A gaming laptop is more than just your conduit to your favorite games, it’s a tool for bringing the kind of performance and visuals to a portable computer that was previously only available on huge desktop PCs. The best gaming laptops combine high powered components with great cooling, low noise levels, impressive battery life, and a gorgeous display, to make your gaming experience as enjoyable as possible.
The portability and all-in-one nature of a gaming laptop does mean you have to make some sacrifices though. Size limitations mean fitting the most powerful of components into thin and light chassis isn’t easy, and those that do might be rather noisy without hefty cooling solutions. Those with best-in-class components and displays can be quite costly, and battery life will always suffer on the most powerful of them.
That’s why a guide you may find the below guide to the best gaming laptops so useful. It helps you find the right gaming laptop for you: One that does everything you need it to and more, without breaking your budget or clouding your experience with extraneous features.
Razer has been a powerhouse in gaming peripherals for years, but its Blade line of gaming laptops shows it knows what gamers need in terms of real hardware, too. While there are many great Razer Blade laptops, the best for pure gaming is the Razer Blade 15 Advanced Edition. It’s not the latest of Razer’s options, but it’s certainly the greatest.
The Intel Core i7-9750H CPU and Nvidia RTX 2070 Max-Q GPU are both excellent for Esports and AAA gaming, and though there are more capable alternatives out there, they won’t hold you back no matter what you do. Especially considering this laptop packs a 1080p display. While that might seem lackluster compared to some of its 4K and OLED counterparts, this one has something special up its sleeve. Its 240Hz refresh rate. That makes it buttery smooth no matter what you’re doing, and can even give you a competitive advantage in Esports titles by lowering your input lag and letting you take advantage of higher frame rates to give you a more accurate picture of what’s going on in the game at any time.
With 15-inches of screen space, there’s plenty of scope for enjoying high-end visuals, but you don’t make huge sacrifices on portability either. The Blade Advanced Edition is compact, relatively lightweight, and 1080p resolution looks fantastic at 15-inches, where 4K would be almost entirely wasted.
The 80Wh battery is solid too, offering an average of six hours of life away from a wall socket if you want to game on the move. It even has an optical-switch keyboard for faster inputs and greater typing accuracy.
17-inch laptops might be unwieldy, but they can offer the pinnacle of gaming performance with extra screen space to appreciate high-end visuals, and extra physical space for higher-end components and cooling. The MSI GT76 Titan DT takes that concept and runs with it right over the horizon.
This laptop packs a desktop Intel Core i9-10900K, the most powerful gaming processor ever made, and a full-fat Nvidia RTX 2080 Super with 8GB of GDDR6 memory. That’s almost as fast as you can possibly get in gaming, with only the 2080 Ti offering a little extra performance for desktop gamers with the deepest of pockets.
In the laptop world though, this is it: The pinnacle of gaming power. Combined with a gorgeous 17.3-inch 4K IPS display, a capable per-key backlit keyboard, great sound, high-speed wireless connectivity, and up to multiple terabytes of storage space, this gaming laptop is an absolute monster.
It is pretty loud though, and runs hot thanks to all its high-powered components. Battery life is almost non-existent too, but it’s not like you’ll be playing with such a bulky device far from a power outlet.
For ultimate, desktop-grade gaming performance in a notebook shell, this is the laptop for you.
The XPS 15 is a surprisingly capable gaming machine and yet you’d never know it. That makes it a fantastic stealth gaming machine for your next office upgrade, or just if you want a professional looking laptop that can still let you play games in your off hours.
The XPS 15 9500 packs the brand new Intel Core i7-10750H CPU with six cores and support for 12 threads, and pairs it with a very capable Nvidia GTX 1650 Ti — perfect for rendering gorgeous gameplay at 1080p resolution. There is a 4K display option, but with this type of hardware it would just tank your frame rates and reduce your battery life; which is excellent on this model thanks to its use of lower powered components and lack of extraneous lighting and extras.
Port selection is fantastic too, including USB-C and USB-A, as well as a pair of high-speed Thunderbolt 3 ports, which let you bring to bear a more powerful external graphics card if you want better visuals and framerates when gaming.
As with all Dell XPS laptops, the display on the new XPS 15 is magical, with fantastic color accuracy, a gorgeously broad contrast ratio, and with such slim bezels, it’s incredibly immersive when gaming.
At just four pounds, too, this machine is great for gaming or working on the go — just be sure to upgrade the storage if you want to have more than a handful of games installed at any one time.
Modern laptops rarely give you much chance to change out their hardware after release — if you’re lucky, most will let you add a second storage drive. The Alienware Area 51m R2 is a very different animal altogether. It lets you easily upgrade memory and storage, but also use Dell’s proprietary technology, to upgrade the CPU and GPU too.
Based on a second-generation design, this high-end 17-inch laptop is very capable even in the base configuration we’ve selected, but has options all the way up to a desktop-grade Core i9 10900K CPU, and an Nvidia RTX 2080 Super. There is also the optional RTX 2070 Super, either of which GPU can be upgraded to down the line if you want more power from your Alienware laptop.
Like the MSI Titan, this is a hefty beast, thanks to its use of desktop hardware, and at just over nine pounds, is not a portable system you’ll want to use on your lap while commuting. But if you need great gaming power, it’s one of the best.
The display is gorgeous and comes in both 1080p and 4K flavors, with the option of higher refresh rates at the lower resolution. There’s also space for up to 4TB of storage, and up to 64GB of memory — great if you want to use this machine for work and play.
Battery life isn’t great with this kind of configuration, but at 90Wh, there’s enough juice to keep it running for a couple of hours if you can’t quite get to a power socket right away.
AMD Ryzen CPUs have made team red a powerhouse on desktop and mobile space and the latest generation of AMD-powered laptops are some of its most impressive yet. The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 is an amazing gaming machine packing a powerful AMD Ryzen 4900HS CPU that easily keeps pace with some of the best Intel mobile chips in games, and goes far further if you use it for intensive tasks like video and photo editing, too.
Paired with an Nvidia RTX 2060 Max-Q GPU, this compact laptop has all the power you’ll need to display gorgeous AAA graphics at 1080p resolution, and high frame rates in independent and Esports games. The 120Hz display gives you a competitive edge over the competition with slower screens, and its keyboard is both comfortable and accurate with plenty of travel for such a thin frame.
There’s heaps of storage space and all the RAM you’ll need for current and next-gen games. With support for the latest Wi-Fi you’ll have access to the fastest network speeds no matter where you want to play, too.
At just 3.5 pounds, this powerful little laptop won’t hold you back when gaming on the go and its sleek white paint job really helps it standout from the crowds of RGB-lit black and silver.
There are plenty of truly budget laptops that pretend they can game, but the G3 15 is much more than that. With a more than capable CPU and a seriously powerful GPU, it can handle Esports games at high frame rates and even modern AAA games at lower detail settings, without missing a beat.
The 15.6-inch 1080p display is a perfect fit for this size and power of laptop and makes this a perfect laptop for those looking for real gaming performance without breaking the bank.
While the display isn’t the brightest, it doesn’t pull much from the battery either, meaning that with the lower power components inside, you can guarantee hours upon hours of gaming time without needing to recharge — something that can not be said for its more powerful cousins on this list.
Eschewing the trend of more mainstream laptops, the G3 also packs several handy ports into its slim and shapely frame. There are USB-C (with DisplayPort out) and USB-A high speed ports, an HDMI output, a rare RJ45 Ethernet port, and a headphone jack, as well as an SD card slot.
There’s not much to dislike about this powerful little machine. Its bigger brother, the G5 15 offers the same solid design, hardware, and a better display, but at several hundred dollars more. The G3 15 offers the best bang for buck.