After spending 41% of my life as a tech journalist I can tell you these are the best Black Friday gaming laptops under $1,000

pcgamer.com:

Money is tight, but maybe not so tight that you don't want to treat yourself to a new toy. Because, let's face it, that's what gaming laptops are: toys. You can pretend to yourself, your partner, or your accountant that you really need a discrete graphics card for your 'work', but let's be honest, you want a laptop that can play games.

But they are expensive things, which makes sales events, such as Black Friday, a great time to start shopping around. If you don't have a particular brand in mind—and aren't expecting to bag a new Razer Blade—you will find some impressive sub-$1,000 Black Friday gaming laptop bargains available right now.

1. MSI Thin GF63 | GeForce RTX 4050 | Core i5 12450H | 8GB DDR4-4800 | 512GB SSD | 15.6-inch | 1080p | 144Hz | $899$599 at B&H Photo (save $300)
This is every inch a budget gaming laptop and that means compromise. If you're after a pure mobile gaming experience we'd probably suggest the Steam Deck OLED or ROG Ally as a more compelling ~$600 purchase, but if you want an actually affordable laptop with some gaming chops the MSI GF63 has something about it. We've not tested a 45W version of the RTX 4050, but that's still got a chance to deliver some decent gaming frame rates at the native 1080p resolution of the screen. So long as you stick to medium settings, I would say. The CPU, with its four P-cores and four E-cores still ends up with 12 threads, so is still a relatively capable chip, but it's that 8GB single channel memory that will hold this machine back. But a <$30 16GB upgrade kit will sort that out.

Price check: Amazon $799.99 (16GB version)

2. Asus TUF A16 | Radeon RX 7600S | AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS | 16GB DDR5 | 512GB SSD | 16-inch | 1200p | 165Hz | $1,099.99$749.99 at Best Buy (save