Engineered for creation and play, the Swift X houses the latest 11th Gen Intel® Core™ H35 series processors,1 and the supercharged NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 3050 Ti GPU.1 With 16" for more room to perform, unleash the Swift X on your next project.
RTX 3050 laptop deals are fairly easy to find, but many retailers can water down their cheaper machines with less storage and, crucially, less RAM. That's why it's important to shop around before committing to an RTX 3050 laptop, making sure that you're getting the best configuration for your cash.
That's where we come in. We've been tracking gaming laptop deals for years now, so we know a good price when we see one. You'll find all our top picks for the best RTX 3050 laptop deals just below, and we keep this page well stocked with new models every week. It's important to note that picking up an RTX 3050 laptop means you won't exactly be getting the best gaming laptop configuration on the market. This is Nvidia's entry level card, so you won't be getting the best possible visuals out of your games.
However, RTX 3080 laptops and RTX 3070 laptops can run up quite a bill, so if you're happy with dropping your fps a little, you can find some excellent value a little further down the price bracket. Plus, you're still picking up the latest generation here, so you're future proofed for updates to come.
You'll find all the best RTX 3050 laptop deals from this week just below.
RTX 3050 laptop deals in the US
RTX 3050 laptop deals in the UK
RTX 3050 laptops are the cheapest models to house Nvidia's latest RTX GPUs, which means you're getting the current generation for the lowest price possible. That's perfect if you're still looking for ray tracing and excellent visuals but don't need to spend the extra cash for a higher refresh rate that might be necessary on Ultra or High settings. If you play slower simulation or strategy titles, you can afford to sacrifice some of the flashier features of far more expensive machines in order to save some cash here.
However, if you're planning on dipping into more competitive games like Apex Legends, or more graphically demanding titles like Red Dead Redemption 2, it's worth considering the jump to an RTX 3060 laptop or higher. You'll generally find more RAM under the hood, and i7 / Ryzen 7 processors are the norm in these models.
We're also expecting RTX 3050 models to be some of the cheaper Black Friday laptop deals come November, so there will likely be even lower prices later on in the year if you can hold off.
Many brands offer RTX 3050 cards in their entry level configurations. That means you'll find this cheaper model in some of the best Razer laptops and in Lenovo, Dell G-Series, and HP Victus / Omen configurations as well. However, some of the more premium devices will often omit this cheaper card to keep their prices at a certain level, for example you'll find this with the best Alienware laptops, and even cheap Alienware laptop deals.
Budget models like the Acer Nitro line and the Asus TUF Dash offer some of the best value configurations with these cards; often pairing them with high end processors and a little extra RAM due to the lower prices of their chassis'.
As mentioned above, if you're looking to squeeze as much power out of a portable gaming rig as possible, then we'd recommend shopping a little higher up the line. However, for those who just need a cheaper machine, an RTX 3050 laptop is well worth it, especially if you're spending less than $1,000. If you're spending a little more than this then you'll want to make sure that the other components inside your laptop are pulling their weight, so you'll be aiming for an i7 or Ryzen 7 processor, 512GB of SSD storage at least, and 16GB RAM.
Of course, if you're torn between the portable route and some of the best gaming PCs on the market right now, things get a little muddy. Prebuilt PCs are also offering some excellent prices on RTX 3050 configurations, but if you're looking for the card itself then it's likely that you'll come across some stock troubles.
While not as fierce around the RTX 3050, many are wondering where to buy RTX 3060 graphics cards these days, as well as where to buy RTX 3070 GPUs as well. RTX 3080 stock is particularly difficult to get your hands on.
That makes building your own machine a little tricky, which is why we're also rounding up all the latest RTX 3060 PC, RTX 3070 PC, and RTX 3080 PC deals on the shelves right now. If you're really looking to push the boat out, you'll also find a selection of RTX 3090 PC deals up for grabs.
According to independent benchmarking from Jarrod'sTech on YouTube, the mobile RTX 3050 Ti could prove to be one of the worst mobile GPUs in Nvidia's 30-series lineup—along with the RTX 3050 it would seem, since that will basically be just as bad. Thanks to some lackluster specifications, the 3050 Ti is around 35% slower than the RTX 3060, with just a 10% difference in price.
In Jarrod's tests, he used two identical XMG notebooks equipped with an Intel Core i7-11800H and 16GB of 3200MHz memory [running at JEDEC speeds]. The only difference between the two is the GPU, one running an RTX 3050 Ti, and the other an RTX 3060.
There's also a difference between the power limit for each GPU. The RTX 3050 Ti runs at a maximum of 80W while the RTX 3060 runs at 115W. These power targets are the maximum allowed limits set by Nvidia for these specific GPUs, so we are looking at a best-case scenario for both mobile Ampere products.
In testing at 1080p and maximum settings, the RTX 3060 was found to be a whopping 50% faster on average than the RTX 3050 Ti, with the worst outliers being Battlefield V, Control, and Cyberpunk 2077 which had anywhere from 74% to 115% higher performance with the RTX 3060. Actually, that's also eliminating Assassin's Creed Valhalla, which due to its high VRAM requirements ran 600% faster on the 3060.
The only saving grace for the 3050 Ti is that lowering image quality significantly can close the gap. Jarrod tested the GPUs a variety of settings, and running both on the lowest quality presets in all titles resulted in much closer performance.
Doing this, the RTX 3050 Ti closes the gap on the RTX 3060, being just 25% slower than its bigger brother on average. Some outliers like Control and Cyberpunk 2077 were still 57%-76% faster with the 3060, but these results are significantly better than the benchmarks with ultra quality prests.
The large differences in performance comes largely thanks to the RTX 3050 Ti's rather low 4GB of GDDR6. With ultra-quality textures and detail models, the 4GB frame buffer simply cannot keep up and is getting maxed out. We've seen the same thing in our own testing of desktop GPUs, where 4GB simply isn't sufficient to run some of the latest games at higher quality settings.
Things get even worse if you enable ray tracing and DLSS, as the RT cores need quite a bit of VRAM to function well. This is a serious issue in games like Cyberpunk 2077, where frame rates with RT enabled fall well below 30 fps, with minimums down in the single digits. That makes the game effectively unplayable at these settings—and this is with DLSS enabled, mind you.
Usually, lackluster performance like this can be understandable on an entry-level GPU like a 50 series product, but pricing for this GPU remains relatively high. XMG notes that the RTX 3050 Ti version of its notebook only costs 10% less to make compared to the RTX 3060 variant. That's an absolutely terrible price to performance value if you opted to go for the RTX 3050 Ti variant [which XMP notes they don't actually make].
We haven't reviewed any RTX 3050 or RTX 3050 Ti laptops yet, but hopefully we'll see some better values going forward. Then again, buying at the bottom of the product stack often results in poor compromises like this.