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The Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 is a beefy gaming laptop that’s great for gaming and productivity, and undercuts competitors by several hundred dollars.
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The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (RTX 4090 version) is still the most refined 14-inch gaming laptop on the market that balances features with performance.
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The Acer Nitro 16 may not have the performance of, say, the MSI Katana 15, but its battery life and bright 16:10 screen make it a better pick.
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Many of the best gaming laptops have high refresh rates, high-resolution displays, and the latest graphics cards and processors. Portable, outstanding gaming performance without the hassle of building your own desktop gaming rig sounds pretty great, huh? Not to mention it can be cheaper to get a gaming laptop instead of a desktop.
Our pick for the best overall gaming laptop is the Asus ROG Strix G18
(available at Best Buy for $2,199.99)
, a powerful, fun machine that delivers superb performance for gamers and streamers. But if you have specific preferences like keyboard placement, battery life, portability, or other features, we’ve reviewed plenty of other great laptops so you can find the model that’s perfect for you.
The ASUS ROG Strix G18 is a beefy gaming laptop that’s great for gaming and productivity. It undercuts competitors in price by several hundred dollars, making it a value alternative to Razer and Alienware.
The 18-inch display delivers excellent color performance and motion clarity, and while it’s not on par with OLED or Mini LED alternatives, most laptops that feature those technologies are more expensive. It’s a bright display, too, which makes the laptop comfortable to use in a brightly lit room.
Battery life is a surprise perk; this laptop features Nvidia Optimus switchable graphics, which turns off the Nvidia GPU when it’s not required and then switches to the less power-hungry Intel-integrated graphics. This helps the laptop exceed nine hours of battery life in less demanding tasks, such as web browsing and streaming video. Most gaming laptops with similar hardware can only operate on 4 to 6 hours of battery power.
Display: 16-inch, 2560 x 1600, 165Hz IPS DisplayHDR 400
Battery life: 2.5+ hours
The Lenovo Legion 5i Pro Gen 8 has the best performance you can get from a mid-range gaming laptop at a mid-tier price. It’s built more like a thick and heavy hardback book and has a sad, short battery life—but if you’re after the best performance per dollar, here it is.
Its graphics card can handle up to 140 watts and easily outdoes gaming laptops configured with an RTX 4070 with a power draw of 100 watts or less. But you can also take advantage of Nvidia DLSS 3.0 and scale the display’s resolution so you can max out the graphics and turn on the ray tracing in high-fidelity games and still get way above 60 frames per second. This laptop’s processor can also handle heavy workloads in 3D rendering, video editing, and much more.
We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention how much we appreciate Lenovo sticking with its phenomenal keyboard and trackpad design—always crafting a delicate balance so the keys don’t feel too hard or too soft to actuate, so the trackpad doesn’t feel like an ice rink after the first half of a hockey match. Even the simple IPS display has a robust color gamut and gets decently bright.
We were amazed by the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14’s performance output. Even with the amount of heat the Nvidia’s top-shelf RTX 4090 mobile graphics card inside produced, this tiny machine managed to expel enough to keep up with or surpass most other high-performing gaming laptops on this list. Its small form factor does inhibit gaming performance a bit, but you could count those lost frames on one hand.
Another one of this gaming laptop’s strengths is its great audio-visual experience. The audio is loud, balanced, and clear, and a color-rich Mini LED display that maxes out at an eye-watering 600 nits of brightness while still maintaining its deep contrast ratio.
Asus also left its keyboard and trackpad virtually unchanged from this laptop’s previous iterations. (Can’t fix what isn’t broken.) And to top all that off with something even sweeter: the Zephyrus G14 can still last about 6 hours on battery power even with all those high-end components inside.
Formerly the Acer Nitro 5 series, the new Acer Nitro 16 sports a delicate and classy design on the lid in colors reminiscent of the 90s Jazz disposable cup design. It has all the ports you could ever need, and the battery life is an outstanding improvement—a 4-hour increase—over the 2022 Nitro 5. Every iteration of the Acer Nitro keeps getting better and better.
Its gaming performance is equivalent to or slightly below the previous generation with an RTX 3060 or RTX 3050 Ti, but not only are Nvidia’s 40-series cards more power efficient, they are the only ones compatible with DLSS 3.0, Nvidia’s resolution upscaling technology that now uses AI to generate frames in-game. With it turned on in compatible games, this entry-level gaming laptop is capable of reaching or exceeding its display refresh rate.
Display: 14.5-inch, 2880 x 1800, 120Hz OLED, glossy
Battery life: 8+ hours
The Lenovo Legion Slim 5 14APH8 is a spicy little machine. Packed inside a compact chassis with a 14.5-inch screen is a potent CPU and GPU combo that can muscle through heavier workloads and games equally well. It has plenty of venting and manages performance that often exceeds other thin-and-light laptops that pack the same hardware. Despite being a potent gaming laptop, it weighs under 4 pounds and is only .82 inches thick. It even boasts respectable battery life, measuring about 8 and a half hours during our standard battery test.
Lenovo also includes a tasty treat in the form of the display, which is a sharp OLED panel offering 100% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space for excellent visuals in games. The display has a 120Hz refresh rate and fast pixel response times that make it a joy to play on.
Should you want to use the laptop with an external monitor in a desktop setup, it has plenty of ports to accommodate you, including a full-sized HDMI 2.1 port. As much as the 2023 Legion Slim 5 14APH8 offers, it’s all the more impressive considering the price, which hovers around $1,000.
Display: 14-inch, 2560 x 1600 IPS, 240Hz, AMD FreeSync Premium Pro
Battery life: 6.5+ hours
Razer’s Blade 14 combines a high-end CPU from AMD and GPU from Nvidia to deliver esports framerates up to 240 fps at 1080p, and it delivers frame rates near or over 100 fps in high-fidelity single-player games with the max graphics preset turned on—comparable performance to many 15- and 16-inch gaming laptops.
Razer’s attention to detail shines with the Blade 14. It’s as stylish and as high-performing as any gamer or content creator would want. Just know Razer is like the Apple of PC gaming: it charges a premium, so this laptop is much more expensive than many of its competitors.
Display: 16-inch, 2560 x 1600p, 240Hz, 100% DCI-P3 LCD
Battery Life: 5+ hours
The last-gen Acer Predator Triton 500 SE is still one of the most powerful gaming laptops available. It won’t be as powerful or as power efficient as some newer machines with Nvidia 40-series graphics cards, but this Predator Triton is no slouch—and you’ll save some money by going with a last-generation gaming laptop.
At native display resolution with graphics cranked up to the max (no ray tracing), the Predator Triton consistently delivers high-frame rates and super smooth visuals. In Total War: Warhammer III, a game that stresses both the processor and graphics card, this gaming laptop topped out at an average of 109 frames per second (fps). In an older but still demanding title like Shadow of the Tomb Raider it outputs 116 fps.
Origin’s ON14-S gaming laptop is not nearly as flashy as some of the others on this list, but it’s surprisingly inexpensive for the performance and features it offers. It didn’t outperform any of the other RTX 4070-based gaming laptops we've reviewed, but it came close—within 5 to 10 fps, depending on the game.
One thing we appreciated about this laptop is its speedy SSD, which clocked in the second-highest read and write speeds we've (at the time of this writing) ever measured for a gaming laptop. The plethora of connectivity options, especially Wi-Fi 6E, bodes well for anyone who games wired or wirelessly, too.
Battery life: About 2.5 hours (MUX on), about 4 hours (MUX off)
The MSI Katana 15 is aimed at anyone who wants the highest frame rates possible without spending over $1,500. Other new and similarly configured gaming laptops can cost anywhere between $200 to $500 more, making this device an excellent value.
It has a perfect configuration for 1080p gaming, delivering over 100 fps on all but one of the games we test as part of our benchmarking suite. (Cyberpunk 2077 averaged 84 fps on High graphics, no ray tracing.) It weighs less than five pounds, so it’s not too big to carry around but it’s also powerful enough to replace your desktop PC.
To help determine a gaming laptop’s ability as a portable powerhouse, we first push each machine’s processor to its brink. These tests help us determine the responsiveness of the laptop and whether it’ll be able to handle streaming or running Google Chrome in the background with simultaneous gameplay.
We then run a series of tests on the graphics card to determine how fast graphics and images are rendered on a particular machine, and whether your gameplay will run smoothly.
Since gaming laptops are smaller and thinner than gaming desktops, we tested the heat output and fan noise of each machine during sustained gameplay. If you plan to use a gaming laptop for everyday tasks, the sound of whirring fan blades is distracting.
Once that’s established, we run a battery test overnight. We unplug the laptop, set the display brightness to 200 nits, and then cycle through popular websites like Discord and Twitch until the battery dies. This is how we figure out how much action we can get on a single charge.
The idea is to emulate daily tasks. Even if you’re buying this laptop solely to play Fortnite, you’ll also likely use it for web browsing.
Lastly, we evaluate the overall build quality like how sturdy the hinges feel and if there’s any flex to the display. We also take into account how light the machine is—under five pounds is ideal—and how many ports it offers.
What You Should Know About Buying Gaming Laptops
Credit:
Reviewed / Jackson Ruckar
We test everything from processing capability to screen brightness.
Under the Hood
When you start your search for gaming laptops, you’ll notice that there isn’t much variety when it comes to internal hardware. The most popular graphics cards these days are made by Nvidia. Companies like AMD also manufacture high-performing graphics cards, but most of the laptops we tested have Nvidia hardware powering their insides. However, with AMD's newest mobile GPUs now coming to market, we'll most likely start seeing more laptop configurations include them.
The latest Nvidia graphics cards are the RTX 40-series. Not only are they more powerful than the previous 30-series generation, in both non-ray traced and ray tracing performance, but they also consume less power. Gaming laptops with any of these cards will be the most expensive options, but they've earned those prices thanks to that performance.
You can still find older (and sometimes new budget) laptops with 30-series cards.
AMD has its mobile GPUs, too, its Radeon RX 7000M and 6000M series, both of which rival and surpass Nvidia’s equivalents in non-ray traced performance in most games. If you're mainly into esports and cranking out the highest frame rate possible, these are the cards you'll want. However, they fall behind in ray tracing. The 7000M cards’ ray tracing performance is closer to Nvidia’s 30-series and the 6000M cards are closer to the 20-series.
The processor inside your gaming laptop won’t directly affect your gaming prowess, but it does matter for day-to-day tasks and simultaneous streaming. Most of what you’ll find on our list comes with Intel Core 12th-gen chips, although there are now 13th-gen mobile Intel chips on the market.
AMD's Ryzen 9 and Ryzen 7 5000- and 6000-series processors are also in a lot of good gaming laptops, with AMD 7000-series chips on the way. They're usually a tad slower than Intel's chips in terms of single-core performance, but they shred in multi-core performance, which makes them a great choice for anyone who needs a machine for content creation and gaming.
Laptops with 6000-series Ryzen processors typically achieve slightly better battery life than their Intel counterparts thanks to AMD’s more aggressive power management.
If you’re looking at budget gaming machines, you’ll want a laptop with Intel’s Core i5 or AMD's Ryzen 5 processors. They’re capable chips, but you will see a performance difference as you push the machine to its capacity.
Display Size
The standard screen size for gaming laptops is 15.6 inches with a 1080p resolution. It’s enough screen for partaking in action without carting around a laptop that’s breaking your back. There are 17-inch gaming laptops available, too, but you might want to avoid that much screen if portability matters to you.
You may have noticed that a majority of our picks include a 144Hz refresh rate, with machines like the MSI Delta 15 with RX 6700M graphics clocking in at 240Hz, but the Asus ROG Strix G15 has a 300Hz refresh rate. The higher frame rate effectively smooths out gameplay and leads to fewer stuttering issues.
Price Point
It used to be impossible to find a competent gaming machine under a grand, but not anymore. Now you can find plenty of options starting with decent processors and enough graphics power to fuel your third playthrough of The Witcher 3.
Anything over $1,000 belongs in the mid-range category, though that label doesn’t necessarily refer to a laptop’s specifications. You’ll still be able to find machines with current-generation hardware, decent battery life, lots of memory, and plenty of storage space. Some last-generation gaming laptops may also appear at this price point.
Laptops that cost well over a grand are considered top performers because they’re equipped with top-tier specs. Machines in this category also tend to offer better display options, and in some instances, allow you to upgrade components down the line.
Prices were accurate at the time this article was published but may change over time.
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Matthew S. Smith is a veteran tech journalist and general-purpose PC hardware nerd. Formerly the Lead Editor of Reviews at Digital Trends, he has over a decade of experience covering PC hardware. Matt often flies the virtual skies in Microsoft Flight Simulator and is on a quest to grow the perfect heirloom tomato.
Joanna specializes in anything and everything gaming-related and loves nerding out over graphics cards, processors, and chip architecture. Previously she was a staff writer for Gizmodo, PC Gamer, and Maximum PC.
Our team is here for one purpose: to help you buy the best stuff and love what you own. Our writers, editors, and lab technicians obsess over the products we cover to make sure you're confident and satisfied. Have a different opinion about something we recommend? Email us and we'll compare notes.