Newegg has got a pretty good deal on a 15-inch Gigabyte A5 X1 gaming laptop for only $1,299. This laptop that usually sells for $1,799 is now $500 off thanks to $300 instant savings and a $200 mail-in rebate.
The Gigabyte A5 X1 is powered by an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX mobile CPU, 16GB of DDR RAM, and an RTX 3070 laptop GPU. This will give you solid 1080p performance at a reasonably high framerate if you're looking to play on max settings. You've even got a DisplayPort and mini-DP in case you were hoping to plug this bad boy into your TV.
The five-pound laptop sits about an inch and a half thick, so you should have no issue fitting it into your computer bag or backpack. The look of the A5 X1 is pretty plain with no real exciting design, but at least the keyboard has got RGB in case you wanted to spice things up a bit.
A bigger SSD would have gone a long way, so the best recommendation would be to upgrade to a bigger SSD since 512GB fills up a lot faster than you think. I also used the Intel version of this laptop a while back, which I mostly loved, but the integrated webcam is not great and I ended up using a USB webcam for work calls..
One of the issues I'm hoping was addressed via firmware in the year since my review was the wildly unreliable autofocus and the wider FOV almost has a fish-eye look to it. Despite that, the redesigned Kiyo Pro is still a pretty solid webcam, and for $95, you really can't go wrong, especially if you stream from a depressingly dark room.
Nvidia says its surprisingly high $3.3B gaming revenue is expected to drop but 'not to worry' because next year will be fine *wink* RTX 50-series *wink*
AMD rumoured to be ditching future RDNA 5 graphics architecture in favour of 'unified' UDNA tech in a possible effort to bring AI smarts to gaming ASAP
