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November 25, 8:30 AM ET: Earlier discounts on the HP Victus 15.6 with an RTX 4050 ran out of stock, as did alternative deals. The gaming laptop is now back in stock but at a higher price. The laptop is still $449.01 off, making it a good Black Friday deal.
HP's Victus 15.6 gaming laptop with an RTX 4050 is back in stock at Walmart. The laptop sold out quickly when an early access deal exclusive to Walmart+ members dropped its price to $499 and that deal rolled out to everyone. Unfortunately, we haven't seen the price of the laptop drop that low again, but it is $449.01 off at Walmart. Most importantly, it's still in stock. Those who didn't hesitate earlier this month got the best deal on the HP Victus 15.6 with an RTX 4050, so don't wait for this deal to run out of stock again.
Could I access this discount without Walmart Plus?
Yes, this Black Friday deal opened to all customers. Those with a Walmart+ membership ($98 $49 per year or $12.95 a month with a free 30-day trial available) had early to a different deal on the HP Victus 15.6 with an RTX 4050 that is no longer available.
More great Black Friday 2024 deals
- Best Buy: Big savings on video games, accessories, and more
- Walmart: Early savings on practically everything
- Target: Live deals on a huge range of products
- Dell: Top deals on laptops, gaming PCs, accessories, and more
- HP: Save big on laptops, desktops, accessories, and more
- Lenovo: Doorbuster deals on all Lenovo PCs, monitors, accessories, and more
- Newegg: Save on PC gaming accessories, components, and more
- Razer: Take advantage of free shipping for a limited time
- Samsung: Holiday deals on laptops, TVs, phones, and more are live
- Amazon: Constantly rotating sales on everything you can imagine
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.
Even at $649.99, the HP Victus 15.6 with an RTX 4050 is a good deal. It still competes with the best Black Friday gaming laptop deals, even at its current price.
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.
