-core, 16-thread chip that will happily do some serious number crunching if needed. There's also a healthy 16GB of DDR4 RAM backing it up.
My only note of concern really is that 512GB SSD. It should be fast enough for anyone's needs, and is fine for a budget gaming laptop, but will get filled up rather quickly with the size of modern games. Still, there are some great Prime Day SSD deals around today, and Asus itself shows you how easy it is to replace the drive in your Zephyrus G14 notebook.
So yes, while you can buy RTX 4060 gaming laptops for less than $1,000, the svelte Zephyrus G14 is a bargain even with a slower RTX 3060 GPU inside it. There are fewer compromises on design, CPU, and memory with this discounted machine, and it really is a beautiful all day, every day laptop.
