Imagine getting a 30-series. Seriously, last year it was quite difficult to get an Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 series GPU without having to remortgage. That's slowly changing, and now that many people can finally afford to step up to a desktop, saving a few bucks on a gaming laptop to match is sorely needed.

Thankfully, there are some great deals (open in new tab) on gaming laptops under $1,000 this Black Friday, and the prices aren't bad either.

We've created a crib sheet to make sure you don't overbuy on Black Friday gaming laptop deals (opens in new tab). The soft cap we set on the RTX 3060 gaming laptop is about $1,000. This would require a two-generation CPU and at least 512GB of storage. All of the laptops below are well worth this price and even exceed expectations in some respects. All have high refresh rate panels, many have excellent processors, and some even have DDR5 memory at this price.

Lord, things are looking up for the holiday season.

I'm personally a ROG fan, but I get a little tingly when I see the Asus ROG Zephyrus 14 with RTX 3060 for $899.99 (open in new tab) It also has an 8-core, 16-thread AMD Ryzen 7 5800HS.

However, we were particularly impressed with the Acer Predator Helios 300 for $999.99 (opens in new tab). It's powered by an Intel Core i7 12700H, a hyper-threaded processor with six P-cores, eight E-cores, and 20 threads that packs a punch in both productivity and gaming, along with DDR5 memory and a 165Hz panel, which is why this product is a bit more expensive than others but still sits just below the $1,000 hurdle we set.

The Helios 300 certainly puts the MSI Crosshair (open in new tab) in the running. It has the same CPU/GPU combo, but the Crosshair has DDR4-3200 RAM and a slightly lower refresh rate of 144 Hz. Nevertheless, this is a great configuration for the price, and is perfect for fans of Rainbow Six Extraction (or Cyber Yellow in general). Either way, it remains a great little machine.