Black Friday Laptop Suggestions?

[Spiced]

Due to COVID work reasons, I am on the road up to 10 months a year away from home. I want a decent PC for semi-modern games, and normally would build my own tower - but don’t want to constantly haul it in my car or travel with one. 
 

I am thinking about looking for a Black Friday / Cyber Monday deal on a solid laptop - but I am waffling between some “gaming laptop” space-heating monsters and a more sensible multi-core/thread workhorse laptop that is fairly light and travel friendly. 

 

An ITX style case with handle and portability could be an option, but work often forces me to both drive and fly to locations, so don’t want a fancy graphics card to go through luggage handling.  I don’t trust the durability of any solutions I have seen so far. 

 

In a perfect world I get some sort of laptop that is great for work applications and airline travel, but then when at my hotel/AirBnB I have a docking station with external but car portable peripherals, perhaps including a full spec graphics card (rtx 3k, big Navi, etc) for when I am gaming. Not sure if there really is a good middle ground between all of these needs, but would love any suggestions that the LTT brain trust can offer. 

[Jumballi]

Anytime I see a Black Friday sale, it’s always something not worth buying. Quality doesn’t go on sale, or at least it doesn’t get discounted more than the usual.

 

My recommendation is drop the “Black Friday” aspect from this question, and then try to get something that fits the bill on the day of the sale. Especially with availability, you should look for quality that you can get now and use right away vs lack of stock on anything remotely substantial(both because of pandemic availability and the low stock of higher quality goods)

 

Check out newegg’s Black Friday guarantee, where they’ll refund anything that says “if it gets discounted” automatically within the sale period.

[dizmo]

Kind of hard for anyone to make suggestions on specific models when we have no idea what's going to go on sale, or for how much. You'll just have to wait it out.

As for method of attack on what you want to accomplish, external GPUs are rarely worth it, especially with how powerful mobile GPUs have become.

 

You haven't said what your work requires performance wise, so it's hard to recommend anything at all.

 

Welcome to the forum.