Good news! Far from moaning about the price of everything PC hardware-related this week, I’ve found a gaming laptop deal worth shouting about instead. It’s this Asus ROG Strix G16 for $1,299 at Walmart, and it’s everything my heart has hoped for after a miserable start to the year.
It’s a 16-core, 32-thread, 5.3 GHz behemoth, and that means this lappy is not only sorted for CPU-demanding games for quite a few years to come, but it’s also very well-suited to productivity and creator tasks, too.
The GPU is also the real deal, being an RTX 5070 mobile with a full-strength 115 W TGP. It’s only got a 1200p panel to take care of, which means it should have very little issue firing frames at the display’s 165 Hz refresh rate—especially if you bring upscaling into the equation.
This lappy also has the minimum fitting of 16 GB of DDR5 and a 1 TB SSD. There’s nothing much to get excited about there, but it’s still a fine amount for modern gaming and computing, and 32 GB / 2 TB gaming laptops are… well, either non-existent at this point, or horrendously expensive.
Them’s the breaks, and I promised I wouldn’t moan. What I will say, however, is that with a mega CPU and a properly-powered GPU on board, I would wager that this lappy is very noisy when pushed to its limits. But we’ve used these ROG Strix machines, and while Asus’ Armoury Crate software is not our favorite, it does a good job of reining the fans in while not absolutely tanking performance.
It’s a little bulky, it must be said. And the very gamer-focused, RGB-lit chassis won’t be for everyone. But if you’re looking for bang for your buck in these difficult times, I can’t find anything right now that beats this powerful gaming laptop for the cash.
Best gaming laptop 2026
