Buying a Laptop For Gaming

When buying a laptop for gaming, you need to balance power with portability and screen size. A powerful processor and GPU are critical, but you also need a display with high refresh rates and resolution to ensure that games look crisp and responsive on the screen. You’ll want to consider the amount of storage as well, since gaming eats up hard drive space quickly. And of course, you’ll need a keyboard and trackpad that provide comfortable tactile feedback and are durable enough for long gaming sessions.

The best laptop for gaming delivers all of the above. Our top pick is the Dell XPS 15, which combines Intel’s latest i9 processor with NVIDIA’s RTX 4070 graphics card—which is faster than the RTX 4060 in our other top laptops for gaming, the Legion Pro 5i and the Dell G15—to deliver epic performance in a portable, comfortable package. The XPS 15 also offers a bright, colorful display and a comfortable keyboard and trackpad that make it easy to focus on the game at hand, whether you’re playing in bed or on the go.

If you’re shopping for a less expensive but still powerful laptop for gaming, the Asus TUF Gaming A14 offers a great combination of price and performance. This gaming laptop comes with 16 GB of RAM, which should be enough to handle modern games. It also has two DIMM slots for bolstering the RAM later if needed. Its storage is a bit limited at 1TB, though, so you may need to buy an external SSD for more space. And it doesn’t have RBG lighting on the keyboard or a large, comfortable trackpad, so it’s not as deluxe as our other laptop picks.

Besides CPU and GPU performance, you should also think about how much memory a laptop has, how hot it gets, its battery life, and the software it comes with. Many budget gaming laptops come with an excess of bloatware that can slow down your system or interfere with its performance. We suggest removing unnecessary programs one at a time or running a program like Microsoft’s Reset utility to clean the computer completely.

If you’re looking for a budget-friendly gaming laptop that can handle the most demanding games, we recommend the Razer Blade 16. It’s a little pricey, but it packs in some impressive hardware, including a Mini LED screen that can swap between native UDH Plus and FHD Plus modes with one click. Its powerful Core i7-6700HQ processor and Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card can handle the most demanding games on the market, and its fast NVMe SSD and HDMI ports give you plenty of flexibility for connecting external peripherals. The keyboard and trackpad are comfortable and durable, and its built-in speakers deliver crisp audio. It even has a biometric security feature that uses the camera’s infrared sensors to identify your face. If you’re willing to pay a bit more for even better hardware, our picks for the best laptops for gaming include the Dell XPS 13, Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, and the Acer Nitro 5 Spin.