The steepest discounts on gaming PCs and laptops for Cyber Monday and Black Friday 2021
If you forego shopping over the summer and wait for Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals to upgrade your PC or build a new one (minus a new graphics card, since they’re impossible to find outside of pre-builts right now), you can save a hundred bucks or more by taking advantage of lots of $10 to $40 discounts on components such as CPUs, RAM, and SSDs.
If you’re the type who always picks the rocket launcher in shooters, however, you may prefer to go for one big Black Friday/Cyber Monday purchase, potentially saving hundreds of dollars in a single shot. It’s not necessarily a better way to save money, because giant discounts can be the result of earlier overpricing, and surprising deficiencies can be hidden in specs sheets. Last week we noticed a $3,069.99 gaming PC with a ridiculously small 240GB SSD.
If you’re seeking a high-end product , though, you might make out pretty well by holding out for its first price drop. Once the early adopters who don’t care about price have been satisfied, we tend to see multi-hundred dollar drops on the most expensive PC gaming gear. It’s can be an opportunity to get an extravagant gaming device for the price of a standard one, or at least below the absolute upper limit of your budget. (Just be prepared for the price to drop again next year.)
Here are the biggest single discounts by dollar amount we’ve found so far this Cyber Monday, with the conditions that the product has to actually be good, and the discount has to actually be new and not inflated by citing an out-of-date list price.
$1,999.99 (Originally $2,499.99)
We reviewed Samsung’s absurd 49″ Odyssey Neo G9 gaming monitor earlier this year, and it’s as cool as you’d expect a desk-spanning 240Hz scroll of pixels to be. One major downside we noted, though, is that it costs $2,500, which is well outside of just about everyone’s monitor budget. Good news: $500 was chopped off its price on November 22, so now it’s just $2,000, which is also well outside of just about everyone’s monitor budget, but less so.
If nothing else, this discount is a reminder that ultra-high-end gear doesn’t tend to hold onto its initial list price for long, at least if it’s not super in-demand like graphics cards are.
$1,799.99 (Originally $2,599.99)
Microsoft is selling a high-end Razer Blade 15 gaming laptop—our favorite gaming laptop—for $1,799.99, which is $800 off Razer’s list price for the laptop, and $700 cheaper than Razer’s current sale price.
$1,799.99 is still a lot of money to spend on a laptop, but the specs are strong—an Intel Core i7-10875H, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, and RTX 3070—and Razer’s light, slim gaming laptops are the best-looking options out there. If you’re in the market, though, see how you feel about an Alienware m15 R6 with similar specs. It’s on sale for $100 less, and you get a 1440p 240Hz display instead of an 1080p 360Hz display. I’d personally take the higher resolution over the higher refresh rate, as 240Hz is still a higher refresh rate than you’ll ever need for most games.
Price: $2,699.99 (Originally $3,289.99)
If you didn’t go through the deal page, Dell would’ve let you build this gaming PC for $3,204.59. With the deal, you’d have saved $504.60. The lesson: Be careful when you’re navigating Dell’s website this time of year!
Dell’s Alienware PCs are priced high for their specs—you’re paying a premium for those fancy custom cases, liquid cooling, and other details—but that’s still a $500 discount on a good build. And because of that, these deals are selling out fast. I found another Dell deal that took $568.40 off an Alienware Aurora R12 with an Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti, but both it and this one sold out as I was writing.
You can browse Dell’s Cyber Monday deals page to see if any similar PCs are on sale. It’s worth a look if you like Alienware’s distinctive LED ovals, and you want a compact system—say, if you’ll be moving it around a lot. Otherwise, look for more Cyber Monday gaming PC deals in our hub, since you might find some good specs without the Alienware premium.
Price: $1,899 (Originally $2,999)
It’s possible to pay the full $3,000 list price for this Gigabyte laptop, although you’d have to do zero research and yet somehow land on the page of a small retailer that hasn’t discounted it. That’s not likely, but since it could happen, and since $3K isn’t a surprising list price for these specs (here’s a Razer Blade 15 with more RAM for $3,100), this is truthfully a $1,100 discount, with the catch that $300 of it comes from a rebate.
That said, if you’re in the market for a high-end gaming laptop, I probably wouldn’t go for one with a 4K 60Hz OLED display. It’ll give you a good picture, for sure, but you could spend $200 less and get an Alienware m15 R6 with a 1440p 240Hz display for $1,699.99. For gaming, we prefer fast 1440p displays over slow 4K displays, and that’s $500 less up front when you take into account the Gigabyte rebate, which has to be mailed in and will come back to you in the form of a prepaid card. Alternatively, if you plan to use your new gaming laptop with an external display for the most part, you could shop around for a Cyber Monday laptop deal on a 1080p laptop and save a bit more.
For more deals, especially on gaming PCs, laptops, and displays that start at a more sensible prices, head to our full Cyber Monday PC gaming deals list.
https://www.pcgamer.com/this-years-steepest-pc-gaming-discounts-include-gaming-pcs-laptops-and-one-giant-monitor/