This $270 HP laptop has an AMD Ryzen 5 7430U inside. Drop Mic.

I’ve been searching for the latest and best deals, and believe me — you will not find a better laptop for less than $300 this Memorial Day weekend.

Currently sitting at just $270 at HP when you use the coupon code PCGLOWUP25, the HP 17z-CP300 is an absolute powerhouse for the price.

At the heart of this machine is an AMD Ryzen 5 7430U CPU — the fastest processor you will find at this price point. It makes the laptop incredibly capable for everyday multitasking, office work, heavy web browsing, and student life.

With 6 cores and 12 threads backed by powerful AMD Radeon Graphics, the Ryzen 5 7430U scores over 15,500 points on CPUBenchmark.

How fast is that? It puts this budget machine within spitting distance of the Apple M2 chip (15,650 points) that powered the 2022 MacBook Air.

By comparison, the CPUs usually found in laptops at this price threshold — like the Intel N100 or N5095 — are roughly 70% slower. If you want speed on a budget, nothing else comes close.

To sell a Ryzen 5 machine for $270 amidst the current global memory price hikes (“RAMgeddon”), HP had to make a few compromises:

The RAM: It comes with 8GB of RAM out of the box. While fine for basic tasks, the great news is that there is a free, empty memory slot inside. You can easily pop in a cheap secondary 8GB module later to dual-channel the memory, which will instantly boost both data bandwidth and graphics performance.

The Storage: The 256GB PCIe NVMe SSD is fast and spacious enough for most casual users. However, there is no second M.2 slot, so if you ever need more internal space, you will have to swap the drive entirely.

The Connectivity: There is no built-in memory card reader, and the three available USB ports are all standard 5Gbps models. Large file transfers to high-speed external SSDs will take a little longer in theory.