Table of Contents
For gamers on a budget, the trick to finding the right gaming laptop is to get enough performance to play 3D games without sacrificing too much in other areas like the display and overall build quality — while also avoiding older models on sale with outdated or soon-to-be-obsolete components. Here’s our anticipated advice on what to consider to get the most gaming laptop for your money.
Price
For most people, the search for an affordable gaming laptop starts with the price. The good news is that you can find a perfectly usable gaming laptop with modern components that can play today’s games for around $1,000. Sometimes even less if you find a model on sale. Dell, HP, Lenovo and other manufacturers rotate discounts all the time, so you can score a great deal if you time it right.
If your budget allows you to spend over $1,000, you’ll find models with more powerful components and brighter, faster displays, along with other perks like per-key RGB lighting and a thinner design.
Operating system
While MacBooks running Apple’s macOS are popular for home, work, and school use, Microsoft Windows is the gaming laptop of choice, especially budget gaming laptops. You can play some games on higher-end MacBook Pros, but they are very expensive compared to budget Windows-based gaming laptops.
If you’re on a budget, consider a Chromebook. ChromeOS is a different experience than Windows: sleeker and easier to use. But limited by the fact that everything essentially runs through the Chrome browser. Still, there are a few Chromebooks for gamers.
Screen
Most gaming laptops come with a 15-inch or 16-inch display, though you’ll also see smaller 14-inch models, as well as a few 17- and even 18-inch behemoths. Newer 16-inch models with taller 16:10 aspect ratios are starting to replace 15.6-inches with a more traditional 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio, and we generally prefer the more square-edged 16-inch models. You’ll likely do most of your gaming at a resolution of 1,920×1,080 pixels, which is a 16:9 aspect ratio, but the increased vertical space afforded by a 16:10 display makes the laptop more useful outside of gaming when scrolling through web pages and long documents.
Another important display specification for gamers is refresh rate: the number of times per second a display updates its image. Most gaming laptops, even budget ones, have displays with variable refresh rates that can sync with a game’s frames per second to eliminate artifacts like screen tearing (where parts of different screens appear to be shuffled together) and stuttering (where the screen updates at noticeably irregular intervals).
All the big companies have bumped their flagship 1080p configurations to 360Hz, but for many gamers it’s not essential: 240Hz max should be fine for the few times you can push framerates above 240fps. On cheaper gaming laptops, you’ll generally see 120Hz, 144Hz, and 165Hz refresh rates, which should be fine if you have a low-end GPU that can’t push framerates past 165fps.
Even if you don’t plan on playing games at resolutions higher than 1080p, we recommend going with the highest resolution you can afford. That’s because on a larger 15- or 16-inch laptop screen, text and edges of images can appear blurry at 1080p — or 1920×1200 on 16:10 laptops. A Quad HD (QHD) resolution of 2560×1440 pixels (2560×1600 on a 16:10 display) will result in sharper text and images, and you can always choose to play games at lower resolutions than that maximum.
Processor
The processor, also known as the CPU, is the brain of a laptop. Intel and AMD are the main CPU makers for Windows laptops. Both offer a staggering selection of mobile processors. To complicate matters, both manufacturers have chips designed for different styles of laptops, such as power-saving chips for ultraportables or faster processors for gaming laptops. Their naming conventions let you know which type is being used. You can go to from Intel or from AMD sites for explanations so that you can get the performance you want. In general, however, the faster the processor speed and the more cores it has, the better the performance will be.
Graphic
The graphics processor, or GPU, handles all the work of driving the screen and rendering what’s displayed, as well as accelerating many graphical (and increasingly, AI-related) operations. For Windows laptops, there are two types of GPUs: integrated (iGPU) and discrete (dGPU). As the names suggest, an iGPU is part of the CPU package, while a dGPU is a separate chip with dedicated memory (VRAM) that it communicates with directly, making it faster than sharing memory with the CPU. All gaming laptops have a dGPU from either Nvidia or AMD, with Nvidia being the more popular of the two. For budget gaming laptops, you’ll see many models with the entry-level RTX 4050 GPU or the entry-level RTX 4060 GPU, as well as older models with previous-generation RTX 3050 or 3060 GPUs.
Memory
For memory, we highly recommend 16GB of RAM, with 8GB being the absolute minimum. RAM is where the operating system stores all of the data for currently running applications, and it can fill up quickly. After that, it starts swapping between RAM and SSD, which is slower. Also, many laptops now have the memory soldered to the motherboard. Most manufacturers will state this, but if the RAM type is LPDDR, assume it is soldered and cannot be upgraded.
However, some PC manufacturers solder in memory, leaving an empty internal slot to add a stick of RAM. You may need to contact the laptop manufacturer or look up the full specs of the laptop online to confirm this. And check the web for user reviews, as the slot could still be difficult to access, the memory could be non-standard or hard to come by, or other pitfalls including voiding the warranty.
Storage
You can still find cheaper hard drives in budget laptops and larger hard drives in gaming laptops, but faster solid state drives have all but replaced hard drives in laptops. They can make a big difference in performance. For a gaming laptop, we wouldn’t recommend going with an SSD under 512GB unless you’re really into deleting games every time you want to play a new one.
