Please don’t buy these terrible ‘gaming laptops’ from Amazon this Black Friday – if you’re on a tight budget, buy this one instead

Amazon, I am literally down on my knees, begging you to stop letting sellers put ‘newest gaming laptop’ in the product name of a laptop that is further from a proper gaming machine than I am from good sleep habits. I’m serious. Please.

Black Friday is a hectic time of year, and it’s far too easy for less-than-scrupulous sellers to slap a crappy AI-generated image onto the screen of a budget laptop, mark up the original price by 300%, and then ‘discount’ it by a hefty amount. Make no mistake, these are not gaming laptops: they don’t even have dedicated graphics cards, instead relying on outdated processors with comparatively feeble integrated graphics (most commonly the AMD Ryzen 7 5825U).

Even more hilariously, many of them are just reskinned versions of the exact same laptop, the ACEMAGIC AX16: you can find that laptop here, and then you can also find it here – but in the latter case, it’s apparently now a ‘KAIGERR’ laptop, a brand I have literally never heard of that probably won’t exist this time next year. Oh, and here it is again, this time wearing the skin of budget monitor brand AOC, who notably does not have any laptops of any sort for sale on its actual website.

Please be aware that I am including those links purely for illustrative purposes, and you should under no circumstances actually buy one of these. If you want a cut-price gaming laptop that can, you know, actually run modern games, just get this one: the Asus TUF Gaming A16, reduced to $699.99 (was $1,099.99) at Best Buy.

Today’s best MSI Thin 15 deal

In our Asus TUF Gaming A16 review earlier this year, we praised the laptop’s solid build quality and excellent battery life. In fact, one of the main points of criticism our reviewer had was the rather high asking price.

Well, this deal smashes that problem to bits: $400 off makes this phenomenally good value for a gaming laptop offering these specs. The AMD Radeon RX 7700S GPU is roughly comparable to Nvidia’s RTX 4060 in a gaming laptop format (in terms of raw performance averages, it sits a little below the 4060 but comfortably above the 4050), and you won’t find an RTX 4060 laptop for this sort of price right now.

That battery life point shouldn’t be skipped over, either – in our tests, the TUF Gaming A16 lasted for more than 10 hours of general non-gaming use, meaning that it can fill the boots of an everyday office or school laptop as well as offering strong gaming performance when it’s time to kick back and relax after a hard day’s work.

So don’t spend hundreds of bucks on one of Amazon’s ‘newest gaming laptops’ – just buy this actual gaming laptop instead. Job done.