For gamers looking to get the most bang for their buck, 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 display and overall build quality, while avoiding the older models that are sold. : obsolete or soon-to-be-obsolete parts Here's our expert advice on what to consider getting the most gaming laptop for your money for

Price:

Gaming laptops start well below $1000, with slower GPUs (like an older model or an RTX 4050) geared toward 1080p playback, and at the high end, the sky's the limit. The sweet spot for mainstream 1440p gaming and the RTX 4070 For a GPU that will last you longer without sacrificing AAA gaming, it's around $1,200 to $2000 depending on what you are willing to sacrifice.

Operating system

Microsoft Windows is the most popular choice for gaming laptops, especially budget gaming laptops. If you have an M3 Pro or better, or an M4 MacBook, Apple is working with developers to increase popular games for MacOS :

Screen

Most gaming laptops display large screens between 14" and 18". Older and cheaper models generally have 15.6" or 17" models. OLED provides the highest contrast, most colorful and fastest displays, but you can look for HDR support, which they don't always have.

Processor:

Intel and AMD are the main processor manufacturers for gaming laptops; most games depend 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 look for at least a Core i7 HX and better or AMD 8040HS series processors or faster.

Graphics:

All gaming laptops will have a dedicated GPU from either Nvidia or AMD (and much less from Intel). Nvidia is the most popular and generally the best value for money. Look for an RTX 40xx or Radeon 7000 series discrete GPU or later.

A memory

For memory, we recommend at least 16 GB of RAM; 8GB will hinder performance in most 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 store games on in progress: 1 TB is good; more is usually better, depending on how much extra it costs.