Good gaming laptops can be tricky to track down, particularly if you’re looking to spend a modest amount of cash as opposed to the sort of money that would buy you a whole desktop PC. This MSI Katan GF66 would normally set you back a healthy £1,199, but right now you can enjoy a £301 saving and grab yourself a quality gaming laptop for just £899.
This is a 15.6-inch machine with an RTX 3060 and an Intel 11th Gen Core i7 11800H. That’s an eight-core, 16-thread “Tiger Lake” CPU nominally clocked at 2.4GHz but that will turbo up to 4.6GHz when pushed. In fact, it tends to operate closer to that turbo most of the time, meaning it’s got more than enough grunt for your games and any more serious pursuits you’ve got in mind.
The main component for a gaming laptop is of course the graphics card, and here you’re looking at an Nvidia RTX 3060 with 6GB of GDDR6. Paired with the high-refresh 1080p screen you’re looking at plenty of games running at the highest presets and still delivering silky smooth 60fps+ frame rates. Hitting that 144Hz refresh rate is well within this GPU’s means when it comes to the likes of Valorant and CS:GO as well.
There are no obvious corners cut to hit this price point either, with a decent-sized chunk of SSD storage and a healthy amount of RAM as well. Don’t let the specs on the site confuse you either, this isn’t a spinning hard drive, it’s a proper SSD. You’re looking at a 512GB NVMe PCIe 3.0 SSD along with 2x 8GB of DDR4-3200, meaning that you’re not hobbled with single-channel memory like you often are at this price point from other manufacturers.
Connectivity is strong as well, with Wi-Fi 6 present and correct as well as a USB Type-C port ready for your cutting edge storage and other swanky peripherals, as well as a pair of USB 3.2 Type-A ports for things you’d actually want to plug into it, you know like a keyboard and mouse for some serious gaming action.
We are about to get a new slew of gaming laptops as they update to Intel 12th Gen and AMD’s Ryzen 6000 CPUs, but that shouldn’t hold you back if you’re in the market for a budget gaming laptop, particularly as these updates seem to be focused on the high-end, at least initially. So you shouldn’t be hit by the buyer’s remorse stick in a couple of weeks.
This is a decent saving on a well-respected laptop then, and one worth snapping up if you’re looking to do some gaming on the go. And at 2.1Kg it isn’t too heavy to take out on the road with you either.
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