If you're on the hunt for a high-end gaming laptop, you just might be tempted to pull the trigger on Gigabyte's Aero 15 OLED. It's yours for $1,799 after rebate at Newegg and, as an added bonus, it comes with Battlefield 2042.
Free game or not, this is a deep discount. The MSRP sits at $2,999, which is a bit high for the hardware, but it's on sale for $2,299. That's more in-line with other laptops sporting the same GeForce RTX 3080 GPU, though the kicker is the $500 rebate. Yes, mail-in-rebates are a pain but, for $500, it's definitely worth printing out the form and submitting it with the requisite UPC cutouts and sales receipt (I'd even go certified mail on this one).
I often compare prices to what Best Buy has to offer, because the retailer makes it easy to sort by hardware, and frequently has sales of its own. In this case, the cheapest in-stock laptop with an RTX 3080 is $2,799.99 (Razer Blade 14). Even among the out-of-stock items, the least expensive is $2,199.90 (Asus ROG Zephyrus).
The caveat is that this is the lower end variant of Nvidia's mobile RTX 3080. Specs can and do vary wildly among its laptop GPUs, and especially this one, which can come in 8GB or 16GB GDDR6 form. This one has 8GB of GDDR6 and a 1,245MHz boost clock. However, it also has a max power rating of 105W, which suggests it can boost higher in certain instances (the TGP range for the 3080 is 80W to 150W+) via Dynamic Boost.
Regardless, it's a fast GPU, and it's paired with an Intel 11th gen Core i7 11800H Tiger Lake processor. That's an 8-core/16-thread CPU with 4.6GHz max Turbo frequency and 24MB of L3 cache.
The core components are balanced out by 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, which all combine for a well-rounded gaming laptop. It also comes with Windows 10 Pro.
Then there's the display. It's a 15.6-inch OLED panel made by Samsung, with a 4K resolution and factory calibration to be accurate out of the box (X-Rite certified and Pantone validated).
You're not always going to hit 60 fps at 4K on this hardware, it just depends on the game (Notebookcheck offers up a bunch of benchmarks for the mobile 3080). Gigabyte mainly went with the higher resolution because it's taking aim at creators and professionals who need more pixel real estate, and accurate color reproduction.
It's good for gaming and other things, too, as our friends at T3 can attest in their review. Simply put, while not cheap, there is strong value for the money on this one, as long as you can be bothered to apply for the rebate.
