Part of my job is to get out there, elbow deep into the various online retailers and see what goodies they have lurking in the recesses of their warehouses to bring you the best gaming laptop deals. And for the past few months, every time I do I'm kinda stunned that the RTX 4080-powered MSI Vector is still on sale for $1,600 at Newegg.
It's hands-down the cheapest RTX 4080 gaming laptop you'll find that isn't open-box or isn't hobbled in some catastrophically performance-castrating kind of way. And I keep looking for the catch, the one thing that can justify why it's still on sale with $500 off the initial listing price.
I don't think it's anything to do with potential refreshes happening in the new year, with the RTX 40-series Super lineup only expected to be hitting the desktop in the first few months of the year, not filter down into laptops. And you're still looking at a full 175W version of Nvidia's mobile version of the RTX 4080 (which is actually closer to the RTX 4070 Ti of desktop fame).
That's important because lower down the stack, MSI's budget laptop range has a habit of absolutely crushing the potential performance of its RTX 4060 machines by restricting them to just 45W. Poor little lambs, what are they going to do with so little power? Not game at decent frame rates, that's what. But this 175W RTX 4080, however, absolutely will.
The screen isn't particularly exciting, with just a 1920 x 1200 resolution for its 16-inch panel. But it will run at 165Hz. And you are getting a decent 16GB of DDR5 memory and a full 1TB of SSD storage space inside it. That CPU is last generation, but it's an Alder Lake processor, with 14 cores and 20 threads of multithreaded chops. And that's plenty good enough for most gamers if we're being honest. And I always am. Inscrutably.
So yeah, this RTX 4080 is still super cheap for a high-end gaming laptop, and you can still bag it before Christmas if you want to treat a loved one, or just love yourself a treat.
