Why You Can Trust CNET Best Buy flash sale: 4 great deals from HP and Dell (Update: Expired)
Save up to $400 on laptops from Dell and HP.
Update: As originally noted, Best Buy's flash sale prices ended overnight. For other deals right now, check out Best TV deals for the big game and CNET's Cheapskate page.
I don't want you to start running around breathlessly like Kiefer Sutherland in an episode of "24," but you should know that Best Buy is running a flash sale right now. The 24-hour sale ends at 10 p.m. PT tonight (1 a.m. ET on Jan. 30).
There are a number of great deals on big TVs for this Sunday's big game, soundbars , Bluetooth speakers , headphones and laptops . Check out the best deals of the flash sale here, and keep reading for the best four laptop deals that can save you up to $400.
This Dell Inspiron features a 15.6-inch touchscreen powered by an eighth-gen Intel Core i5 CPU and 8GB of RAM. Many budget models feature a Celeron or Core i3 chip, so the Core i5 here is a boon, even if it's a generation behind. Budget laptops often supply only 4GB of memory, so getting 8GB is also appreciated at this price. You'll need to make do with only a 256GB SSD, however, which will likely get crowded quick if you intend to make this your primary laptop. The other big drawback is the 1,366x768-pixel resolution (versus the more common and crisp 1,920x1,080 pixels) -- but if you're primarily connecting this to an external monitor, that won't be an issue.
This HP model follows the same script as the Dell above -- eighth-gen Core i5, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD -- but bumps you up to a roomy 17.3-inch display with a 1,600x900 resolution. The resolution falls short of 1,920x1,080, and the display lacks touch support, but this large laptop could make a nice addition as a cheap second system for watching Netflix or wherever you stream your shows.
This budget gaming laptop delivers a punch with the ninth-gen Core i7-9750H CPU, which has six cores and twelve processing threads, and GeForce RTX 2060 graphics. The RTX 2060 is the budget GPU in Nvidia's current RTX lineup and offers ray tracing and 6GB of VRAM. (Ray tracing reproduces how light behaves in the real world improving shadows and reflections to give games a more photorealistic look and immersive feel.) Rounding out the core specs are an ample 16GB of RAM and two drives -- a 1TB hard drive for storage and a 256GB SSD for speed.