Gaming laptops are expensive. There’s no way around that fact. With absolute beasts like the Razer Blade 16 ($4,299), MSI Raider GE78 HX ($2,999) and Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 ($3,699) asking for an amount of money that would make any broke gamer sob, it’s hard not feel ostracized by these absurd prices. My recent testing of the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 left me especially discouraged, as I walked away from a gaming laptop with a shoddy plastic make and underwhelming display that asked for as much as $3,600.
If any manufacturer is expecting nearly four grand out of a consumer’s pocket, the associated product should look and feel premium. It made me wonder if the state of Nvidia’s RTX 40-series GPUs were so dire that anything built with them would have to be anywhere between $3,000 and $4,000. After all, the RTX 4080 desktop GPU starts at $1,199, while the previous generation’s RTX 3080 started at $800.
