We’ve been finding some superb gaming laptop deals over this Prime Day sales period, and I’ve been like a kid in a candy store picking out the best ones. But, with my hand on my heart, I can say that this one makes my wallet itch more than all the others.
We’re huge fans of the Zephyrus G16 here at PC Gamer, but this ever-so-slightly older Asus ROG Zephyrus M16 is still a truly beautiful thing. And I’ve found an RTX 4080 version for $1,900 at Best Buy, which is a very good price for any RTX 4080 gaming laptop.
But what you’ll usually find in a laptop sporting this GPU for this sort of money—if you can find one at all—is a big, hulking bruiser of a machine, more suited as a desktop replacement than something you can shove in your bag. But this super-slim and svelte lappy is all things to all gaming laptops—it’s properly portable, fabulously good-looking, and an absolute powerhouse of gaming performance.
Take another look at that sleek, black chassis. Not only does it look more than professional enough to pull out in a meeting, but it contains a set of gaming components that’ll allow it to outpace most other gaming laptops by a country mile. You get a Core i9 13900H, still one of the fastest CPUs you can cram in a laptop chassis, along with 16 GB of DDR5-4800.
That’s not the fastest or the largest amount of RAM in the world, but still perfectly decent even compared to brand new machines—and unlike the new G16, you can stick an extra 16GB SODIMM in the free RAM slot with relative ease.
And then there’s that mobile RTX 4080. We’ve seen many RTX 4090 laptops pass through our hands over the past few years, and almost all of them are not worth the money. That GPU is too much of a handful for virtually any mobile cooling system, and it pushes the price up far too high—as we found when we reviewed the RTX 4090 version of this machine. But the RTX 4080? Much more like it, and it’s an absolute stormer of a mobile GPU.
You don’t get the OLED of the G16 here, of course, but this still has a lovely 16-inch 1600p LED-backlit display. It’s 240 Hz as well, with a top brightness rating of 1100 nits, which’ll look pretty fantastic beaming your games at super-high frame rates right into your eyeballs.
1 TB of Gen 4 storage is pretty standard, and a decent amount to get going with, but I’d still crack it open and stick a cheap Gen 4 2 TB drive in there somewhere down the line. Still, it’s a very good start, and you could leave this lappy as it is and enjoy superb performance and excellent portability right out of the box.
It’s the laptop I want in my bag, on my desk, and on my next flight. While the G16 is so desirable it’s practically aflame, the RTX 4080 model is still darned expensive at $2,300. But this M16? Yep, the price is right, and so is just about everything else.
