Best bang-for-buck gaming laptops in South Africa

South Africans looking for a portable gaming machine will find a plethora of capable laptop models on the market.

The early days of gaming laptops taking heavy flak for their lackluster performance compared to desktop gaming PCs are well behind us.

The introduction of 2016’s Nvidia GTX 1000 series came with substantial advances in mobile GPU architecture, resulting in much more powerful laptop cards.

Since then, laptop manufacturers have also improved cooling and heat dissipation technology, making laptop GPUs less likely to throttle and slack when under heavy demand.

For people who often travel and want to be able to game with ease, a gaming laptop can be a good investment.

Specialist online PC shops like Dreamware Tech, Evetech, Titan Ice, Wootware, and numerous other stores cover almost any major brand you can find elsewhere in the world.

The most noteworthy manufacturers include Acer, Asus, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, Lenovo, and MSI.

Beware of buying at the low end

We decided to check the most affordable gaming laptops you could buy from these major brands and well-known stores.

In terms of generally-available gaming laptops in South Africa, the Nvidia RTX 30 series of graphics cards currently offer the best performance.

It is certainly possible to get away with a reasonably decent machine at the entry level for around R15,000.

But unless you plan on going for a second-hand option, that will likely come with either an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 or GTX 1650 graphics card.

Most tech reviewers found that these GPUs do not offer particularly good value or performance.

While they might be suitable for less demanding multiplayer titles when played at low or medium graphics, they tend to struggle with the latest games at higher settings.

The higher-end RTX 3050 Ti, although still only sporting 4GB of VRAM, comes a little closer to the much-praised but discontinued GTX 1660 Ti and is worthy of consideration.

What are the most affordable capable gaming laptops cost?

We found several laptops with RTX 3050 Ti, RTX 3060, or RTX 3070 graphics cards for under R30,000 in South Africa.

Any models with more powerful GPUs than these were selling for well over R30,000.

The cheapest option was a Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 from Evetech, priced at R15,999 for an AMD Ryzen 5 5600H processor or R16,999 for an Intel Core i5-11300H model.

The former comes with 16GB of DDR4 RAM, while the latter gets 8GB. Both come paired with 512GB of fast NVMe storage.

Moving up to the RTX 3060, we found both the Asus TUF Gaming A15 and Lenovo Legion 5 for R19,999, from Wootware and Evetech, respectively.

The most affordable model with an RTX 3070 was also the Asus TUF Gaming A15, priced at R25,999 from Wootware.

The table below summarizes the three cheapest models of gaming laptops we found from prominent online PC retailers in South Africa with GeForce RTX 3050 Ti, RTX 3060, or RTX 3070 GPUs.

(A quick note on buying from Evetech, which is the sole supplier for certain brands: From hard experience, we’ve found it is best to only buy the base model of a particular laptop. If you need more RAM or storage, upgrade it yourself or have another provider you trust do it for you. People we have referred to Evetech who had custom machines or RAM upgrades done have all come away with faulty RAM sticks, usually requiring weeks of fighting to have them replaced.)

It is worth noting that when the rand was around R15 to the dollar, buying and importing a laptop from Amazon would likely save you a few thousand rands.

Laptops are exempt from luxury taxes that many other tech items get slapped with, generally making them cheaper when bought overseas.

However, these models are effectively gray imports, so you could run into trouble if they experience any technical issues.

Without a global or traveler’s warranty, if there is a problem, you could end up having to ship your model back to the manufacturer at a substantial cost.

So while it could save your wallet around buying time, it might come back to bite you in the long run.

Below are the specifications for each of the models we have included in the table above, all of which can be bought locally.

In sections where more than one specification is included, the first is for the AMD-based model and the second for the Intel-based variant.

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Acer Nitro 5

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Asus TUF Gaming A15

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HP Omen 16

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HP Damage 16

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Lenovo Ideapad Gaming 3

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Lenovo Legion 5

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