Best gaming laptop for 2024

For gamers looking to get the most performance for their money, the trick to finding the right gaming laptop is to have enough performance to play 3D games without sacrificing too much in other areas such as the screen and overall build quality, while also avoiding older models for sale with outdated or soon-to-be-obsolete parts. Here’s our expert advice on what you need to consider to get the best gaming laptop for your money.

Price

Gaming laptops start at well under $1,000 with slower GPUs (like an older model or RTX 4050) aimed at 1080p gaming and at the high end, the sky’s the limit. The sweet spot – for mainstream 1440p gaming and an RTX 4070 GPU that lasts longer without sacrificing AAA play – is roughly between $1,200 and $2,000, depending on what you’re willing to sacrifice.

Operating system

Microsoft Windows is the most popular choice for gaming laptops, especially budget gaming laptops. But if you have an M3 Pro or better or an M4 MacBook, Apple is working with developers to expand the number of prominent games for MacOS. So don’t give up.

Screen

Most gaming laptops have large screens between 14 and 18 inches; the older and cheaper models generally have 15.6- or 17-inch models. OLED delivers the highest contrast, most colorful and fastest displays, but you may want to look for HDR support, which they don’t always have.

Processor

Intel and AMD are the main CPU manufacturers for gaming laptops; most games rely on the GPU for their graphics performance, but sims and other games that populate worlds based on player or environmental interactions use the CPU quite a bit, so at the very least look for a Core i7 HX and better or AMD 8040HS- series CPUs or faster.

Graphic

All gaming laptops will have a dedicated GPU from Nvidia or AMD (and to a much lesser extent Intel). Nvidia is the most popular and generally the best performer for the money. Look for discrete GPUs from the RTX 40xx or Radeon 7000 series or higher.

Memory

For memory, we recommend at least 16 GB of RAM; 8 GB will hinder performance in many cases.

Storage

For a gaming laptop, we don’t recommend going with less than a 512GB SSD unless you only play one game at a time or want to spend a lot on an external SSD and your system has at least a Thunderbolt/USB4 port to at least store running games. 1TB is good; more is usually better, depending on how much extra it costs.