When it comes to gaming laptops, often the best time to pick one up is just after new graphics cards or processors come out. That means you get the latest and greatest if you pay full price, but it also means you have the option to pick up a last-gen machine that was state of the art just months prior at a steep discount.
It’s the second kind of laptop we’re talking about today: an MSI Katana GF66 gaming laptop, equipped with an RTX 3070 graphics card, Core i7 11800H processor and 512GB of NVMe SSD storage. It cost £1399 on launch, but now it’s going for £979 at Amazon – more than £400 off. If you don’t want to support Amazon, then Currys and Laptops Direct offer the same model for £20 more.
With this level of hardware, you can expect great performance at 1080p. You’ll get over 200fps in esports titles like Fortnite and Valorant, while AAA games like Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War run at ~120fps. Even in heavier games like Control and Battlefield 2042, you’ll have the ability to hit 60fps with ease at high settings – pretty impressive stuff for a laptop. Having an RTX card means you can enjoy the enhanced visuals of ray tracing, but more importantly you can use DLSS in supported games to boost frame-rates signficantly.
This is why laptops like this MSI Katana shouldn’t go overlooked, as the 3070 and i7-11800H are going to be more than capable of playing whatever you happen to want to play right now and in the future? DLSS or even FSR – which supports Nvidia cards as well as AMD – will be able to assist you in carrying on that same experience as time marches forward.
Over on the Deals Foundry Twitter page, we’ve been advocating for people to give these older laptops a look, especially as the current 12th-gen Intel and most recent Ryzen 6000 laptops costing hundreds of pounds more while offering only a modest boost to performance – the value proposition just isn’t there unless you absolutely have to be on the bleeding edge.
We reckon this deal is well worth considering, but if you think you’ve found better, let us know in the comments. We’ll see you next time!
Will you support the Digital Foundry team?
Digital Foundry specialises in technical analysis of gaming hardware and software, using state-of-the-art capture systems and bespoke software to show you how well games and hardware run, visualising precisely what they’re capable of. In order to show you what 4K gaming actually looks like we needed to build our own platform to supply high quality 4K video for offline viewing. So we did.
Our videos are multi-gigabyte files and we’ve chosen a high quality provider to ensure fast downloads. However, that bandwidth isn’t free and so we charge a small monthly subscription fee of £4.50. We think it’s a small price to pay for unlimited access to top-tier quality encodes of our content. Thank you.
Find out more about the benefits of our Patreon
Please enable JavaScript to see comments.
Jelly Deals | Get Razer gaming accessories for half price with this Razer Power Up Bundle from Currys
Headset, keyboard, mouse and mousepad, all sorted.
Jelly Deals | CCL has the lowest price around for the 2TB Crucial MX500 SSD right now
Small form factor SATA drive with a smaller price.
Jelly Deals | Xbox Series X consoles remain in stock at Amazon
Microsoft's latest Xbox console seems to be sticking around.
Jelly Deals | Green Man Gaming's VR Sale has games for less than £1
Immerse yourself in these deals.
How to get Dewpider and evolution Araquanid in Pokémon Go
How to add the Water Bubble Pokémon to your Pokédex.
Pokémon Go Water Festival Catch Challenge 2022 quest steps and field research tasks
Everything you need to know about this year’s Water Festival.
Warzone Godzilla vs Kong event rewards, bundles and skins in Operation Monarch
A monster invasion awaits…
Jelly Deals | Get Razer gaming accessories for half price with this Razer Power Up Bundle from Currys
Headset, keyboard, mouse and mousepad, all sorted.
Premium only | Off Topic: I want Netflix to spend all its money on game shows
You've been Bamboozled!
2
Supporters only | Letter from the editor: When nostalgia ain’t what it used to be
Retro grade.
2
Premium only | Off Topic: On the subtle mystery of Sam & Dave Dig a Hole
Spectacular.
Premium only | Off Topic: Severance and The Crowd – back in 1928 it was already clear that work is weird
Soothing Syrup.
1
Buy things with globes on them
And other lovely Eurogamer merch in our official store!
Bad puns and video games since 1999.
Copyright © 2022 Gamer Network Limited, a ReedPop company.
All rights reserved. No part of this site or its content may be reproduced without the permission of the copyright holder.
