I’ve spent all year testing RTX 50-series gaming laptops and these are the RTX 5080 machines to get for Black Friday
This year has been spent either testing graphics cards or gaming laptops. Those have been the products that have occupied me the most, though with the year front-loaded with the former and back-filled with the latter. But that means I’ve tested so many machines that I’ve actually had hands on with most of the Black Friday gaming laptop deals we’ve been talking about.
And while I do absolutely have a penchant for a 14-inch gaming laptop—that would absolutely be my preference for a work-and-play machine—if you’re purely after a mobile device that will deliver the best gaming performance then for me it’s an RTX 5080 gaming laptop.
Yes, the RTX 5090 is technically more powerful, but that extra VRAM and the smattering of extra fps come at such a huge price premium that it feels like a ludicrous extravagance for the end result. Especially when you can bag a good RTX 5080 gaming laptop for under $2,000.
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This is probably the peach of the lot. When we reviewed the Intel-powered version of the HP Omen Max 16, we found it a bit of a noisy beast, but with a really good IPS screen and a nice-feeling keyboard. I also tested an RTX 5090 version, which had the same boons and busts, but I came away impressed with the chassis design and the general feel of the device.
But it was always the price that was the issue for these machines. $3,000+ just always felt like too much when RTX 4080 gaming laptops had been so much more affordable at the end.
This isn’t an Intel-powered version, but I think it’s all the better for it. Not only is it now the cheapest RTX 5080 gaming laptop in the Black Friday sales, but that AMD chip also gives you some extra versatility. Battery life is always an issue for 16-inch laptops, but because the Radeon 890M iGPU inside the Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 is so capable, you can play 1080p games away from the plug socket and gain some extra battery life by entirely disabling the Nvidia GPU.
It really is a ton of gaming tech for the money, and my pick of the Black Friday sales for sure.
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Before the HP Omen Max 16 above dropped, I was all-in on this machine as the go-to Black Friday gaming laptop pick. I spent a long time playing with it for the MSI Vector 16 HX AI review and came away thoroughly impressed with its no-nonsense styling and commitment to the bit.
It’s an old-school gaming laptop and no mistake. It’s got no battery life, has a thoroughly anachronistic design, but it sure can fling the game frames around like a good un. Like them all, it’s a noisy machine when pushed to its limits, but unlike a lot of RTX 5080 gaming laptops, pulling the Vector 16 HX AI down to its Balanced performance preset doesn’t tank gaming performance, but does massively decrease the noise levels.
Were it not for the fact it’s only got 16 GB of memory inside it, and that’s becoming more of an issue when upgrading is now so costly, it would still be my pick, but the HP Omen Max 16 just has it all.
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At nearly $500 more than the HP Omen Max 16 above, it’s hard to be all-in on the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i, but I still love the machine and, more importantly, the honestly incredible software it packs.
Parking that for a second, the Legion Pro 7i comes with an utterly glorious OLED display, and the thing delivers the absolute peak performance of all our gaming laptop picks. But the LegionSpace software is what really makes the experience; it’s just so damned good, and so PC gaming.
I’ve never seen another laptop configuration app that gives you so much control over the power and performance of both the CPU and GPU as Lenovo does. It’s almost like it trusts its customers. With the software, you’re able to dial back the CPU power to the point where the fans calm down, while still delivering peak gaming performance because the GPU is still flying.
It means you get a relatively quiet gaming laptop that still gives great game.
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