It feels like the RTX 5060 mobile has only been around for five minutes, but I’m already starting to see gaming laptops featuring the budget GPU get perilously close to the sub-$1,000 mark. None have quite made it below that threshold just yet, outside of the major sale events (none you’d want to buy, anyway), but for $1,050 at Best Buy this Gigabyte A16 is within touching distance of that magic sum.
It’s pretty astonishing to me that you can pick up a laptop with one of Nvidia’s latest GPUs for this sort of money, although perhaps its just the trauma of hunting through a difficult gaming laptop market for months rearing its ugly head. Anyway, there are a few caveats to be aware of with this machine, but it looks like a great little budget ripper regardless.
First off, you’re getting the 85 W variant of the RTX 5060, which is a slightly low-powered version. Luckily, however, Gigabyte has sensibly paired it with a 1200p display.
That might seem a little low-res in 2025, but here’s the thing—1200p still looks excellent on a 16-inch panel, and this one’s got a 165 Hz refresh rate to boot. That relatively tame resolution also means the GPU shouldn’t have too much trouble keeping frame rates high, particularly when you factor in DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Gen, both of which it supports.
And oh-ho-ho, what’s this? 32 GB of DDR5? In a budget gaming laptop? My, all my wishes have come true at once. Yes, 16 GB of system RAM is starting to feel more than a little tight these days in modern gaming machines, whereas this comes with what I would regard to be the correct amount.
The CPU is no slouch, either, being an Intel Core i7 13620H with six Performance cores and four Efficient. While it’d be nice to see something with eight full-fat cores blazing away, the six bigguns you get here are relatively quick and shouldn’t have much trouble powering their way through the latest games.
So yes, this Gigabyte machine isn’t stuffed full of the highest-powered components money can buy. For close to $1,000, though, I reckon it’s still an excellent gaming laptop for the cash, and one of the highlights of our cheap gaming laptop deals page right now. The tide may be beginning to turn for well-equipped budget gaming laptops from respected brands, so let’s hope the discounts keep coming.
Best gaming laptop 2025