It's a great time to buy a gaming laptop. Now that laptops with Nvidia's latest GTX and RTX cards have been on the market for around a year, prices have dropped, but you still get the most power-efficient components currently available. Case in point: an HP laptop with an RTX 2060 graphics card is just $1,099.99 right now from Walmart.
According to HP's own website, this model comes equipped with an Intel Core i7-9750H processor, which has 6 cores/12 threads and a boost clock of 4.50 GHz. You also get 16GB of RAM, a 256GB boot SSD, a 1TB hard drive for storing games, and a 15.6-inch IPS 1080p display. The combination of a small SSD and a large HDD is a bit annoying, since most other laptops in this price range simply have a large NVMe SSD, but both drives are easy to replace with higher-capacity components. On a related note, the RAM is also upgradable to 32GB.
The graphics card is the main selling point of this machine: you get an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card with 6GB of VRAM. There's no indication that this is the lower-power 'Max-Q' version that most laptops in this price range use, so you're getting the full RTX 2060 experience. That means just about every game under the sun will work well, especially since the 1080p display doesn't require the GPU to push as many pixels (compared to laptops with 1440p or 4K screens), and you also get to use ray-tracing graphics in select titles. You can check out our RTX 2060 review for more information, but keep in mind that review is for the desktop GPU, so performance isn't exactly identical.
As with most gaming laptops, you also get plenty of connectivity options. This Omen model has one Thunderbolt 3 port, three USB 3.0 Type-A connectors, an Ethernet jack, a headphone/microphone combo jack, and a Mini DisplayPort connector. Windows 10 Home is preinstalled.
Overall, this is a pretty good package for $1,100, and the upgrade options give you a bit more performance down the road if you need it.
