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Reading Time: 4 minutesIf you’re still holding out for the best gaming laptop deal of the summer, looks like you won’t have to wait much longer — Dell is preparing to launch its weeklong gaming laptop sale, where you can save up to 41% on G-Series laptops, X-Series laptops along with a variety of comparably stacked machines from Alienware.
As luck would have it, Dell’s gaming laptop promotion began on July 21st and runs through July 27th — right after its current Black Friday in July ends on the 20th. With actual Black Friday still a few months away, this back-to-school sale is a surefire way to save on a midsize Dell gaming laptop before the semester begins.
Should I Buy a Gaming Laptop?
PC gaming is notoriously performance-intensive, hence the booming market of souped-up gaming PCs and laptops designed to accommodate the demanding processing requirements of modern video games.
Gaming might be the most common reason to need a PC water cooling system or an overclockable graphics card, but did you know that you can enjoy the same performance benefits by using a gaming laptop to run other massive programs like Photoshop, Ableton or even a tab-heavy session of Google Chrome?
Characteristic gaming PC features (such as sophisticated graphics cards or user-swappable drives) are invaluable tools for memory-intensive majors and hobbies like video editing, music production, programming and graphic design.
With these overlapping interests in mind, Dell chose to highlight some of its most versatile, non-gamer-friendly laptops for this sale. Full-time PC gamers, casual gamers, gaming-curious deal lovers and gamers-turned-students looking for a second machine to bring to school, take notice:
Alienware X-Series Gaming Laptops
Even if you aren’t much of a gamer, a mid-size gaming laptop could be a game changer for anyone who relies on CPU-hungry applications for school or work. If your ideal back-to-school computer prioritizes versatility and space efficiency (assume that affordability is built-in), you might be in the market for a new Alienware X-Series Gaming Laptop.
The Alienware x15 and x17 are 15-inch and 17-inch versions of the same computer, though each model has its own suite of build customization options on the Dell website. Under the hood, these X-Series laptops are outfitted with eight-core, 16-thread 11th generation Intel Core i7 processors, NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 3070 graphics cards and a dizzying array of connectivity and display options. NVIDIA’s latest graphic card offerings include technology such as ray tracing and DLSS to give you a fast and great-looking gaming experience.
These X-Series laptops are more than a good deal — they’re also quite stylish, thanks to their ultra-thin design and improved AlienFX lighting displays. Speedy typists and mechanical keyboard enthusiasts will especially enjoy the x17’s CherryMX mechanical keyboard option, featuring stainless steel switches that promise a 15 million keystroke lifecycle.
Alienware x15 Gaming Laptop 15″
Sale Price: $1,665.99 | Reg. Price: $2,749.99 | Save: $1,050
Specs:
- Maximum Weight: 5.2 lbs.
- 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-11800H (24 MB cache, 8 cores, 16 threads, up to 4.60 GHz Turbo)
- NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 3070, 8 GB GDDR6
- 512 GB RAID 0 (2 x 256 GB), M.2, PCIe NVMe, SSD
- 16 GB, DDR4, 3200 MHz, integrated
- Includes one year of Premium Support
Alienware x17 Gaming Laptop 17″
Sale Price: $1,861.99 | Reg. Price: $3,149.99 | Save: $1,288.00
Specs:
- Maximum Weight: 7.05 lbs.
- 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-11800H (24 MB cache, 8 cores, 16 threads, up to 4.60 GHz Turbo)
- NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 3070, 8 GB GDDR6
- 1 TB, M.2, PCIe NVMe, SSD
- 32 GB, 2 x 16 GB, DDR4, 3200 MHz
- Includes one year of Premium Support
G15 Gaming Laptops for Deals Under $1000
If your laptop budget is around or below $1,000, check out Dell’s latest generation of G-Series gaming laptops – the G15 and G15 Ryzen Edition Gaming Laptop. Comparing the G-Series to its aforementioned X-Series counterparts, it’s safe to say that both lines provide many of the same benefits for students and creators — affordability, plenty of build and customization options as well as current (or very recently updated) hardware. On top of that, you can still access the Alienware Command Center on G-Series laptops.
Hardware generation is the main factor that sets the G15 apart from its (slightly) more expensive contemporaries. Buying a gaming laptop at this “no-frills” price means working with less on-board memory and a graphics card older than the RTX 3070, but the difference between a “really nice graphics card” and a “really nice graphics card” is hardly relevant at this price point.
G15 Ryzen™ Edition Gaming Laptop
Sale Price: $1,099.99 | Reg Price: $1,468.99 | Save: $369
Oliver Pretl-Drummond
Oliver Pretl-Drummond is a copywriter, memoirist and Scorpio living in Baltimore, MD. Primed by years of recreational research spirals, they've helped Slickdeals document hundreds of arcane store policies and hidden coupon tricks for the greater good of deal hunters everywhere. They spend their days seeking and sharing killer deals on budget travel, sound systems, home goods and tech. By night, their free time is reserved for making bass music while consuming exotic caffeinated beverages with their partner and growing family of yucca plants.
