I've recently had the (dubious) pleasure of lugging around an 18-inch monster of a gaming laptop, and it's made me all too aware that portability matters. Which is why I'm such a big fan of the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 and G16 gaming laptops, both the 2024 refresh models and the 2023 versions.
We spot the 2024 versions on discount fairly often, but they can still be a fair chunk of change to throw down on a laptop purchase. Which is why I reckon this Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 2023 model is such a good deal for $1,150 at Best Buy right now.
While it doesn't have the fancy OLED screen of the 2024, it's still got a lovely 16-inch 165 Hz panel. It's only 1080p, but to be honest at a 16-inch screen size it's still going to look sharp enough for gaming, and it's much less strain on the GPU.
Speaking of GPUs, this has a proper mobile RTX 4070. At 1080p, it's got a good shot of throwing 165 frames at that screen in most games—and there's always DLSS 3 and Frame Generation to fill in the gaps when even this powerhouse of a mobile GPU starts to falter.
The Core i7 13620H might not be the latest and greatest, but it's still a 10-core (six Performance, four Efficient) chip with a speedy 4.9 GHz boost clock that's more than a match for demanding gaming, with a decent turn of speed in productivity tasks too. Plus, you don't really want a mega-spec CPU in a laptop this thin and light anyway, as you'd spin up the fans to jet-engine levels pretty quickly.
Nope, this machine is stripped down, lean, mean, and ready to go wherever you might take it. It's a refined beast for very reasonable cash, and exists in a sweet spot between truly portable and properly powerful.
My only reservation really is that 512 GB SSD, which will fill up pretty quickly once you start installing a few games. Luckily, the G16 has a spare M2 slot, meaning that it's a trivial matter to unscrew the back plate and slot in something appropriately sized next to the existing drive, like this:
Yep, for a mere $75 extra you can throw in our favorite budget SSD. That'll leave you with the pre-installed 512 GB as a dedicated system drive, and a chunky 1 TB model for plenty of game and app installs.
Job done. For an all-in price of $1,225, you'll have snagged yourself a speedy, super-portable gaming laptop with looks to make your friends (or co-workers, natch) go green with envy. All in a day's work, folks. All in a day's work.
