The latest wave of gaming laptops has hit the (virtual) shelves, and it's now possible to pick up an RTX 4060 gaming laptop for just over a grand.
The Asus Tuf A15 is down to £1099 at Amazon, a great value for a machine that includes the aforementioned GPU rated up to a 140W TDP, a Ryzen 7735HS CPU, 16GB of DDR5 RAM, 512GB NVMe SSD, a 15-inch 1080p 144Hz IPS display and a 90Wh battery with fast charging.
AMD's Ryzen 7000 "Zen 4" CPUs are brilliant performers, but as they use a new AM5 socket, upgrading to the new CPU means picking up a new motherboard - and DDR5 RAM. Thankfully, we've started to see a host of discounts on CPU and motherboard combos, including this one from Newegg that bundles a Ryzen 5 7600 CPU and MSI Pro B650M-A WiFi motherboard for $324.99, an $84 savings compared to buying both separately.
Today the former AMD graphics card flagship has reached a new low price, as you can now pick up the RX 6950 XT for £700 - that's considerably less than the new RX 7900 XT that it closely resembles in performance. The 6950 XT is a strong performer for 4K gaming, and well worth considering if you feel a stronger connection to the Red Team than the Green Team!
The WD Black SN770 is one of the best value PCIe 4.0 SSDs on the market, offering high speeds - up to 5150MB/s reads and 4900MB/s writes - while also being surprisingly cheap.
It normally costs around £90 for a 1TB unit, but now you can pick one up from Amazon UK for only £65.58, a 27% discount that brings it down to just 6.5p per gigabyte.
Hi-Fi Rush, our inaugural RPS Game Club game, sets its on-the-beat beatdowns in some pretty interesting places. Glistening sci-fi skyscrapers. An underground volcano lair. A Smaug-pleasing gold hoard, conveniently adjacent to a finance executive’s office. Who’d have guessed, then, that its absolute best fight – not just a thrilling brawl in itself, but the point at which a stumbling adventure plants its feet back in greatness – would take place in a canteen?
Remember when Arkane said their co-op vampire 'em up Redfall is more akin to Far Cry than Left 4 Dead? I do! I remember a chill ran down my spine as I cast my mind back to Far Cry 6, where the tutorial island itself was longer than anything else I'd played that year. I was scared Redfall might succumb to a similar fate. I imagined it filling my head with map markers until my head swelled, popped like a balloon, and dropped grey rarity brain matter.
Well, having given Redfall a go for 90 minutes I was, perhaps, being a bit dramatic. The game may be open world, and may have some slightly jarring open world-isms, but I felt like Arkane's magic wasn't diluted by it all. Their talent for storytelling and level design bubbled to the surface constantly, making exploration a genuine joy. Sure, I have some reservations, but I can't deny that I'm itching to play it again.
In our sixth episode, the Indiescovery gang belatedly turn our attention to the question of just what the heck we're doing here anyway. The issue of "what makes an indie game an indie game?" is full of twists and turns, and nobody has ever really come up with an answer that covers all the bases. Lucky for us, that's not really what we're talking about here, although we do use that as a jumping-off point for our chat.
Instead, we try to come up with an Indiescovery Manifesto, one that will guide us in the future when we're thinking about what games we ought to cover on the pod. We achieve this through a lively discussion that mainly involves me playing devil's advocate by throwing out ridiculous edge cases until Rachel and Liam want to break down and weep. (What can I say, I never saw a fence I didn't want to touch just to see if it's electrified.)
High speed, low latency DDR5 RAM continues to drop in price, and now it's possible to pick up a high-speed 32GB kit of DDR5-6000 CL36 for just £120, as Corsair's Vengeance dual-channel kit is down to £119.99 at Amazon UK. This is less than half the price that this DDR5 kit launched at in October last year, especially given that the RAM still cost £173 in February!
When it comes to SSDs, the brands we probably think about most often are WD, Samsung, Crucial and Kioxia, each of which creates their own flash memory. However, we're missing the fifth place NAND flash memory manufacturer, another brand that creates their own flash memory and controllers: SK Hynix, or as their consumer brand is labelled, Solidigm (meant to rhyme with paradigm for some reason).
I recently upgraded a laptop I'm testing with their P44 Pro 1TB drive, and I've been thrilled with its performance - and now, this drive has hit a scorchingly hot price on Amazon US. You can now pick up this drive for just $69.99 after a 44% discount from its US MSRP of $124.99, an incredible price for a high-end PCIe 4.0 drive.
Want a super-fast gaming laptop? With the very latest components, including a 13th-gen Core i7 processor and GTX 4070 graphics card? Of course you do - and now one is significantly more affordable, thanks to a 15% off discount code at Lenovo's web store that knocks £285 off one of their best gaming laptops. With code LEGION15, you can pick up a £1900 laptop for £1615, an incredible deal for this bleeding-edge spec!