There are some great PC games out there to play right now. So there's no better way to get stuck in than by getting this bargain gaming laptop for $800, a Core i7 12650H processor with six P-cores and four E-cores for most gaming, school, and office-level applications. It is more than adequate. If the rest of the laptop is better matched to this CPU, anything more powerful would be wasted.

The RTX 4060 Mobile graphics chip has 3,072 shaders, a boost clock of 1,890 MHz, and 8 GB of VRAM, perfect for gaming at 1080p, ideal for a 15.6" screen resolution. The refresh rate is 144 Hz, which is very easy on the eyes, and for supported games, the DLSS 3.5 feature can be used to improve game performance to match that refresh rate for smoother visuals.

Of course, you don't get all the best for $800, and the first thing that was cut was storage: the SSD only has 512GB of capacity, which was fine a year ago but a bit disappointing these days. Fortunately, high-capacity SSDs are inexpensive now, so if you play a lot of games, you might want to upgrade your drive.

RAM capacity is small at 16GB, but sufficient for most games. However, this is DDR5-4800, which is not the fastest. I don't plan on changing it anytime soon, but if I plan on using this laptop for a while, I would upgrade the RAM to 32GB of DDR5-5600 for a healthy boost in CPU performance.

Overall, the specs are nicely balanced, with no areas that really stick out as inferior to others. It has enough performance to satisfy gamers and students; see our review of the Gigabyte G5 with the 12500H. This case is an even better laptop.