Amazon Prime Day is one of the best sales events on the calendar for picking up a ton of cheap tech - and that includes gaming laptop deals. Whether you're making your first tentative steps into the world of mobile PC gaming or are a veteran looking for that next upgrade, simply put, it's a great opportunity to bag a bargain.
That said, as with any big sales event, doing the research and knowing the lay of the land is going to be crucial before you lay down that hard-earned cash. That's where we come in with this handy guide to the upcoming gaming laptop deals in the Amazon Prime Day sales event. We're covering the main points you're going to want to consider, how to save money, and also tell you where to find the best deals on the day.
- Prime Day laptop deals now live - see our full list of recommendations
We're always tracking the best gaming laptop deals here at TechRadar on a week-by-week basis, so we're in a good position to inform our readers on what to expect. In short, there's sure to be a ton of great sales on Amazon Prime Day, but maybe not where you expect them...
Amazon isn't the best retailer for gaming laptop deals
Surprisingly, given the namesake, Amazon doesn't actually tend to heavily feature gaming laptop deals as part of its greater Amazon Prime Day sales line-up. Put simply, the vast majority of gaming machines offered via Amazon are third-party listings and therefore aren't subject to the same juicy Prime Day discounts as the official Amazon listings.
Over Prime Day, Amazon's focus is very much on offering discounts on its own brand Amazon devices as well as Prime-member tie-ins to drive up membership counts. That's not to say there won't be a few sales here and there, however, and Amazon in particular does have a large inventory of premium Razer and Alienware machines that it sells directly.
Pesky third-party sellers
A word to the wise - you'll often find third-party gaming laptop deals at Amazon like the one pictured below that have '2021' in the product title but are in fact older machines.
You'll definitely want to avoid listings like this unless they're really cheap (and we mean really cheap) on Prime Day. In the above example we're seeing a machine that not only has a processor that's two generations old now, but also has a really weak graphics card for the price.
Because the Amazon gaming laptop deals inventory is often flooded with questionable third-party listings like the one above, it can actually be pretty tricky (and time-consuming) to sift through the bad matches to find the gold. Subsequently, we recommend checking in at Amazon over Prime Day to see any potential flash sales or daily deals but otherwise mostly focusing on other retailers.
Other retailers will have great options
Unsurprisingly, many retailers also hold their own version of 'Prime Day' (even if they don't call it that) - making sure Amazon doesn't get to have all the fun on its big day. Fortunately for gaming laptop deals hunters, this includes some of the retailers that really specialize in offering great value machines all year round - Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Best Buy to name just a few.
Dell in particular is a great retailer to keep an eye on over Prime Day if you're looking for a cheaper machine. Its newly released Dell G15 series and older G5 15 series generally range from around $550 to $750 when on sale, and, while not being the flashiest machines around, do offer excellent bang for the buck. Conversely, Dell also so happens to be the home of the well-regarded Alienware gaming laptop brand. These are of course really pricey machines, but they do offer the latest RTX 3000 series cards and often see price cuts of over $700 on sales events.
To Ray-Trace or not to Ray-Trace
When it comes to components, no part is more crucial to the overall performance of your machine than the graphics card. Subsequently, what brand or generation of graphics card you're rocking is going to really determine what type of machine you have and how much it's going to cost too.
Right now, the top graphics cards are of course the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3000 series and the AMD Radeon RX 6000 series. As you'd expect, these will give you the best performance and support for the latest graphical features (like Ray-Tracing), but some really, really high prices too. Because these are new components, and in pretty high demand, we don't expect too many juicy price cuts on machines featuring these cards.
Where we do expect huge discounts, however, is on slightly older machines. Our number one tip if you're looking to save some big cash on gaming laptop deals over Prime Day is definitely consider dropping down to a slightly older card.
This is a somewhat controversial point as many would highlight the false economy in buying a cheaper machine right now. It's definitely true that a machine with an older GTX card for example won't age as well as an RTX card when it comes to future game releases, but we wouldn't automatically discount them - especially if you're on a budget or a casual gamer. Here's a great example of a slightly older, but still really powerful budget machine over at Dell.
Similarly, there are some great RTX 2060 gaming laptops going for really cheap right now. These are definitely 'last-gen', but they're almost as powerful as the latest machines with the newer RTX 3060 cards and still of course feature full support for the latest features like Ray-Tracing and DLSS. Here's an absolutely bonkers value machine over at Walmart that we'd wholeheartedly recommend checking out.
What about AMD?
There's recently been a couple of big AMD launches that offer a ton of very beastly (and great value) components on gaming laptop deals. The latest RX 6000 series of mobile GPUs and Ryzen 5000 series processors in particular are fresh off the presses and slowly filtering down into the latest releases from a number of brands. Unfortunately, it's unlikely we'll see any big discounts on these machines in particular over Prime Day because they're so new, so it could be a while before we see cheaper options with these components.
If you're interested in a solely AMD-based machine and have a bit more cash to spend, however, then check out this Asus G15 at Best Buy. It's just been released this past week and happens to be the first machine to rock an RX 6800M graphics card.
Don't forget to follow TechRadar
And finally, our last (and probably best) tip for scoring gaming laptop deals over Amazon Prime Day is to visit TechRadar! As always, we'll be closely following the sales and posting what we think are the best ones - including on gaming laptops. Recommended bookmarks are our dedicated deals feed and Prime Day laptop deals page in particular, where we'll have the best sales as they drop as well as industry-leading analysis.
