If we get a better Black Friday gaming laptop deal than this Gigabyte RTX 3060 notebook I'm going to be surprised. And obviously super happy, too, because that will mean we get a genuinely powerful gaming laptop for $600-odd. But I'm going to stick my neck out and say that's possibly unlikely, because at $729 from Newegg this is a bargain.
We're talking about an admittedly chunky notebook, but one that sports an outstanding specs list for the money. We've long been talking about aiming for the sub-$1,000 mark for any RTX 3060 system, but now we've got to revise that down to sub-$800 because of rigs like this.
- We're curating all the best Black Friday PC gaming deals right here.
And yes, there are other ~$800 RTX 3060 laptops around, but none that are able to offer a better core spec than the Gigabyte A5 K1. The 1080p IPS screen comes with a 144Hz refresh rate, a panel that will complement the Nvidia graphics card, and an impressive 16GB of system memory. And yes, it's dual channel with a pair of 8GB DDR4 modules in place.
That Ryzen 5 5600H CPU isn't particularly well represented in gaming laptops out in the market today, but it's a strong AMD 5000-series processors, with six Zen 3 cores and a full 12 threads of CPU power. It's easily powerful enough to support the RTX 3060 GPU and give you a decent amount of computational power outside of gaming, too.
It is also worth knowing that there's a spare NVMe slot inside the machine, that is pretty easily accessible, and that's important. Important because the 512GB SSD is the only thing that might age quickly, but the fact you can quickly and relatively easily drop in a secondary SSD down the line is actually a major boon.
If you were hoping for a sleek ~$700 gaming laptop, however, you're going to be disappointed. This is a chonky ol' notebook at 2kg, and doesn't look particularly beautiful, but that does also mean it has a healthy amount of space for cooling inside it.
