With the arrival of NVIDIA’s new 50XX series GPUs, overall scarcity and very high prices are a big barrier to purchase — even for relatively “casual” and commodity-grade cards like the RTX 5070 Laptop, your options can be surprisingly low.

Does it still make sense, then, to buy an older gaming laptop with NVIDIA’s previous-generation RTX 4070? I currently own an RTX 4070 laptop myself, and the short answer is no — almost definitely not.

RTX 4070 Laptop vs RTX 5070 Laptop pricing

The RTX 4070 Laptop is a pretty old GPU at this point, but even before considering the performance difference between the 4070 and 5070, you need to look at the stock and availability situation. 

Very, very few models of laptop are still shipping with the RTX 4070 Laptop as we get near late 2025, because no manufacturers are actively producing laptops with this video card anymore. That means most retailers have very low stock of RTX 4070 laptops remaining, and no real incentive to price them aggresively. The time for crazy deals was in the weeks before and after the RTX 50XX series of laptop GPU launched. Now, what few RTX 4070 laptops remain are priced bizarrely — anywhere from $1000-1800, with an average of $1300-1500.

Meanwhile, RTX 5070 laptop prices are dropping quickly, as you can see in the list below. One of Amazon’s most popular models, the Gigabyte A16 (with an admittedly weak CPU, an Intel i7-13620H), has recently dropped to $1300. And Lenovo’s Legion 5i with a much more powerful Intel i7-14700HX CPU and true OLED display is currently at $1600 — a pretty incredibly buy if you actually intend to use your gaming laptop’s built-in screen. These prices will only continue to go down as the market saturates and the holiday shopping season approaches.

Cheapest RTX 5070 laptops available now

Here are a few models of RTX 5070 laptop that ship right now, along with a breakdown of some of the basic pros and cons of each. Current as of August 20, 2025.

• Gigabyte A16 — $1300
  • Pros: Extremely affordable, lots of RAM (32GB), great if you just plan to use with an external display
  • Cons: Older, slower 13th Gen Intel i7 CPU (25W TDP, 6-core + 4 low-power cores), basic 1920×1200 display
• Lenovo Legion 5i — $1600
  • Pros: Strong value, high-end OLED display, more portable 15.1″ form factor, powerful 14th Gen i7 CPU (55W TDP, 8-core + 12 low-power cores)
  • Cons: Ships with single-channel 16GB RAM (can be upgraded)
• Gigabyte AERO X16 — $1480
  • Pros: Efficient AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 CPU (12-core) with integrated graphics, lots of RAM (32GB)
  • Cons: Basic IPS display panel, low-power processor
• MSI Katana 15 HX — $1680
  • Pros: Very powerful 14th Gen i7 (55W TDP, 8-core + 16 low-powere cores), built-in MSI gaming software for cooling and performance boost
  • Cons: Relatively expensive compared to the Lenovo Legion 5i given the display is a significant downgrade
• Thunderobot Storm 17 — $1400
  • Pros: Very affordable, very large display (17.3″), miniDP display connector
  • Cons: Unknown brand, single channel 16GB ram (upgradeable), massive, older and slower 13th Gen Intel i7 CPU (25W TDP, 6-core + 4 low-powere cores)

RTX 4070 Laptop vs RTX 5070 Laptop performance comparison

The RTX 5070 Laptop is an incremental upgrade from the RTX 4070 Laptop. The RTX 5070 Laptop is built on NVIDIA’s new Blackwell GPU core architecture which just began shipping on laptops in 2025. The RTX 4070 Laptop uses the much older Ada Lovelace architecture, which was announced in 2022 — three years older. But both GPUs utilize the same number of CUDA cores (4,608), meaning most of Blackwell’s improvements stem from improved efficiency, greater memory bandwidth, and higher clock speed.

Performance improvements for the RTX 5070 Laptop over the RTX 4070 Laptop will vary from game to game. Some games may see effectively no difference in performance (e.g., Elder Scrolls Oblivion Remastered, Doom: The Dark Ages, Helldivers 2, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2). Others titles may see very significant boosts (Cyberpunk 2077 [+20-30%], Horizon Forbidden West [+10-20%], Baldur’s Gate 3 [+10-20%]),.

A hard-to-account-for factor in these improvements will also be games for which CPU-bound performance is a consideration, as is a complication when comparing any one gaming laptop to another. If you buy an RTX 5070 Laptop with a very powerful 14th Gen Intel i7 CPU, you may see better results in some games than when using a less powerful processor. Alternatively, a laptop with an RTX 5070 Laptop GPU paired with a low-power CPU may perform notably worse in CPU-bound games than a laptop with an RTX 4070 Laptop GPU and a very powerful CPU.