Frugal gamers know Black Friday is one of the best times of the year to buy a gaming laptop (especially the pricier ones) for less. Black Friday 2024 falls on Nov. 29, a shopping tradition held on the day after Thanksgiving.

While $550 is an amazing price for a gaming laptop, you have to set your expectations accordingly. The Ryzen 5 7235HS processor is a bit long in the tooth, and ditto for the RTX 3050 graphics card with 6GB of video memory. It’ll run most new games, but you may have to settle for medium settings to hit 60 FPS.

Not all gaming laptop deals are built the same - and you can easily cheapen your way out of a playable system by shopping in the budget category and not paying attention to your spec sheet. While this most frequently happens with older RTX 3050 systems these days, it's more often the RAM that you need to watch out for.

We've pulled out offers from entry-level portables on the cheap to high-end machines that are great for content creation as well as gaming, for hundreds of dollars off. Here are the top gaming laptop deals for October.

There are two things we love at PCMag: reviewing laptops and then finding them on sale. The best new tech + saving our readers money is what we're all about! So let's check out today's deal!