If you've been on the hunt for a graphics card upgrade, this laptop might be your way into the Nvidia 30-series club. The Gigabyte Aorus 15P YD comes equipped with an RTX 3080 and is currently $1949 on Newegg, which saves you $450 off the regular price.
The price is pretty competitive when it comes to laptops that have a 1080p screen, Intel i7 processor, 32GB of RAM, and a 3080. One of our favorite gaming laptops, the Razer Blade 15, has similar specs and is commonly priced at $3,000.
The 3080 in this thing is the laptop version of the elusive desktop GPU. In other words, it's the lower-spec 8GB GDDR6 memory version of the GPU, coming at reduced clock speeds (it can boost to 1,245 MHz) compared to the 16GB version. The laptop version of the 3080 runs at speeds much closer to a desktop 3070 because it actually has the same GA104 GPU inside. A 3070, for comparison, can boost up to 1725MHz.
The Aorus 15P YD doesn't come with a 1440p or 4K screen. Typically, we recommend a 1440p screen as a compromise between 1080p and 4K. This laptop's IPS screen makes up for a lackluster resolution with the ability to speed up to 300Hz. In my experience, higher refresh rates are life-changing for competitive games like Halo Infinite and Overwatch, but in something turn-based, for example, it's not as important. Reducing the lag between your inputs and seeing it on screen is a big deal, but if you play slower-paced games, you won't benefit from it as much.
This laptop pairs its 3080 with an Intel Core i7 11800H processor. It's an 8-core, 16-thread CPU that can boost up to 4.6GHz. You also get 32GBs of RAM. Both of these components make this laptop capable of non-gaming applications like video and photo editing, if that's your thing.
The Aorus 15P YD escapes the laptop problem of having a tiny SSD, but not by much. Its 1TB SSD is not nothing, but it'd be nice to see even more than that. Modern games can have huge install sizes and swapping out which ones you have stored on your system is both a pain and potentially costly depending on if you have a data cap. For the price of this laptop, this isn't a huge knock, but it's something to consider if you tend to download lots of games and applications.
The laptop's design is pretty subdued. It doesn't scream 'gamer' with a futuristic design and loud color accents, but it does come with a full RGB keyboard. It also has several useful ports, including three USB 3.2 ports, one Thunderbolt 4 port, one mini DisplayPort 1.4 port, and one HDMI 2.1 port, SD card reader, and a 3.5mm headphone jack.
