Ideally, you should be looking at under $1,500 for an RTX 3070 gaming laptop. In fact, when Nvidia announced the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti mobile (opens in a new tab), he said it would show up in machines at that price, though it was something that didn’t really materialize into anything like real numbers. Yet here we are looking at a machine offered at $100 more than that. The important thing is that it’s still a decent spec for the money, and you can spend a lot less if you want.
The default version of this machine arrives at only $900 (opens in a new tab), although that’s not a particularly exciting base spec, and frankly, there are better deals out there to pack GTX 1650 GPUs. Where it gets interesting is in the range of GPUs and CPUs available. Unfortunately, you can’t choose CPU and GPU separately, but the available pairings at least make sense. This is the second highest spec of the Core i7 12700H and the RTX 3070 which is the most notable option.
Selecting this option will require the screen to be upgraded to the 144Hz panel for reasons that aren’t exactly clear, but it’s something you’ll benefit from with this GPU which will be able to reach very high frame rates. high in many games. It’ll only add another $40 to the final price, which isn’t too bad.
While you’re here, it’s also worth upgrading the RAM. Upgrading from a single DDR5-4800 stick to 16GB of dual-channel memory will make a significant difference to your most serious games and exploits. At $60, it’s not the cheapest memory upgrade you can do right now, but DDR5 SODIMMs are on the more expensive end of the spectrum, and that’s honestly not a price too offensive to pay to have a machine completely deceived when it arrives.
The rest of the spec is pretty reasonable for the money, and while you might be tempted to upgrade to the 1TB NVMe SSD, I’d recommend against it. SSDs are cheap right now, and the price only seems to go one way. Also, the 512GB SSD that comes by default should be enough for a few games until you upgrade.
All in all, not a bad price for a decently performing machine. Hook it up to a 1440p monitor and you’ll enjoy smooth frame rates at the highest settings, or just use it alone and get the most out of that 144Hz refresh rate.
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