Get an MSI gaming laptop with an RTX 3070 and Core i7 CPU for £979
2022 models are slightly faster, but 2021 machines are way better value.
When it comes to gaming laptops, often the best time to pick one up is just after new graphics cards or processors come out. That means you get the latest and greatest if you pay full price, but it also means you have the option to pick up a last-gen machine that was state of the art just months prior at a steep discount.
It's the second kind of laptop we're talking about today: an MSI Katana GF66 gaming laptop, equipped with an RTX 3070 graphics card, Core i7 11800H processor and 512GB of NVMe SSD storage. It cost £1399 on launch, but now it's going for £979 at Amazon - more than £400 off. If you don't want to support Amazon, then Currys and Laptops Direct offer the same model for £20 more.
- Get the MSI Katana GF66 15-inch with an RTX 3070 and i7-11800H for £979 at Amazon (MSRP £1399)
- MSI Katana GF66 for £999 at Currys
- MSI Katana GF66 for £999 at Laptops Direct
With this level of hardware, you can expect great performance at 1080p. You'll get over 200fps in esports titles like Fortnite and Valorant, while AAA games like Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War run at ~120fps. Even in heavier games like Control and Battlefield 2042, you'll have the ability to hit 60fps with ease at high settings - pretty impressive stuff for a laptop. Having an RTX card means you can enjoy the enhanced visuals of ray tracing, but more importantly you can use DLSS in supported games to boost frame-rates signficantly.
This is why laptops like this MSI Katana shouldn’t go overlooked, as the 3070 and i7-11800H are going to be more than capable of playing whatever you happen to want to play right now and in the future? DLSS or even FSR - which supports Nvidia cards as well as AMD - will be able to assist you in carrying on that same experience as time marches forward.
Over on the Deals Foundry Twitter page, we’ve been advocating for people to give these older laptops a look, especially as the current 12th-gen Intel and most recent Ryzen 6000 laptops costing hundreds of pounds more while offering only a modest boost to performance - the value proposition just isn't there unless you absolutely have to be on the bleeding edge.
We reckon this deal is well worth considering, but if you think you've found better, let us know in the comments. We'll see you next time!