When it comes to buying your first gaming laptop (or snapping up a cheap one with enough power for 1080p gaming), anything armed with an RTX 4050 is a great way to go. Everybody seems to dump on it, but you can get strong fidelity from this entry-level GPU, and with DLSS 3.0, frame rates are slick — even in the likes of Cyberpunk 2077!
Even better is this mind-blowingly low price. Right now you can get the Lenovo LOQ 15 at Woot for just $699 — that’s a massive $500 off the price, and puts this into must-buy territory for newly portable PC gamers.
As you may have seen, I reviewed the Lenovo LOQ 15 recently, and while there are some compromises to keep the price down (more on those further down), the fact you can pick one up for less than $700 (the lowest price for an RTX 4050 we’ve seen), does paper over these downsides rather nicely.
Because sure, as you’d expect with a cheap gaming laptop, the display isn’t the best in terms of color accuracy, the webcam is a bit naff and the build quality is plastic fantastic (but not in a good way).
But the main focus of any entry-level investment like this is getting the best internal specs for your buck, which this certainly achieves with an Intel Core i5-13500H mid-tier CPU, RTX 4050 GPU, 8GB DDR5 RAM and a 1TB SSD for storing a ton of high-volume games.
This is the lowest price you’ll pay for an RTX 40-series gaming laptop of this spec — the lowest we’ve seen in 2024 (so far). If you’re in the market for a super cheap way into PC gaming, this is the deal to snag.
