Best laptops under R8,000 in South Africa

Laptops are often critical for work purposes, especially if you travel a lot, but they can also provide users with access to a range of entertainment, including gaming, music, video streaming, and general browsing.

With the exclusion of gaming, most of these activities don’t require powerful hardware, and several options are available in South Africa for under R8,000.

For gaming fans who can’t afford to build a PC or buy a gaming laptop, these lower-end notebooks can let them access cloud gaming services like Nvidia GeForce Now for a pleasant gaming experience.

South Africa got its first GeForce Now servers — thanks to Rain — in September 2023, and the service officially launched locally in December of that same year.

For a fee, subscribers can stream their favourite games across a range of catalogues from a dedicated gaming PC. Provided that the user has a stable Internet connection, cloud gaming can offer a great gaming experience.

MyBroadband scoured online retailers’ websites to find the best laptops available in South Africa for under R8,000. We excluded refurbished laptops from the comparison.

We ensured all options listed meet Nvidia GeForce Now’s minimum requirements.

The most affordable option listed is the Lenovo IdeaPad 1 for R6,499 from Evetech. The 15-inch laptop features a 1,366 x 768-pixel display, AMD Ryzen 3 7320U, 8GB of DDR5 RAM, and 256GB of SSD storage.

Evetech sells another Lenovo IdeaPad 1, this time with an FHD display, AMD Ryzen 5 7520U, 8GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 512GB SSD.

Several laptops listed, including the Asus X515, Lenovo IdeaPad 3, HP 15s, and MSI Modern 14, pack an Intel Core i3-1115G4 CPU, which features two cores, four threads, and a frequency of up to 4.10GHz.

The Asus X515 is available for R6,999 from Incredible, and it pairs the processor with 8GB of DDR4 RAM and a 256GB SSD.

Two Lenovo IdeaPad 3 laptops are listed — one from Takealot and the other from Evetech. The model sold on Takealot for R7,898 packs similar hardware to the Asus X515, with 8GB of DDR4 RAM and 256GB of SSD storage.

The model sold by Evetech costs R7,999, and it packs a larger 512GB SSD.

Ten of the best laptops you can buy for less than R8,000 in South Africa are listed below with specs and pricing.

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Lenovo IdeaPad 1 (15AMN7) — R6,499 (Evetech)

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Asus X515 — R6,999 (Incredible)

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Asus X543UA — R7,709 (Dreamware Tech)

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Acer Aspire 3 (A315-510P-337G) — R7,799 (Progenix)

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Lenovo IdeaPad 3 (15ITL6) — R7,898 (Takealot)

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Asus X515MA (C82G0W) — R7,999 (Titan-Ice)

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HP 15s Notebook — R7.999 (Takealot)

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Lenovo IdeaPad 3 (15ITL6) — R7,999 (Evetech)

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Lenovo IdeaPad 1 (15AMN7) — R7,999 (Evetech)

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MSI Modern 14 (C11M) — R7,999 (Evetech)