This powerful laptop for students is under $500 at Best Buy

If you’re back at school and still in need of a laptop that can handle both work and play, then Best Buy’s latest round of early Black Friday deals has plenty to consider.

Between lightweight Chromebooks, MacBooks, and plenty more, we’ve found this well-balanced, powerful gaming laptop that’s more affordable than ever.

The HP Victus 15.6-inch laptop is down to just $479.99, a huge $320 off of the MSRP, and comes with a free six-month Webroot Antivirus Protection for three devices, too.

While it's aimed at gamers, there is plenty here for students who need a powerful allrounder laptop. It's got an 12th Gen i5 CPU, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card and 512 GB SSD. We think this is great choice if you're looking for one of the best student laptops, and it's even got the power to be one of the best laptops for coding and programming on a budget too.

Was $799.99 now $479.99 at Best Buy

HP Victus Laptop - was $799.99, now $479.99 at Best Buy

This Windows 11 laptop offers fast storage, a 15.6-inch display, and enough horsepower for gaming on the go.

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For that impressive price, the HP Victus offers an HD display (1920x1080 resolution) that doesn’t offer the highest resolution but is packing a 144Hz refresh rate for smoother movement.

The 8GB RAM is ideal for flicking between tasks, while also offering enough power for gaming (with 4GB of VRAM, too), and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 is great for photo and video editing. It’s also got plenty of power for playing games at the end of the day, too.

There are a pair of Bang & Olufsen speakers, too, and the 512GB of storage is on an NVMe M.2 drive – meaning it’s faster than standard SSDs and around fifteen times faster than a standard mechanical hard drive.

There are plenty of ports, too, with two USB-A ports (you don’t see them a lot in modern laptops), and a USB-C option, as well as ethernet and HDMI connections for hooking the machine up to broadband and an external display.

The 720p webcam is a bit of an Achilles heel, but the ports on offer mean it’s at least easy to hook up an external option.

User reviews are positive, too, with reviewers contributing to an overall review score of 4.5 stars out of 5. Many note that it’s impressively fast, although not quite powerful enough for playing the latest heavy hitters and that the design is impressive. All-in-all, customers are pleased with the display, speed, and battery life, too.