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MSI is probably the most well-known for motherboards and variants of graphics cards, but the company does have a nice foothold in the gaming laptop market. In fact, the MSI Sword is a surprisingly good budget gaming laptop, and if you’ve wanted to pick one up, Best Buy has discounted it by $300, down to $900 from $1,200.
While the Sword isn’t going to beat out any of the more expensive gaming laptops, the included RTX 3050 Ti is a card that can handle most newer games, albeit with lower graphical settings. The RTX 3050 Ti is an interesting choice since we don’t often see it in gaming laptops, so it’s a nice upgrade from the usual specs and will allow you to play more games, if only marginally. As for the CPU, it’s an 11th-gen Intel i7-11800H, which is a surprisingly powerful CPU for the GPU, and excellent if you tend to use a lot of productivity or editing software or play a lot of simulation and management games that tend to eat up CPU resources.
If you enjoy playing FPS games, the MSI sword will do nicely since the 15.6-inch screen can hit a 144Hz refresh rate, so if you like to play CS:GO or similar games, you should be cruising. Other internal specs are also rather reasonable, with 8GB of RAM that should handle most tasks, and a 512GB SSD, which is a bit on the smaller side for gaming nowadays, so we suggest grabbing one of our external hard drive deals. This deal also comes with a few interesting freebies thrown in, including a one-month subscription to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and a three-month subscription to Webroot Internet Security with Antivirus Protection, which is one of the top-rated antivirus and internet security combos.
On the surface, the MSI may not seem like much, but the combined GPU and CPU combo makes it a great deal when you grab it from Best Buy for just $900. Of course, if you’re looking for something a bit beefier, check out our other gaming laptop deals, as well as our gaming monitor deals, which you can pair with whichever laptop you get for a better desktop experience at home.
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