Good gaming laptops can be pricey. You want a powerful GPU, a quality CPU, a decent screen, and an overall spec that won't hold the machine back. You want all of this in a chassis that keeps those components cool and that won't do your back in lugging around on your daily commute. And if it looks good, then even better.
The good news is that this MSI Pulse GL66 laptop manages to tick plenty of these boxes including the all-important value one. It's rare to see a laptop packing an RTX 3070 for as little as this in fact. Those machines tend to come in closer to $1,500, and that's often when they're reduced. So this machine rocking up at a penny under $1,300 is notable on its own. Newegg isn't trying to pull a fast one either, as the rest of the spec holds up well.
As ever it's the GPU that matters most to gamers, and the mobile take on the RTX 3070 is a potent pixel pusher. It'll drive this 1080p screen with everything maxed out without issue, and if you're one to hook your laptop to a desktop monitor, then you'll find it'll handle 1440p gaming easily enough too. Even 4K gaming isn't out of the question with some tinkering with the settings. You do of course get support for ray tracing and DLSS 2.0 as well.
You are looking at a last-gen CPU, but that's often something you have to accept to get the best deals around. The good news is that the Core i7 11800H you'll find inside this machine is still a worthy slice of modern silicon that packs a decency punch for modern gaming. It's an 8-core, 16-thread chip that will keep the RTX 3070 well fed.
16GB of DDR4-2400 is a healthy amount for a modern laptop and should ensure that it remains responsive for years to come.
The 512GB NVMe SSD is probably the weakest aspect of this machine, as things can get cramped with some of the bigger games out there hitting 100GB or more already. Still, it's an easy enough upgrade down the line if you do find you're running out of space.
With a healthy saving of $320, this is a decent machine for the back-to-school season that also happens to be a bit of a monster when it comes to PC gaming.
