Best Prime Day gaming laptop deals 2022: Sales to shop today

Prime Day is landing in just two days, and we’re likely to see a ton of great sales this week. In fact, gaming laptops are likely to be some of the bestsellers in this year’s Prime Day deals, and we’re hoping for a banner turnout from Amazon and other retailers. For some, though, they may still want to grab a gaming laptop right now, and we’re happy to say that some of the best Prime Day gaming laptop deals are already popping up. That being said, there are some good reasons for waiting until Prime Day to do your shopping, but if you want to dive in right now, we’ve got some juicy Prime Day gaming laptop deals you can shop today.

Best Prime Day gaming laptop deals 2022

Dell G15 Gaming Laptop — $686, was $1,069

Why Buy

The Dell G15 is a little bit of an industry workhorse in that it’s one of the most often suggested gaming laptops on the market. In fact, you likely already know somebody who owns a G15, and if not, you can probably spot the striking design and look from a mile away. Of course, it’s not just a good-looking laptop; it manages to pack quite the punch under the hood, and it does so in a relatively good budget range, making it a great entry-level gaming laptop for those who want to pick one up from among the best Prime Day gaming laptop deals.

For starters, and what most folks will focus on, we have the RTX 3050 GPU, an entry-level, laptop-specific GPU that should power most indie and casual games just fine and will handle the likes of games like CS:GO and League of Legends without too much trouble. It helps that the 15.6-inch screen runs at 1080p, and therefore doesn’t stress the GPU too much, while the 120Hz refresh rate should be fine for most folks who want good refresh rates without plonking down a bunch of money on hitting 144Hz or having a higher resolution. It also has a peak brightness of 250nits, which may be a bit on the lower side, so avoid using it in the sun or in bright lighting if you can.

As for productivity, it does a relatively good job with its 11th-gen Intel i5-11260H, as you’d expect for a laptop that tries to be a little bit of something for everybody, although you’ll only get about five hours of battery life out of it with light productivity, and significantly less while doing heavy gaming. In terms of the rest of the specs, you get 8GB of RAM, which is about baseline nowadays for a good experience, and 256GB of Storage, which is a little bit on the lower side, so maybe grabbing an external hard drive deal might be a good idea. You also get Wi-Fi 6, which we appreciate since it’s future-proofing your laptop while providing you with an excellent wireless experience, even when gaming.

Acer Nitro 5 — $744, was $840

Why Buy

The Acer Nitro 5 is a sort of laptop that tends to go unnoticed but is a pretty great little device for gaming. That being said, it has a lot of similarities with G15, using almost the exact same hardware, with the main difference being that you’re getting a slightly nicer display that can hit a 144Hz refresh rate. For those who really enjoy FPS games or want those higher framerates, that extra bit will make a difference, especially with the 15.6-inch FHD display with an IPS panel, which provides some excellent viewing angles and good color reproduction.

As for the GPU, it’s an RTX 3050, the entry-level budget GPU from Nvidia that was specifically made for laptops and is just about powerful enough to run most modern games on medium settings, especially given the screen isn’t going to be taxing it too much. That being said, you may have to do a bit of tweaking to get 144Hz, especially if you’re playing more graphically demanding FPS games like Rainbow Six Siege or CoD: Warzone, so definitely keep that in mind. The CPU is a 10th gen Intel i5-10300H, which is also a mid-range budget CPU, although still pretty powerful and should handle most of your gaming just fine, with maybe a bit of struggle when running more CPU intensive stuff like simulation or strategy games.

The CPU, and the laptop overall, are both great for productivity, and the keyboard is surprisingly enjoyable to use for a product in this price bracket. The mousepad is slightly more offset to the left than you’d find in most laptops, although that’s slowly become the norm these days and is something you should consider before jumping right in. As for the RAM, you get 8GB to work with, which is a decent baseline, although storage is slightly small at just 256GB. Not necessarily a big deal since both can be upgraded down the line, and you can always use an external hard drive to help supplement the internal storage. Overall, it’s a great Prime Day gaming laptop deal to get if you want a 144Hz refresh rate at a budget price.

OMEN HP Laptop 16 — $800, was $1,100

Why Buy

HP has been making a lot of headway in the past few years regarding their gaming laptops, and the pinnacle of that is the Omen HP 16, a laptop with some good base specs that can be further customized on HP’s website before you buy. In fact, we’d probably encourage a few upgrades here in there, depending on what you’re aiming for with this gaming laptop, especially if you want to play the latest games on good graphical settings while also making the laptop somewhat future-proof.

For example, while we like the 16.1-inch screen, which gives you a ton of real estate for both gaming and productivity, the base screen only has a resolution of 1920 x 1080, which is why we’d definitely suggest getting the $30 that lowers the response time to 7ms, adds 144Hz refresh rate, and low blue light tech. Even better, we’d recommend grabbing the $70 upgrade that bumps the screen up to 2560 x 1440 resolution since that’s the perfect sweet spot for the screen size and gaming laptops in general, plus you also get a 165Hz refresh rate.

At that point, you’ll also likely want to upgrade the GPU from the base GTX 1650, although the upgrades here are bundled together with the CPU upgrades, so you’ll be upgrading the AMD Ryzen 5 5600H while you’re at it. There are many options in terms of specs and price, going up to an additional $870 for an RTX 3070 and AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX, although that CPU may be a bit of overkill unless you do incredibly CPU-intensive work. Instead, we’d suggest the $680 upgrade, which nets you an RTX 3070 and an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H, a perfect combination if you go for the 2k screen upgrade. Otherwise, if you’re sticking with the base screen or the $30 upgrade, then going for the $130 upgrade to the RTX 3050Ti and AMD Ryzen 5 5600H should be more than enough.

As for the other specs, you get 8GBs of RAM with the base built, which is absolutely fine, although you can upgrade it to either 16GB for $70 or 32GB for $190, and only the 16GB upgrade is worth it. Base storage is 512GB, which is pretty good, although it can also be upgraded to 1TB for $80, another upgrade worth doing.

While the HP Omen 16 may not seem like the best Prime Day gaming laptop deal out of the bat, given the upgrades you’d want to make, the truth is that the couple hundred dollars of discount you get can and should be used to get yourself some upgraded specs. Given that it’s one of the few 16-inch screens on the market, the upgrades are worth it, even though it may be slightly more than you were originally willing to spend.

Acer Predator Helios 300 — $1,190, was $1,300

Why Buy

The Acer Predator Helios 300, or how it’s more widely known as “Helios 300,” is a surprisingly good gaming laptop from Acer and one that also often flies under the radar, something that seems to be pretty common with Acer.

Right from the get-go, the Helios 300 doesn’t kid around, with a 15.6-inch FHD screen with a whoppingly low 3ms response time and 144Hz refresh rate, while also being an IPS panel, so there’s great color reproduction and contrast. All of that is powered with an RTX 3060, a good upgrade from the 3050, and the start of the mid-range GPUs that can handle a bit more oomph, making it great if you want better graphics with modern games. The CPU is upgraded with an 11th gen Intel Intel i7-11800H, a higher-end CPU, and probably a bit more powerful than needed given the GPU, but we won’t complain.

Given the specs, it’s great for both gaming and productivity, and while the old version of the Helios 300 had a bit of an issue with overheating, the newer version doesn’t have the same problem, especially if you’re smart about your fan and heat management. Battery life is also decent, clocking in at around 4 hours or so, although you should care for your laptop’s battery, which applies to all laptops and should help you get the most out of the Helios 300. Thankfully, the new cooling should also somewhat help with the longer battery life, so that’s a nice bonus, not to mention that it keeps the keypad at a good temperature where you don’t feel the head when doing heavy gaming, at least not to a degree that would bother you.

As for other specs, you get 16GBs of RAM, which is more than enough for most users, even power users, while the storage is a respectable 512GB SSD, so it should be more than enough to handle most of your gaming and day-to-day needs, especially if you stream most of your content and don’t play Warzone, which is likely going to take up half your SSD without a sweat. You also get sweet Wi-Fi 6, which was sorely missing in previous iterations of the Helios 300, and certainly something we expect for most gaming laptops at this price range.

Overall, the Helios 300 is an excellent example of a great Prime Day gaming laptop deal if you want a mid-range gaming laptop at an excellent price.

Legion 5 Pro Gen 6 AMD — $1,650, was $2,080

Why Buy

Lenovo has come out of left field in the past few years with its laptops, especially their gaming laptops, and has made a pretty excellent showing of it. In this case, we have the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro, a surprisingly excellent laptop that’s made many great design decisions. And yes, we are mostly anthropomorphizing it for effect.

For starters, it’s one of the few laptops on this list and on the market that comes with a 16-inch screen, but that’s not all. It has a 16:10 aspect ratio which makes it great for productivity and, by extension, gaming since not only do you have a bigger screen to work with, Lenovo has decided to go with a 2560 x 1600 resolution, which is a 2k resolution for this type of aspect ratio, and 2k is the sweet spot for larger screens on laptops, as mentioned earlier. All of that is run using a beefy RTX 3070 that isn’t thermally throttled, luckily, and can still manage to throw out good performance, even at the 165Hz refresh rate the screen has. Also, the laptop has HDR 400, which is impressive, to say the least.

When it comes to CPU, you got a mid-to-top range AMD Ryzen 7 5800H that should easily handle most productivity tasks, as well as most games, even ones that like to eat CPU resources for breakfast, and while that means the CPU will run a little bit hot, Lenovo’s cooling solution and fan management means you won’t be feeling it on the keyboard. Speaking of which, it’s a pretty nice keyboard, although the mousepad has been moved much further left than any other laptop on the market,  with the left edge lining up with the S key. That means you will likely have to switch the mousepad off when gaming to use the WASD or even when typing, so you aren’t constantly causing phantom touches.

Besides that, you get 16GB of RAM, which is perfect for this kind of laptop and should fit more users, but what’s even more impressive is the two 1TB SSDs you get for storage, which is a massive amount you don’t usually see in gaming laptops, or laptops in general, even with added store customization. Battery life isn’t too bad either, especially if you let the screen be run mostly by the integrated GPU when you’re not gaming, giving you anywhere between 3-4 hours of battery life, which is to be expected given the power draw of the screen. You also get Wi-Fi 6, which we appreciate, and the only real downside is that the whole thing is a bit heavy, coming in at five and a half pounds, plus another two pounds or so for the power brick.

All in all, the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro is an excellent gaming laptop, and as a Prime Day gaming laptop deal, it’s great if you want a higher-end gaming laptop without breaking the $2k mark.

Razer Blade 14 — $2,300, was $2,800

Why Buy

Razer is sort of the Apple of the gaming laptop world, focusing on a very specific brand image and theme, and when it comes to their gaming laptops, that theme is lightweight and thin, and that’s nowhere more evident than the name of their laptops: Blade. The Razer Blade 14 is pretty much the pinnacle of that design mentality, being a tiny gaming laptop for what’s under the hood, although it can sometimes run a little bit hot.

You may not think a laptop with a 14-inch display would have a powerful one, but you’d be wrong since the Blade 14 not only runs at a 165Hz refresh rate it also rocks a 2560 x 1440 resolution to boot, which means you’re getting some sharp and excellent image quality. What’s even more impressive is that such a small laptop can run a beefy GPU like the RTX 3080, but it does, and if you aren’t familiar with the RTX 3080, it’s one of the top five GPUs on the market, so they aren’t kidding around with this one. There’s also an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX, a top-end CPU that will easily handle CPU-intensive tasks, whether it’s intense simulation games, audio editing, productivity, or probably a few other things we aren’t thinking about.

With such high-end specs, you’d maybe expect a ton of RAM, but you only get 16GBs. Of course, we say ‘only’ as if 16GB of RAM is bad, but it’s on-par for a high-end gaming laptop, especially one this tiny. We’re also very impressed with the 1TB internal storage that it’s managed to fit in there, and we’re starting to wonder how they manage to put so much awesome gear into such a tiny chassis. Regardless, it’s a pretty high-end gaming laptop that is tiny and a pleasure to use, and if you’re looking for a Prime Day gaming laptop deal for a high-end laptop that’s also super-portable, this is the one. Granted, it comes at a premium, and a lot of folks may balk at the idea of paying $2,000+ for a gaming laptop that’s only 14 inches, but that’s the reality of going for a brand name like Razer and a tightly packed gaming laptop like the Blade 14.

Prime Day gaming laptop deals FAQ

Is Prime Day a good time to buy a gaming laptop?

Prime Day laptop deals tend to be the best of the year since Prime Day is usually when all the electronics have their cheapest sales, so now is the best time to grab a gaming laptop if you want one. The only other time that good electronics sales are during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which often try to mirror Prime Day. Unfortunately, they’re both overstock sales events, so supply is often limited, meaning you’ll have to be on top of the best Prime Day gaming laptop deals as soon as you find them, not to mention that the deals may not be as good as those on Prime Day.

When do the best Prime Day gaming laptop deals start?

In Amazon’s announcement of the Prime Day 2022 dates, it said that Prime Day would be on July 12 and July 13, a spread of a couple of days as it usually is. Amazon also said it would roll out some deals early, especially with their own devices, such as the Amazon TV and Echo Dot, at least as early as June 21st. That means there are probably already a few gaming laptop deals floating around if you really want to grab one now.

Should you shop the Prime Day gaming laptop deals Now or wait until July 12?

Unless you’re in immediate need of a gaming laptop, which you probably aren’t, we’d strongly advise you to wait the few days until Prime Day rolls around. As mentioned in the introduction, there are a few good reasons for this, but mostly the fact is that Prime Day often has the best sales, and the competition like to undercut Amazon a lot, so you’re going to see some amazing price during those two days.

That being said, if you really need to have a gaming laptop now, you’ll still find some good deals.

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