I'll be honest, Best Buy has kinda broken my heart. Just a few days ago it had the mother of all 14-inch gaming laptop deals, with the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 OLED—our absolute favorite compact gaming laptop—on sale for just $1,100. Sadly, by Monday the Zephyrus G14 was back up to $1,600. That's still not bad for such a gorgeous gaming laptop, one with a full unibody aluminum chassis, great performance, and striking looks. But it's not great.
What is pretty great, however, is the number of other 14-inch Prime Day gaming laptop deals there are. The compact gaming laptop is the ultimate portable notebook that will still deliver high-end frame rates, and without any truly tangible downsides.
Acer Predator 14 | RTX 4070 | Core i7 13700H | 14-inch | 250 Hz | 1600p | 16GB DDR5 | 1TB SSD | $1,999.99$1,149.99 at Amazon (save $850)
It's not the prettiest gaming laptop you'll ever see but underneath the cheap-looking exterior is a pile of really nice hardware. That Intel CPU has 14 cores, 20 threads, and the GPU is a 140W RTX 4070. Backing them up are 16GB of DDR5 RAM and, unusually for this price, a full 1TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD. Even the 2560 x 1600 screen is good, with a 250 Hz refresh rate and mini-LED backlighting. There's very little to dislike here and it'll be down to whether the lightweight nature or 14-inch panel just aren't right for you.
Price check: Newegg $1,595
HP Omen Transcend 14 | RTX 4060 | Core Ultra 7 155H | 14-inch | 120 Hz | 2880 x 1800 | OLED | 512GB SSD | 16GB DDR5-7500 | $1,729.99$1,279.99 at HP (save $450)
This lovely 14-incher is pretty expensive for an RTX 4060 but it's still one of the best compact gaming laptops around. You get an excellent OLED panel as standard and a 65W GPU that will still deliver a quality gaming experience. The 512GB SSD is a bit small, but you can configure the machine with a 1TB drive if you're willing to spend a bit more. Shame the battery life isn't so good, but that's small gaming laptops for you
Asus ROG Zephyrus 14 |
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