Reviews good gaming laptops

These ray-tracing capable cards from Nvidia are among our picks for the best graphics cards , at least the desktop versions. Nvidia's Max-Q tech makes it possible to run a powerhouse GPU inside a thin laptop frame without the whole thing becoming boiling hot. Choosing the latest processor isn't quite as necessary, but it's a nice to have.

When shopping for a gaming laptop be sure the Intel processor has a model number of Intel Core ix-9xxxH i. The portability is a huge advantage, as is a ready-to-go display, often equipped with variable refresh rate technology or better-than-HD resolutions. The disadvantage is most gaming laptops are only as portable as the nearest electrical outlet. All that power comes at a price, after all, and while there are a few exceptions, the general rule of gaming laptops is battery life stinks.

Another big disadvantage a gaming laptop has compared to a gaming desktop is price. It costs quite a lot more to stuff all those components i. When considering a gaming laptop over a gaming desktop, ask yourself, is the premium in price worth it over and would it be cheaper to buy these all separately?

From our experience, it's always better to stick with the least amount of memory and storage on checkout, and then upgrading it yourself with higher capacity components that are much cheaper to buy on their own. A 1TB SSD might sound tempting as it'll help get your system booted in an instant and store all your games, but a high-end upgrade like that can often cost half or a quarter as much as the whole machine.

However, upgrading leads directly to another consideration, how easy it to swap out components. Whereas it's usually a snap to add or replace a component in your desktop rig, upgrading anything in your gaming laptop, other than RAM , will often mean having to buy a whole new computer.

One thing a powerful gaming laptop has over a comparably equipped desktop is a certain "wow" factor. Since it's portable, it's a whole lot easier to show it off. Manufacturers realize how important looking cool is, so gaming laptops are some of the coolest and most aggressively styled computers around. They borrow lines from modern supercars and high-tech jet fighters, and many have flashy LED lights to let everyone around you know how serious you are.

Some gaming laptops like the Asus ROG Mothership and Acer Predator shake up the traditional clamshell laptop formula by introducing innovative 2-in-1 laptop designs.

But these gimmick models are rarely worth the extra premium they demand. For more helpful guides, be sure to check out our guide to the best gaming chairs , gaming desks , and the best gaming headsets.

Follow him on Twitter baggingspam. But it's not Nvidia Ampere's power without compromise, however. MSI has had to be a little parsimonious about its power demands to pack something as performant as an RTX into an 18mm thin chassis. But it is still an astonishingly powerful slice of mobile graphics silicon. It can get a little loud, but thankfully, you have the benefits of all the Nvidia Max-Q 3. This includes Whisper Mode 2. The GS66 also comes with an outstanding Hz p panel, which perfectly matches the powerful GPU when it comes to games.

Sure, you'll have to make some compromises compared to an RTX you might find in a hulking workstation, but the MSI GS66 Stealth is a genuinely slimline gaming laptop. Yes, it's expensive, but this is the pinnacle of high-end gaming. There's absolutely no question you can buy a much more sensible gaming laptop than this, but there is something about the excesses of the ROG Strix Scar 17 that make it incredibly appealing. It feels like everything about it has been turned up to 11, from the overclocked CPU—which is as beastly as it gets—to the gorgeously speedy Hz screen.

Asus has pushed that little bit harder than most to top our gaming laptop benchmarks. And top the benchmarks of the best gaming laptops it does, thanks in the main to the GeForce RTX that can be found beating away at its heart.

This is the W version of Nvidia's top Ampere GPU, which means it's capable of hitting the kind of figures thinner machines can only dream of. The inch chassis means the components have a bit more room to breathe compared to the competition too, and coupled with the excellent cooling system, you're looking at a cool and quiet slice of gaming perfection.

This extra space has allowed Asus to squeeze an optomechanical keyboard onto the Scar 17, which is a delight for gaming and more serious pursuits. Best gaming PC : the top pre-built machines from the pros Best gaming laptop : perfect notebooks for mobile gaming. It may not be the best gaming laptop, but it's one of the best value machines around.

The new and improved Helios has a Hz IPS screen and smaller bezels, putting it more in line with sleek thin-and-lights than its more bulky brethren of the previous generation. The only real drawback is the diminutive SSD, although the laptop has slots for two SSDs and an HDD, which makes upgrading your storage as easy as getting a screwdriver. Read our full Acer Predator Helios review. When it comes to gaming, the obvious answer is the graphics card, but that's where things have gotten a little more complicated recently.

With GPU performance now so dependent on cooling, you have to pay attention to what wattage a graphics card is limited to and what chassis it's squeezed into. As we said at the top, an RTX confined in an 18mm chassis will perform markedly slower than one in a far chunkier case with room for higher performance cooling. That really depends on what you want to do with your laptop. An 8-core, thread AMD Ryzen chip will allow you to do a whole load of productivity on the road, but honestly, it will have little benefit in gaming.

That's one of the reasons Intel has launched its Tiger Lake H35 chips; they're quad-core, 8-thread CPUs, but they're clocked high to deliver high-end gaming performance when paired with something like the RTX This will arguably have the most immediate impact on your choice of the build.

Picking the size of your screen basically dictates the size of your laptop. Below I've sketched out which graphics card and what other specs you need in a cheap gaming laptop. I also go over the main features to consider when shopping for a cheap gaming notebook. For screen resolution, a p display hits the sweet spot between price and required GPU beefiness. It is really the only option for a value-oriented gaming laptop. Even if you could score a cheap laptop with a high-resolution 4K panel , the GPU inside won't be able to run games at that resolution, so prepare yourself for p gaming.

When it comes to storage, try to steer clear of laptops with a lone solid-state drive. Heck, even a model with a GB SSD offers barely enough space to keep multiple games installed and at the ready, so you might be stuck getting a system with a slower, yet much more spacious, spinning hard drive. You can also get a sweet deal by going with something older sporting previous generation processors, as they are usually available at fire-sale prices and there's not a huge difference in performance between 8th Gen Coffee Lake and 9th Gen Coffee Lake Refresh for gaming.

You won't be quite as future-proof down the line, but you'll still enjoy several years of solid p gaming at a low price. One more thing: just because it's a laptop doesn't mean you need to take its name literally. The best experience with a laptop usually isn't on your lap but at a desk. Do yourself a favor and check out my guide to the best computer desks to find one to suit your needs—and perhaps a laptop cooling pad to boost your performance—and don't forget to check out the best gaming chairs to sit in with your new laptop.

Jason Cipriani has covered technology full-time for the past 8 years. Best Budget Gaming Laptop Value-packed budget gaming notebooks. Acer Predator Triton SE. Was this article informative? Our general guidance is to buy as fast a GPU as you can afford and are willing to heft. Our score focuses in on the graphics portion only, so the CPU differences have very little impact on the score.

One other wrinkle you have to sort out in a gaming laptop is support for hardware ray tracing. Ray tracing is a graphics capability touted by Nvidia that creates more realistic plays of light and shadow over any given scene in a game.

One rub against RTX is its hefty performance penalty when enabled. Also, the techniques are supported in only a few games and mostly sparingly. The performance penalty, especially in laptops, is steep. Max-Q is essentially the same GPU as the full power version, but tuned to run at a lower power and thermal output. This lets laptop makers stuff performance previously unheard-of into a thin laptop.

As expected, there is a performance cost, which is similar to what we saw with the series of Max-Q laptops. It sees a large power savings along with a large performance penalty. If you want to lug a five-pound gaming laptop instead of a nine-pound gaming laptop, the cost is performance. An external Thunderbolt 3 cabinet combined with an ultra light laptop is a good way to get your game on but still give you a light computer.

The last category you should think about is the burgeoning support for external graphics in gaming laptops. Customers of Alienware have long enjoyed this with its relatively inexpensive and proprietary Graphics Amplifier technology, but many new laptops support external graphics cabinets using Thunderbolt 3.

These cabinets let you plug your laptop into a more powerful discrete GPU. Although external graphics are primarily desired by users who run on integrated graphics, a gaming laptop with Thunderbolt 3 support could come in handy when the GPU inside gets too old to play the latest games.

And in some cases, far less than that. The only reason to consider battery life on a gaming laptop is if you want to use your laptop unplugged for non-gaming purposes. Acer Nitro 5 ANM5. HP Pavilion Gaming Laptop 15t. Gigabyte Aorus 17G.

HP Omen cbnr , Black. Aream R1. Alienware 17 R5. Mentioned in this article.