As you may have seen from my weekly round-ups of gaming laptop deals under £1000 last year, finding an RTX 2060 laptop for less than four figures is a pretty rare thing. The lowest prices I’ve seen have sat right on that £1000 line, but today’s deal brings that entry-level ray tracing experience down even further. Having recently reviewed one of Asus’ 2021 TUF gaming laptops - the excellent Asus TUF Dash 15 - I’m pretty confident this model from 2020 will live up to the same great build quality standards. It’s no slouch in the rest of the specs department, either, as it also has one of AMD’s nippy Ryzen 7 4800 processors, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD and a 15.6in, 1920x1080 display with a 144Hz refresh rate in addition to its RTX 2060 graphics chip. At 2.3kg, it’s not going to break your back, either, if you want to carry it around in a bag, and it also comes with a free month of Xbox Game Pass for PC, too. Admittedly, it would be great if there was more RAM and storage straight off the bat, but the good news is that both of these can be upgraded and added to. Every TUF Gaming A15 laptop with a GTX 1660 Ti or above comes with a spare RAM and M.2 SSD slot under the hood, according to Asus’ website, and its easy upgrade design means it should be pretty simple to do, too. All you need is a standard screwdriver, according to Asus, although I appreciate that not everyone will feel confident taking apart their brand-new laptop. To those who don’t mind a bit of DIY upgrading, though, this is a great price for an RTX 2060 gaming laptop, and is well worth considering if you’re after a powerful portable gaming machine that doesn’t break the four figure barrier. Other RTX 2060 laptops I’ve tested in the past, such as the Acer Predator Helios 300 have been able to hit a smooth 60fps in all of today’s big blockbusters on High to max settings in my benchmarking tests, and should be more than capable of filling out its 144Hz refresh rate display in less demanding games and competitive online shooters. And just in case you are looking for a bargain SSD to stick inside a laptop like this, remember that there are some great deals to be had on Crucial’s P2 SSD right now, as well as Samsung’s super fast 980 Pro.
