The finest RTX 3070 Black Friday gaming laptop also rocks a mighty AMD CPU and a 240Hz screen
Gigabyte has been the standout Black Friday gaming laptop hero so far this year, with outstanding deals on a host of different machines. This $1,599 RTX 3070 notebook is going for the same price we've seen some RTX 3060 laptops retailing, and is a perfect case in point.
But, while we make a big thing out of the graphics chip at the heart of a gaming laptop that's not the only thing to have an impact on performance. And the rest of the spec of the Gigabyte A5 X1 really stands out, too.
Alongside that quality Nvidia GPU is one of the top AMD mobile processors, the Ryzen 9 5900HX. That's an eight-core, 16-thread Zen 3 CPU that can clock as high as 4.6GHz. The 5000-series AMD chips have been a bit of a revelation, and show just how far the company has come. It's a great all-round CPU, and no mistake.
The laptop screen is impressive, too, with the A5 X1 sporting a 1080p IPS panel that comes with a lightning-quick refresh rate of 240Hz. Along with the RTX 3070, that makes it a great gaming monitor. I will say that this Gigabyte machine is no thin-and-light, and comes with a relatively chunky chassis. At 4.68 lbs there's a fair bit of heft to it, but that should also mean it's got space to cool the 140W GPU at its heart.
Gigabyte A5 X1 | 15.6-inch | Ryzen 9 5900HX | RTX 3070 | 1080p | 240Hz | 16GB RAM | 512GB SSD | $1,799 $1,599 at Newegg (save $200)
This is the cheapest RTX 3070-based machine we've found so far, and the rest of the package makes it one of the finest, too. The AMD CPU is an eight-core stunner and the 240Hz screen is a pro-move as well. Our only issue is the slightly miserly 512GB SSD.
But it also comes with 16GB of DDR4 memory and a healthy 512GB SSD. I'd suggest that's maybe the weakest part of the spec, however, and you'll quickly fill up half a terabyte with the size of the latest crop of PC games.
You can be sure there will be Black Friday SSD deals on internal as well as external SSDs, should you wish to expand the storage on this otherwise super-tempting system. So, that shouldn't be too much of a worry.