[Expired] Virtual Reality deal: Amex Offer + bundle + cash back

I just picked up a deal at Best Buy that I thought might appeal to readers who have Amex Offers at Best Buy and are interested in dipping their feet in the Virtual Reality waters. Best Buy has the following gaming laptop on sale for very good price considering the specs:

I’m no gaming laptop expert (nor do we need it for gaming), but it comes with a 7th-gen quad-core i5 (7300HQ), 8GB of RAM, a GTX 1050 video card, and a hybrid hard drive. Again, I’m not an expert, but that looked pretty decent at the price.

But the icing on the cake here is that they are also bundling that with $400 off a Virtual Reality / Mixed Reality gaming headset and controllers with it. That makes two of the three options free with the laptop. These aren’t the inexpensive type of virtual reality that you can pair up with your phone — these sets retail for $400-$450. They are newly released and don’t have the best reviews — I wouldn’t necessarily choose one of these over an Oculus Rift at the same price, but considering the fact that these are basically free with the laptop, I think they’re a great deal.

You can see the promotion landing page here (there are other computer options if you’re looking for something higher-end)

It just so happens that my wife spilled a glass of water on her laptop last week and the keyboard stopped working. She’s been making do with an external keyboard plugged in, but we were probably going to need to laptop shop. This laptop will more than meet her needs and is in the price range we would have considered. Furthermore, we’ll pair it with the current Amex Offer for $25 back on $250 or more to save an additional $25. I think this might be available in-store — if it is and we were near one today, I’d definitely be going there instead to take advantage of Chase’s 10x points via Chase Pay in-store at Best Buy, splitting the charge over two cards to walk away with 6500 Ultimate Rewards points on top.

If we don’t like the Virtual Reality headset, it looks like these are going for $200-$300 on eBay. We may even just offload it at that price and call it a nice win at a laptop with gaming specs for a net $425 or less.

Net cost before tax was $650 – $25 (Amex Offer) – $18.75 cash back (Shop at Home) for a net cost of just over $600. That’s about what I would have spent on a laptop anyway and we’ll get a new toy out of the deal or a nice savings if we decide to sell it.

Bottom line

This looks like a nice deal if you’re interested in either piece of the package. The Microsoft Store is also offering $400 off with a bundle including one of these headsets, though the packages were all more expensive. If you know more about gaming laptops and virtual reality than I do (which is likely if you’ve read this far), what do you think of this deal today?

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