Useful information
Prime News delivers timely, accurate news and insights on global events, politics, business, and technology
For gamers looking to get the most bang for their buck, the trick to finding the right gaming laptop is getting enough performance to play 3D games without sacrificing too much in other areas like the display and overall build quality, while avoiding time the oldest models on sale. obsolete or soon-to-be obsolete parts. Here’s our expert advice on what to consider to get the best gaming laptop for your money.
Price
Gaming laptops start well below $1,000 with slower GPUs (like an older model or RTX 4050) geared toward 1080p gaming, and at the high end, the sky is the limit. The sweet spot, for mainstream 1440p gaming and an RTX 4070 GPU that will last you longer without sacrificing AAA gaming, is roughly $1,200 to $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. If you have a MacBook M3 Pro or later or M4, Apple has been working with developers to increase featured games for MacOS. So don’t give up.
Screen
Most gaming laptops feature large screens between 14 and 18 inches; Older, cheaper models generally have 15.6- or 17-inch models. OLED offers 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 leading CPU manufacturers for gaming laptops; Most games rely on the GPU for their graphical performance, but sims and other games that populate worlds based on player or environment interactions use the CPU quite a bit, so look for at least a Core i7 HX and better. o AMD 8040HS series CPU or faster.
Graphics
All gaming laptops will feature a dedicated GPU from Nvidia or AMD (and, to a much lesser extent, Intel). Nvidia is the most popular and generally has the best performance for its price. Look for RTX 40xx or Radeon 7000 series discrete GPUs or later.
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 using an SSD smaller than 512GB unless you play only one game at a time or want to spend a lot on an external SSD and your system has at least one Thunderbolt/USB4 port to at least store games in progress. 1TB is good; More is usually better, depending on how much more it costs.
