Cyber Monday took place on November 27 this year. Although the Friday-Monday period is generally where the biggest price discounts land, there's been a visible trend in recent years where retailers kick off their Cyber Monday sales early and don't necessarily reduce prices any further.

So if you spot a great deal on Cyber Monday - we advise you go for it! There's no guarantee that the deal will still be live after midnight on Monday.

Shockingly, you can find them in this article! Ahead of (and during) Cyber Monday and beyond, we're gathering all the best deals on gaming laptops and adding them to this page as soon as they become available, with our thoughts and links for you to easily purchase one.

Below is a brief list of the best retailers to check out; our advice is to shop around on some of these sites in advance, to get a good idea of what sort of gaming laptop you want to buy as the sales roll in.

US:
Amazon: the biggest inventory, but also flooded with third-party sellers
Best Buy: huge selection, with compelling choices for all budgets
Walmart: super-cheap options, watch out for third-party sellers
Dell: good if you're on a budget, plus powerful Alienware laptops
HP: great budget Pavilion machines, plus high-end Omen laptops

UK:
Amazon: large inventory, but beware of upmarked third-party sellers 
Currys: exceptionally competitive choices for all price ranges 
Dell: excellent budget options, as well as hefty sales on Alienware laptops 
Box: a large inventory of Asus, Acer, and HP laptops at competitive prices 
Laptops Direct: often has great clearance sales, but watch out for old stock

As a general rule of thumb for any modern gaming laptop running Windows 10 or 11, we would recommend the bare minimum of 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, with an Intel Core i5 or AMD Ryzen 5 CPU. That's the absolute baseline; if you want to do anything remotely more demanding than surfing the web and running Microsoft Office, we strongly recommend more.

When it comes to gaming, you'll want a discrete GPU. This could be from Nvidia's GeForce line or AMD's Radeon series - both are good and broadly speaking, larger numbers in the name of the GPU mean better performance. The Nvidia RTX 4050 or RTX 3060 is what we would currently consider the minimum for a good gaming experience at 1080p resolution, but more powerful GPUs like the higher RTX 3000-series and 4000-series will net you better performance.

You're also going to want at least 8GB of RAM, ideally 16GB, for playing the latest games, as well as an Intel Core i5/AMD Ryzen 5 processor. A Core i7/Ryzen 7 is also good, but anything more powerful than that is likely to be overkill.

The only reason you might want to splurge on a super-powered system with tons of RAM, a high-end GPU, or an Intel Core i9/AMD Ryzen 9 CPU is if you need your gaming laptop to be able to carry out demanding, resource-intensive tasks. This could be editing 4K videos, or running 3D animation rendering software. In this situation, be sure to do your research in advance regarding what programs you'll be running and the recommended system requirements for those.

Regarding how old the components are, you may want to tread carefully. We'd recommend against choosing anything more than two generations old; that means you can go back as far as an 11th-generation Intel or a 5000-series AMD CPU. Some of the deals that crop up on Cyber Monday might seem great, but upon closer inspection have some seriously outdated components that won't stand up in the long run.

Lastly, if you're considering something like a MacBook, you'll have a much easier time. The variation of components here is far smaller than that found in Windows-powered gaming laptops; broadly speaking, we'd recommend opting for one with Apple's excellent M2 or M3 chips, rather than the older Intel-powered models.