Why You Can Trust CNET Save a Massive $332 on One of the Best Starter Gaming Laptops
This Dell G15 with an RTX 3050 and an AMD Ryzen 5 6600H is one of the best starter gaming laptops out there, and with this deal bringing it down to $620, it's a steal.
If you love playing video games but are shocked to see some of the prices on even midrange gaming PCs, grabbing this Dell G15 laptop is a good idea. It's a great starter laptop, and with the deal from Best Buy discounting it down to $620 from $950, it's one of the best gaming laptop deals for an entry-level laptop we've seen this week.
Under the hood, the Dell G15 runs an RTX 3050. It'ss an entry-level graphics card, but it's still a relatively good card to get started with. You'll be able to play most competitive games without issue, especially since the G15 runs an FHD screen, so you won't need to expend many GPU resources on resolution. Even better, it can hit a top refresh rate of 120Hz, a good starting point for action-packed and competitive games where each frame makes a big difference. Being part of the RTX lineup also means getting access to Nvidia's DLSS 2 upscaling technology, which can help with better graphics and framerate. However, it's still a relatively new technology and not widely supported.
Besides the graphics card, you get a mid-range AMD Ryzen 5 6600H processor, which is generally more efficient than the equivalent Intel CPU while being just as powerful. That means you get slightly better battery life while still having more than enough processing power to get productivity and editing tasks done without a hitch. Speaking of battery life, you'll likely see around 4 to 5 hours for general use and half of that if you're gaming, which isn't a lot, but it's about what's expected for gaming laptops at this price.
As for RAM, you get 8GBs of DDR5, which is the fastest protocol right now, as well as 512GB of storage. Unfortunately, the storage is a bit on the lower end, especially with most modern games being around the 60-80GB mark. That said, you can always get an external hard drive to store non-game files, so it's not a dealbreaker. Also, when it comes to overall build, it's sturdy, with little to no flex on the keyboard, which is always an important factor.