Finding great gaming laptop deals is trickier than usual right now due to the ongoing tariff drama, but you can still find killer hardware for cheap — especially if it's already sitting on store shelves waiting to be scooped up.
Here's a great example: I found the HP Omen Transcend 14 is $1,229 @ Best Buy for a limited time, which is nearly $500 off the usual $1,699 asking price of this RTX 4060 gaming laptop. It's part of the Best Buy weekend sale.
We reviewed this laptop when it came out late last year and gave it high marks as one of the best gaming laptops on the market, especially if you prize thin, stylish design and an OLED display.
Since this model came out last year it's no longer on the bleeding edge, but that's not a dela-breaker because it's a mid-range 14-inch gaming laptop, so it was never going to be running something like Cyberpunk 2077 natively at 60+ FPS with all the settings cranked to max.
No, this svelte little beast is tailor-made for mid-range games. But thanks to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 laptop GPU you can also take advantage of Nvidia's DLSS upscaling tech, which you can enable in games that support it (e.g. most modern titles) to enjoy better performance with minimal downsides.
In fact, the model Best Buy has on sale is basically the exact same model we used for our HP Omen Transcend 14 review, so you can read that for our hands-on report and performance testing data which proves this elegant gaming laptop has enough muscle to achieve great framerates running even the best PC games in 1080p.
This ultraportable doesn't exactly scream "gaming laptop" either thanks to its thin (0.7 inches thick) design, stylish chassis and eye-catching OLED display. I prefer OLED displays because I find they deliver sharper contrasts, inkier blacks and more vivid colors than the IPS panels I test, and the 14-inch (2,800 x 1,800 pixels) OLED panel on the Transcend 14 is lovely to look at. And with the 120Hz refresh rate you can count on smoother scrolling in Windows 11 and buttery-smooth gameplay at up to 120 FPS.
This laptop is also pretty great for day-to-day productivity work thanks to the afore-mentioned subtle elegance and its comfy keyboard, which is more pleasant to type on than most gaming laptops. Plus, you get enough ports for old-school or new-school accessories, including a pair of Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, another pair of USB-A ports, an HDMI out for external displays and a headphone jack for gaming undisturbed.
However, keep in mind you will lose one of those USB-C ports while charging because the laptop doesn't have a traditional power port—instead, you plug the charger into the USB-C port on the back of the laptop. You'll want to keep it plugged in while gaming, too, because in our gaming tests it barely lasted an hour gaming on battery before kicking the bucket.
However, our lab testing reveals it lasts a more reasonable ~4 hours or so if you're just typing and surfing the web, so it's the kind of gaming laptop you can take to the coffee shop for an hour or two when you need to get work done. Just make sure to bring the charger if you're going to stay longer, because like most gaming laptops this thing can chew through battery life if you're not careful.
I think this eye-catching 14-inch RTX 4060 gaming laptop is a steal at under $1,300, but if it's not right for your needs you might want to scope out some of the other cheap laptop deals we've recently found.
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