With Black Friday sales just around the corner, should you buy a gaming laptop
now or wait? On one hand, you don’t want to miss out on saving money with a great
deal. But then on the other hand, you don’t want to miss out on better performance coming
from early 2024 models just a couple of months away now. So what do you do? Buy now or wait?
I’ve been talking to the big laptop brands to find out what they’ve got coming in 2024, and
honestly for most people, if you do need something now, take advantage of these sales and buy now.
We’re updating our gaminglaptop.deals website multiple times a day over the holiday sale period
so that you save the most amount of money on your gaming laptop, check it out with the link below.
Alright so new gaming laptops normally get announced at CES in January, which at this
point is just 2 months away. I’m not going to name any specific brand, but people from at least three
of the major gaming laptop brands have told me not to expect any new Nvidia GPUs for laptops in
2024. At least at the start of the year for CES. They’ve all told me that 2024 gaming laptops will
still primarily be using Nvidia RTX 40 series GPUs that are already out. Which isn’t too surprising,
as CES in January 2024 is only 12 months since RTX 40 laptop GPUs first hit the scene.
Just for some brief context which might help, RTX 30 series laptop GPUs were first announced
at CES in 2021. Then a year later at CES we got the refresh for RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti, then
a year after that at CES was the RTX 40 series laptop announcement. So based on this pattern,
and the fact there’s quite a big performance gap between RTX 4070 and 4080 gaming laptops,
I was kind of expecting to see an RTX 4070 Ti or RTX 4070 Super announcement at CES
2024. Especially after all the recent rumors of RTX 40 Super desktop cards.
But apparently that’s not happening, at least from all the brands I’ve talked with. Now that’s ont to
say that we won’t see a GPU like this sometime later in 2024. It just won’t be at the start
of the year during CES. Laptop GPUs usually come out sometime after the desktop version,
so it sounds like at least initially we’re going to have the same laptop GPUs as last year. Which
means no major performance improvements for gaming laptops in 2024. And even if we do get a refresh
like an RTX 4070 Super or something, that’s just going to sit between a 4070 and 4080, it’s not
like it’s going to be a whole brand new tier of performance. They’d have to go for like a 4090
Ti laptop or something like that, and I don’t even want to imagine how expensive that’s going to be…
And this is the main reason why I think it’s pretty safe to buy a gaming laptop now if
you need one to take advantage of those sales. It is certainly possible that we
might see cheaper prices next year that are even lower than Black Friday sales,
but honestly I wouldn’t expect it for a few months. Generally speaking,
the Black Friday sales are the best we see all year. The alternative is if you want to
wait til like 2025 for RTX 50 series laptops, which if I had to guess based on the past is
approximately when we would see those. And as a new architecture that probably would give
us more of an FPS boost too. But yeah that’s not expected in laptops for more than a year.
Now it’s certainly possible that everyone I’ve talked to is under an Nvidia embargo
and they aren’t allowed to tell me that there are new GPUs coming, that would make perfect
sense. But I don’t think that’s the case, because most of them just told me up front,
it’s not like I went out of my way to ask about this. And just being completely honest,
most of the time when there is new hardware a few months away they tend to tell me about it anyway
even if they’re not supposed to. They just count on my discretion of not counting on anyone else,
which I really do appreciate because it helps me plan content and know what’s coming. Plus
it’s kind of in these brands best interest to let me know pretty soon if there are new
gaming laptops coming rather than just flat out saying there’s no GPUs at all. Some of
these brands want to sponsor us to fly to CES in Las Vegas, but at the moment we’re probably just
not going to go unless we get a really good deal. Because it just doesn’t sound like there’s going
to be enough new laptops to cover. At least not to justify the 24 hours it takes for me
to leave my house and get to Vegas, plus then I have to do that on the way back, so 48 hours
of total travel time. Not to mention staying in Vegas for a week and dealing with jet lag.
So yeah, if there was anything super amazing coming out I probably would have at least been
hinted towards something. Now that’s not to say that there won’t be any brand new gaming
laptops. It sounds like there might be some new models, but for the most part it sounds
like they’re going to be using existing GPUs. And I haven’t heard anything about
new AMD laptop GPUs either. I mean they only just announced the new RX 7900M, their current
top-end mobile GPU which is RDNA 3 based, and we’re not expecting the next gen on the AMD
desktop side until sometime next year. And again laptops generally come out after desktop parts.
So if I had to guess, it’s probably also going to be 2025 until we see next gen AMD Radeon
graphics for laptops, same as Nvidia. So then, what will new gaming laptops in 2024 actually
have then? Honestly so far, it seems like it’s mostly going to be a CPU improvement. Intel have
of course said that they’re launching their new Meteor Lake laptop CPUs on December 14th,
but I believe these max out at 6P cores and 8E cores. So from a core and thread
count perspective, kind of like a 13700H. Current rumors suggest that
higher end Intel 14th gen HX processors will just be a basic refresh of 13th gen,
just like they did on the desktop side. So almost no performance improvement in other words.
And I’ve also heard rumors that AMD are bringing forward their Ryzen 8000 laptop CPU launch to
December. I guess they can’t let Intel’s Meteor Lake have all the fun… Granted I think AMD will
still be using their Zen 4 architecture for these. So it’s probably not going to be that different
from Ryzen 7000, unless they do like a Zen 4+ or something. But even then it’s probably not going
to be anything super different. So for the most part, there’s probably not going to be that big
of a performance gain when it comes to laptop CPUs either. I think Meteor Lake will probably be more
common in more thin and light style laptops rather than gaming laptops. I’m sure we will see some
gaming laptops with it, but the higher end stuff I would expect to be HX still. Now don’t get me
wrong, new CPUs are of course welcome, especially if Intel’s battery life claims with Meteor Lake
hold true, because that sounds like it’s going to be one of the biggest improvements in years.
I did a video talking about that here, so check that out if you want to know more. But yeah,
I think the simple fact is for most people buying a gaming laptop there isn’t really
any point waiting for these new processors. And even if these new laptop processors get announced
in December 2023 and then we see the laptops in person for the first time at CES in January 2024,
it’s probably still going to be a few months before these laptops actually
hit the shelves and become available to buy. At least that’s what’s happened in the past.
Not to mention when they first do become available, they’re usually way more expensive
compared to what we see just a few months later. This is really something that we saw this year.
Like we had MSI’s GF63 with RTX 4050 launch for $1000, but then just a few months later it’s
already down to $650. SO even if you did decide to wait til early next year, you’re probably going to
have to wait even more to actually get one at a reasonable price. And this would be part of
the reason why 41% of gaming laptops that you guys bought through the links below our videos
this year were last gen 2022 models. So then if new GPUs are out of the question and new CPUs
aren’t particularly interesting, then what do we have to look forward to for 2024 gaming laptops?
It would just have to be other small refinements. Chassis improvements, bigger batteries, better
screens, maybe we’ll start getting 16:10 OLED, and more RGB. You know, the things that matter.
Like I said, there probably will be some brand new models. But I’m also not expecting a whole
lot of big changes, because they usually hold onto those sort of things for the new big GPU
launches because they want their new products to look as enticing as possible. So if you do need a
new gaming laptop, I think it makes sense to take advantage of the November sales instead of waiting
around for next year. And again, you can find the best sales at our gaminglaptop.deals website,
link below the video. Based on all the information that I’ve got at the moment,
it doesn’t sound like any brand new technology is going to come out at CES in January and completely
take us by surprise. Delivering us way better FPS for way less money, it’s just not going to
happen. I’d only really wait until next year if you really do want the better CPU performance.
Or in the case of Intel Meteor Lake, better battery life. Or if you otherwise just want
to see what other improvements happen. Like maybe we start getting more OLED, I don’t
know. Or maybe more PCIe Gen 5 storage, that kind of thing. Basically more subtle improvements that
aren’t going to improve your FPS in games like we would see if we were actually getting new GPUs.
If you’ve decided that it is time to buy your next gaming laptop,
then check out this video next where I’ve tested some of the best gaming laptops in
2023. I also go into the bad models that you should avoid, so I’ll see you in that one next!