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November 18, 10:30 AM ET: Best Buy's alternative model with a last-generation RTX 3050 GPU has now also sold out after Walmart quickly sold all its RTX 4050 variants.
That's right; it wasn't a typo: this RTX 4050 gaming laptop was $600 off for Black Friday 2024, with early access exclusively available to Walmart+ members. The rest of us could buy it from 5 PM ET later on the same day (if it didn't completely sell out by then,) but anyone with an active subscription could grab it early for $499 with Walmart+ (out of stock.)
Could I access this discount without Walmart Plus?
Yes, this deal opened to all customers on November 11 at 5 PM ET. However, anyone with a Walmart+ membership ($98 $49 per year or $12.95 a month with a free 30-day trial available) had early access from 12 PM ET on the same day. However, stock availability wasn't guaranteed for either time.
🎃The best early Black Friday deals🦃
- 📺LG Curved OLED Monitor (32-inches) | $879.99 at Amazon (Save $620!)
- 🎮Amazon Fire TV Xbox Game Pass bundle | $74.99 at Amazon (Save $62!)
- 💻Alienware m16 R2 (RTX 4060) | $1,399.99 at Dell (Save $300!)
- 🔊2.1ch Soundbar for TVs & Monitors | $44.99 at Walmart (Save $55!)
- 💻HP OMEN Transcend 14 (RTX 4050) | $1,099.99 at HP (Save $500!)
- 🎧Sennheiser Momentum 4 ANC | $274.95 at Amazon (Save $125!)
- 📺LG C4 OLED 4K TV (42-inches) | $999.99 at Best Buy (Save $400!)
Is the RTX 4050 good enough for a gaming laptop?
For those on the absolute tightest budgets during Black Friday, it's tempting to spring for a gaming laptop in the $500 price range that promises to run the latest games, but often, the internal graphics card (GPU) choice is an underpowered waste of time. It's certainly been the case in affordable gaming laptops I've tested, like the Lenovo LOQ 15IAX9I that paired a high-power Intel 12th Gen Core i5 CPU with an underwhelming Arc A530M GPU from Intel.
The 13th Gen Core i5-13420H processor inside this discounted HP Victus is an 8-core, 12-thread CPU running at up to 4.6GHz and pairs with 16GB of DDR4-3200 RAM. It's not exactly high-performance memory, as most manufacturers have moved to faster DDR5 modules. Still, it's a reasonable pairing that needs a suitable graphics card that isn't total overkill, and that's where NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4060 GPU comes in.
I've been building custom desktop PCs and comparing gaming performance to the latest laptops for years, seeing how the more compact competitors can compete against my full-size rigs loaded with NVIDIA's RTX GPUs.
While the RTX 40-Series launched in 2022, they're still NVIDIA's most recent GPUs until the long-awaited RTX 50-Series is expected to appear in 2025. What makes these GeForce graphics cards so unique, whether on a desktop PC or a laptop aimed at gamers and creators, is the RTX namesake, which includes DLSS 3.5 upscaling and frame-generation tech. Essentially, the RTX 4050 can render games at lower resolutions and modest framerates before using clever tricks at a hardware level to blow up the final image and add in-between frames to deliver smoother frame rates.
It's not that you'll suddenly be able to play AAA titles like Alan Wake 2 with DLSS on such a budget-grade machine, more that you could push modern titles from 'Low' graphical presets to a happy 'Medium' without experiencing extremely sluggish gameplay. Make no mistake: the RTX 4050 for laptops is the absolute entry-level GPU available from market leader NVIDIA and is outperformed by its desktop RTX 4050 equivalent, but it's still a smarter choice for budget gaming laptops than Intel Arc.
