The Best Gaming Laptops, According to the Experts
It’s a rough time to be a gamer, and frankly, a tough time to be shopping for a serious gaming laptop. The current “RAMageddon” pricing problems we’re experiencing mean a great GPU is going to cost you 25-plus months’ worth of your World of Warcraft subscription and so will a memory upgrade. The worst part? You’ll probably want both, along with a speedy CPU.
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The simple advice I’ve gleaned from the many laptop reviewers and gamers I’ve recently spoken with: Buy the best gaming laptop you can get right now so it lasts you as long as possible. But the best gaming laptop for you might not be a $5,000-plus system that’s packed with every upgrade you can get. We talked to the experts to help you find the laptop that suits your needs, whether you’re looking for extreme performance, have more modest aspirations, or you just can’t budge a penny on your budget.
Our top picks
How to choose the best gaming laptop
Graphics Card/GPU
The best place to put your money is the graphics card, or GPU. “Right now, gaming laptops are incredibly expensive, but typically, a higher-end GPU will last you longer if you play a lot of new games and want to play them at the best settings for years to come,” says Andrew Freedman, senior editor at Tom’s Hardware.
If money is no object, you’ll want to opt for a laptop with a Nvidia GeForce 5090 GPU. Full stop. There simply isn’t any real competition from AMD or any other company right now.
If you’d prefer a GPU that doesn’t break the bank, the Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti still gives you 12GB of dedicated onboard memory, enough to hit high frame rates in graphically demanding titles (especially if your laptop’s display isn’t 4K). The lowest you’ll want to go is an Nvidia RTX 5060 GPU and, even then, you’ll want to make sure that you’ll be able to hit great frame rates (60-plus) in your favorite titles at the quality settings you prefer. Benchmark-focused websites like HowManyFPS or DropReference can help you figure this out.
There’s another specification you’ll want to make sure you’re looking out for: TGP, or the maximum amount of power the laptop allows the GPU to use This spec may be called something else on a laptop’s spec sheets, so just make sure you’re scanning for any information related to the laptop’s graphics power (in watts).
“It’s not just which GPU you get, it’s how much power the laptop actually gives it,” Laurence, an independent reviewer known as LADTech on YouTube, says. “Two laptops can both have an RTX 5050, but one might run it at 100 W and the other at 70 W, and you’ll see a real difference in performance between them.”
Bennet, who reviews many, many laptops as Crimson Tech on YouTube, has some hard truths for those looking to game for as little money as possible. “As for budget options, most laptops under 1,000 to 1,200 bucks are edging the border of trashy. The most important thing to look out for on cheaper options is the GPU wattage, because if that thing’s only got a single heat pipe and fan, and power limits of 45 watts on a 5060, you’re better off just not buying a gaming laptop at all.”
Also make sure whatever laptop you’re eyeballing doesn’t have any performance-throttling issues as a result of poor thermals. Check that other owners haven’t reported any serious performance issues in more reasonable conditions. As Ashley Biancuzzo, associate editor at PCWorld, puts it, a great laptop needs “a serious cooling system, too — all that heat has to go somewhere!”
Memory
“You should treat 16GB of RAM as the baseline nowadays,” says Biancuzzo. If you regularly play titles that are fairly casual or otherwise not very graphically demanding, you’ll probably be fine sticking with that. Resist the urge to drop down to 8GB no matter what it does to your gaming laptop’s price, as you run the risk of having a fairly subpar experience across everything you’ll use the laptop to do, not just games.
Conversely, if you can stomach the cost, “32GB would be perfect,” says Bennet. But, he warns, given how expensive memory is nowadays, “I’d highly advise against paying a 600-buck markup for going from 16 to 32, since most people will be perfectly fine with 16GB.”
Display
If you want the best visual experience — accurate colors, great contrast, and deep blacks in any room condition — you’ll want to go OLED: Ideally, something that can hit 1,000 nits at peak brightness and comes with a VESA TrueBlack HDR1000 certification (or higher). A great laptop should also allow you to set it to a more modest HDR400 or HDR500 display mode, in case the laptop display’s auto-brightness limiter is driving you nuts when you’re using its HDR1000+ mode or if any of your favorite games appear washed out.
Gaming laptops typically come in one of three resolutions: 1,200p, 1,600p, or 2,400p (4K), though you can still find some gaming laptops sporting an “HD” 1,080p display. The higher the resolution, the greater the clarity, but you’ll want a larger screen to enjoy the benefits. “4K is wasted under 18 inches, IMO,” says Jon Martindale, a freelance technology journalist and reviewer for ExtremeTech, PCWorld, Micro Center, and others.
The bigger the display, the better, but that will impact your laptop’s portability — even lugging an 18-inch laptop around the house can feel like a chore. This is harder to avoid for gaming laptops than general-purpose laptops, but a decent rule of thumb is that “anything under four pounds is fine for carrying around,” Martindale says, adding, “I wouldn’t want to haul five-plus pounds with me all day.”
Also, a higher-resolution display means your GPU will need to push more pixels. A 4K laptop demands more graphics horsepower than a 1,200p laptop, which can mean spending more on a better GPU, as well as your laptop’s cooling, to get as good a gaming experience. There’s nothing wrong with shooting for the moon — a gorgeous 4K, OLED display — but you’ll need to invest more to keep those frame rates and graphical quality settings as high as they can go.
“Honestly? If someone can afford to spend thousands of dollars on [a premium gaming laptop], I’d just lean into it,” Biancuzzo says. “At that price point, you’re looking at upper-level GPUs (RTX 5080 / 5090), 1,600p OLED displays (240Hz), 32GB RAM, etc.”
As for your laptop’s refresh rate, a great gaming laptop should be able to hit 144Hz, at minimum, but you’ll often find laptops that can do much better than that. However, a 440Hz panel doesn’t give you any extra benefit if you can only output 120 frames per second in most of your games. It’s more futureproofed, sure, but if given the option, it wouldn’t hurt to pull back to a 240Hz screen (using the same panel type) if it’ll save you a little cash.
Processor
To get a gaming laptop worth its (considerable) weight, look for a mainstream Intel or AMD x64/x86 processor. Qualcomm’s ARM-based chips support some low- to medium-complexity gaming, but still have compatibility issues with too many titles to make them viable alternatives for a dedicated gaming machine.
With Intel, you’ll typically want a gaming laptop based on Intel’s Core Ultra 9 or Ultra 7 chips, preferably one based on the company’s Arrow Lake Refresh architecture, and specifically the “H” or “HX” designations, which are Intel’s mid- and top-tier offerings. An i7 or i9 based on Intel’s older 14th-generation Raptor Lake architecture is also a good choice and can save you a little money.
On the AMD side, you’ll want to target laptops using its Ryzen 9 9000-series chips for top performance (again, look for “HX”-designated chips using the company’s latest Zen 5 architecture). If you want maximum performance, aim for the 300-series Ryzen AI Max+ chip, and if you want to spend less, AMD’s 200-series Ryzen 7 chips are competitive with Intel’s “Raptor Lake” lineup.
But don’t worry too hard about your CPU. When in doubt, spend more money on a better GPU, if you have to pick. “The CPU upgrades are nice, but not as meaningful,” says Freedman. He adds: “If you’re willing to go a generation or two back on the CPU, you may find savings as sellers clear out stock. But it’s rough out there. I do this for a living and it can be hard!”
Storage
“Maximizing value through limiting memory and storage is huge at the moment, with costs as high as they are,” Martindale says.
So ask yourself: How many games are you planning to keep on your laptop at the same time? (And if this will be your only laptop, how many photos, videos, work projects, et cetera?) If you like having a plethora of preinstalled Steam games to pick from for any gaming session, you might need to shoot high: 1TB or more, which should give you plenty of space for a few heavy-hitters (my Baldur’s Gate 3 installation sits at nearly 150GB, with Diablo 4 pushing up to 160GB and World of Warcraft at a whopping 213GB) and plenty of smaller friends (like the ever-charming Satisfactory at a mere 30GB, or Timberborn, which only eats up 2GB of space).
If you only really play one or two big games and a handful of smaller titles, you might be able to get away with 512GB. You’ll want to save around 10-15 percent free for your operating system to use, which is already going to feel tight, but it’s doable if it helps a more powerful laptop fit your budget better.
Best gaming laptop overall
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Display: 16 inches, OLED, 2560-by-1600 pixels | Processor: Intel Core Ultra 9 Processor 386H or AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 | Graphics: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060, 5070, 5070 Ti (up to 140W), 5080 (up to 165W), or 5090(up to 165W) | Memory: 16- to 64-gigabytes; Storage | 1TB or 2TB; Ports: 3x USB 3.2 (Type-A), 1x Thunderbolt 5 (USB-C), 1X Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C), 1x microSD, 1x HDMI 2.1
Typically dubbed the “MacBook of gaming” by reviewers and gamers alike, Razer’s Blade 16 stands in a league of its own. It’s an expensive laptop as you start upgrading its parts from its base configuration, no question there, but the premium you pay is reflected in this system’s performance and prettiness. Unlike many souped-up gaming laptops, which can push double-digits of weight, the Razer Blade 16 weighs just 4.7-pounds and sits at 14.9mm thin when closed. That’s just two millimeters chubbier than a 16-inch MacBook Pro (and identical in weight), which means you shouldn’t have any issue lugging it around with you as a daily driver and gaming-desktop alternative.
The basic, $2,400 configuration of the laptop (which you need to buy direct from Razer) gets you an AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 CPU paired with a Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 GPU, accompanied by a full terabyte of storage and 16GB of memory. That, plus effective thermal management means you should be able to get north of 60 frames-per-second on the higher settings of today’s most graphically intense titles. If you turn on the GPU’s DLSS image enhancement, you’ll likely see triple-digit frame rates, depending on the specific mode you use.
Though costlier, bumping up to Razer’s middle-of-the-road configuration puts you in the sweet spot. For an extra $1,100, you get Intel Core Ultra 9 386H, 32GB of memory, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti GPU. You get a GPU that will allow you to turn on ray-tracing and max-out your graphics settings while maintaining smooth, consistent gameplay — and a system that’s much stronger for multitasking, perfect for those managing streaming setups or encoding gameplay videos, or just plain power users who want a high-performance all-around machine. Simply put, you’ll be able to unlock more gorgeousness, and your investment will be more future-proofed.
The high-end version of the Blade 16, with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 GPU and 2TB of storage, costs nearly $5,000. While that looks like “the ultimate gaming setup” on paper, we don’t think it’s worth it. That’s high-end desktop PC money, and at that point it’s better to put the cash towards a laptop with a bigger screen (like the Razer Blade 18) if you really need to keep your gaming rig portable.
The Razer Blade 16 comes with a gorgeous 2560-by-1600-pixel OLED display that’s certified for VESA DisplayHDR TrueBlack 1000. It has excellent color accuracy out-of-the-box, and its vivid colors and rich contrasts will make games like Cyberpunk 2077 look as good as their dystopian futures possibly could — a perfect pairing with the laptop’s incredible performance, so you’ll have great frame rates and a lovely picture to look at. The laptop’s glossy screen picks up reflections, however, so you may want to dim the lights in your gamer den for the best experience.
The laptop’s RGB keyboard lighting gives you that extra gamer aesthetic, and you can make it as wild or as subdued as you want via Razer’s Synapse app. It’s especially fun when one’s games can link directly to the app and change the keyboard’s colors, though I wish some of the effects were more interesting than just a simple static color (cough World of Warcraft cough). That’s Blizzard’s fault, though, not Razer’s, and you can DIY your own color setup and link it to a specific game, should you find the automatic results lacking.
If you need more storage, you can add an extra M.2 SSD into the Razer Blade 16 if you happen to have one lying around (that you haven’t put on eBay yet, that is). Otherwise, you have ample room to connect external storage and other devices, thanks to 3 USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports that join one Thunderbolt 5 port, one Thunderbolt 4 port, an SD card reader, one HDMI 2.1 port, and a 3.5mm audio jack.
Best high-end gaming laptop
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Razer Blade 18 (2026) Gaming Laptop - 18-inch
Display: 18 inches, OLED, Dual UHD+ 240 Hz / FHD+ 440 Hz | Processor: Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus or 275HX Plus| Graphics: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti (up to 140W), 5080 (up to 175W), or 5090(up to 175W) | Memory: 32- to 128-gigabytes; Storage | 1TB or 2TB; Ports: 3x USB 3.2 (Type-A), 1x Thunderbolt 5 (USB-C), 1X Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C), 1x SD Card Reader, 1x HDMI 2.1, 1x 2.5-Gigabit Ethernet
If you just won the lottery, Razer’s Blade 18 is an even better (and bigger) version of its already-premium Razer Blade 16. It costs even more than its sibling, and it’s less portable, but it’ll last you years to come — plenty of time to let your savings account heal. The larger screen gives you more immersion for your gameplay, and this is the only Razer laptop (as of when we wrote this) that offers access to the highest-performance processors you can get for your games and general use.
“We liked the Razer Blade 18 quite a bit, but it is very expensive, which makes me scream internally,” Biancuzzo says. “It’s got an RTX 5090, 32GB of RAM, and a giant 18-inch display that can go into two modes (3840-by-2400 at 240Hz or 1920-by-1200 at 440Hz). It also has TONS of ports, so you’re covered if you have a lot of gaming peripherals. It’s about as souped-up as you can get.”
Biancuzzo looked at the highest-end Blade 18, though we recommend the stock trim, equipped with an Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti GPU. At that price, another big upgrade over the Razer Blade 16 is an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor, which you can bump up to the chart-topping Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX for an extra $500. These are the best-of-the-best Intel chips you can get as of when we published this article, rivaled only by AMD’s Ryzen 9 9955HX (which isn’t an option on the Razer Blade 18).
These Arrow Lake-HX chips can spit out anywhere from 10 percent to nearly double the performance of the Razer Blade 16’s Panther Lake and Zen 5 options, depending on the benchmarks. You might not see a huge impact in your games, but you’ll see a big boost in your multitasking — useful if you’re doing a ton of Twitch streaming, rendering your latest raid videos for YouTube, looking up strats across a bunch of browser tabs, and trying to game at the same time. This also future-proofs you for even longer than you’d get with the powerful, but not chart-topping Razer Blade 16.
If you want even more desktop-like performance, you can also upgrade the GPU to either an RTX 5080 or 5090 (the latter locks you into 2TB of storage as well, up from the laptop’s 1TB default option). But the price you’ll pay for a completely maxed-out Razer Blade 18 makes less sense if this laptop is going to spend a majority of its life on your (gamer) desk. At that point, you’re likely better off with a dedicated, souped-up desktop gaming PC.
Best less-expensive gaming laptop
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Lenovo Legion 5a Gaming Laptop - 15-inch
Display: 15.3 inches, OLED, 2560-by-1600 pixels | Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 250 | Graphics: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 (up to 130W) | Memory: 16 gigabytes | Storage | 512GB | Ports: 2x USB-C (65-100W Power Delivery), 3x USB-A, HDMI 2.1, Ethernet port
“If I had the least amount of money and just want the best performance? I would get the Lenovo LOQ / Legion 5 (at a reasonable price), or an [Asus] TUF A16,” Bennet says.
Lenovo’s Legion 5a has one critical upgrade over those other less-expensive machines that makes a huge difference if you care about the visual quality of your games and movies: A beautiful 2560-by-1600 OLED display that’s certified for DisplayHDR True Black 1000. This gets you visual quality that’s closer to a high-end machine like the Razer Blade 16 than most “budget” gaming laptops, along with a GPU, memory, and storage that matches the Blade’s base configuration. (The CPU, however, is slower, which could impact your gameplay if your favorite titles are more processor-dependent).
Because the Legion 5a pairs its higher resolution display with a less-powerful Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 GPU, as with the Razer Blade 16 you’ll likely need to rely on software settings such as DLSS to hit triple-digit frame rates in graphically punishing titles if you’re looking to max out your graphics settings. But you’re much more likely to notice and enjoy the richer contrasts and gorgeous true blacks of an OLED display over a traditional IPS display, so we think the tradeoff is worth it.
Best entry-level gaming laptop
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Lenovo LOQ Gaming Laptop - 15.6-inch
Display: 15.6 inches, IPS, 1920-by-1080 pixels | Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 250 | Graphics: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 (up to 115W) | Memory: 16 gigabytes | Storage | 512GB | Ports: 1x USB-C (65-100W Power Delivery), 3x USB-A, HDMI 2.1, Ethernet port
If you want to spend as little as possible and prioritize performance over image quality, Laurence wholeheartedly recommends Lenovo’s LOQ 15, which you can typically find for around $1,300, pricing unpredictability aside.
“For the price, you’re getting really good specs, and the 5060 is about 15 to 20 percent faster in games than the 5050 [that you’ll find in cheaper gaming laptops], so if you can stretch your budget to this one, I would,” Laurence says. “If I were buying a reasonable gaming laptop right now, the LOQ is for sure the one I’d get.”
The configuration you’re looking for is respectable for mid-tier gaming: an AMD Ryzen 7 250 CPU; a Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 GPU; 16GB of memory; and a 15.3-inch, 1200p display. You’ll run into plenty of configurations of this 15.3-inch laptop across various retailers, and the specs may differ slightly (a 1080p display instead of 1200p, for example). Make sure you’re selecting the right one if you’re shopping around.
As Bennet puts it: “An RTX 5060 is the minimum, and again, perfectly fine for 99 percent of people if you’re willing to play at 1080/1200p.”
Our experts
- Ashley Biancuzzo, associate editor at PCWorld
- Andrew Freedman, senior editor at Tom’s Hardware
- Jon Martindale, freelance technology journalist
- Laurence, an independent reviewer known as LADTech on YouTube
- Bennet, an independent reviewer known as Crimson Tech on YouTube
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