Reasons to avoid - Lower performance than other laptops. Gigabyte Aorus 17G Display: Reasons to avoid - No upgraded design - Extremely heavy. Screen: Up to Reasons to avoid - No webcam - Keyboard lighting color can't be changed. Lenovo Legion 7 Gen 6.
Reasons to avoid - Battery life is lacking. View Deal. Alienware m17 R4 Reasons to avoid - Expensive - Basically no battery life. Razer Blade Pro 17 Reasons to avoid - Very expensive - Gaming at 4K needs tweaking.
Storage: 1TB M. Reasons to avoid - Not the most powerful - You're paying a lot for the design. Lenovo Legion 5 Pro. Screen: inch x IPS nits, Hz. Storage: Up to 2TB M. Reasons to avoid - Fairly generic chassis that's on the heavy side. Reasons to avoid - Battery life is only at a little over 3 hours. Thinking of insuring your laptop? Harry Domanski. See more Laptops news.
Of course, all this silicon weighs a fair bit, meaning the Aorus 17G isn't the most portable of gaming laptops, and it is let down a bit by things like its webcam, too, but with decent battery life when unplugged but not gaming, unfortunately , it's not the most normal computing averse gaming laptop we've ever seen.
The biggest barrier of course for most gamers will be the price, but with RTX 30 series graphics on offer, and a system that really does how the stones to replace your gaming desktop as well, it could be an investment that is worth it. What you're looking for in the best gaming laptop of is the capability to run the most demanding games of the day — graphically intensive games, throwing up all sorts of shading and effects on screen — without having to make a ton of settings compromises along the way.
Bad gaming laptops advertise themselves on their gaming credentials, but then deliver vastly inferior performance to their desktop counterparts, so it's absolutely crucial that you avoid these clunkers. High-resolution screens are a nice added bonus on a gaming laptop as well, but it's important to keep in mind that high frame rates are far more important when gaming on the go — so it's pretty pointless plumping for a laptop with a 4K screen if it doesn't have the interior hardware to power games on it.
In other words, a very high quality, Full HD screen can beat a 4K display in some situations, especially when it's partnered with stonkingly fast internals for a superb portable gaming experience. Other things to look out for when buying a gaming laptop include weight and portability after all you are buying this to carry around , battery life a perennial problem with gaming laptops , and price.
In the gaming laptop field there are, as you might expect, a lot of makers. Some of these have been producing laptops for gaming for decades, and have serious pedigree, while others are newer to the game and are producing exciting and innovative new models.
Here at T3 we rate and review the finest offerings from these makers and, as such, have created our own list of what we consider the best gaming laptop makers in the world. We think it is pretty much impossible to objectively rank these makers, as each keeps outdoing the other with new systems, but we think if you buy a system from one of these firms then chances are you're going to be very, very happy. Alienware — Dell's elite gaming-focussed arm has been turning out luxe, drool-tastic gaming laptops for 25 years now founded in As you would expect from that legacy, that means that basically every system it makes is top-tier.
There's a great attention to detail on each system's build quality, and thanks to its backing from Dell, each is often very customisable, too. Razer — Razer's systems don't come cheap, at all, and they aren't very configurable either, but they are truly elite-tier in terms of fit, finish and style. If your pockets are deep enough you can get a system with loads of gaming power, too, and thanks to Razer's professional aesthetic, these systems can also be used in an office setting.
Many models are also light and very portable. Dell — Despite Dell having Alienware in its fold it also turns out some slightly less premium but still very capable and powerful gaming laptops under its G-range. The Dell G5 and G7 especially offer plenty of gaming performance, including ray tracing-capable GPUs, and also ring in less than Alienware, too.
You also get the same levels of excellent customisation as well. Asus — Asus, in T3's opinion, is currently killing it in the gaming laptop market, with a series of ranges covering all bases. The Asus ROG Zephyrus and Strix ranges especially have been frequent members of T3's best gaming laptop guide over the past few years, with tis systems delivering great build quality and style with raw pixel-pushing power.
It's new Zephyrus G14 is highly portable, too. Acer — Acer is an unsung hero of the gaming laptop market in T3's eyes, consistently producing very good gaming laptops that offer large doses of bling and gaming power. The Predator Triton and Helios are the two lines of note, which offer systems with different sized screens and specs, as well as cutting edge features and novel designs.
It has a crazy amount of gaming laptop series, too, but if you shop for anything in the GT, GS or TE ranges then you're going to be very happy with your purchase. The GS Stealth laptops are especially liked by T3's staff members due to their portability as well as power. Reviewing laptops is a serious undertaking as, unlike many products, they are masters at many different things and feature a myriad of components.
They also cost hundreds if not thousands to buy, so making sure a system is covered comprehensively is critical to our testing process. With gaming laptops, though, the system's actual graphics performance in modern AAA games is the foremost consideration, and that's why we always put a gaming laptop through the best PC graphics benchmarking tool in existence, 3DMark.
We run as many of these graphics benchmarks as possible, and then also look to benchmark a game with its own built-in benchmarking tool if available. We also then experientially report back our findings of actually playing games on the gaming laptop, noting how smooth the framerates were and how high the resolution and in-game graphics settings could be pushed.
Away from game-playing performance, we also test out a gaming laptop's battery life and see just what its screen is like to use in normal, non-gaming tasks. This includes watching videos, editing images in PhotoShop and browsing the internet.
Of course, we also look to ascertain the gaming laptop's build quality. Many other things like fan noise, keyboard type and RGB lighting system are also evaluated, too. Finally, we consider the system against its peers and in terms of value for money.
It is then given a star score, with five stars been the top score any system can receive, and it is considered for entry into our best gaming laptops buying guide. We put the LifeSaver Liberty filter water bottle to the test in the wild. We've got all the best mechanical keyboards together in one place.
Better protect your device while online and optimise it with the help of the best VPN currently available. Find our top 10 choices right here to get started. The best USB-C monitors make computing, gaming and creating on a second screen a pleasure. It's a strong field but we've picked out the best inch laptops you can buy today in Which curved gaming monitor is the best one for you?
These are the finest panels on the market today in T3 is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher.
Visit our corporate site. All rights reserved. England and Wales company registration number Select your region. Sign up to our newsletter Newsletter. Display: Reasons to avoid - Limited stock - Limited customisability. Screen: Storage: GB. Reasons to avoid - No integrated webcam. Aorus 15P YD. Reasons to avoid - Limited battery without AI - Screen latency could be better.
Reasons to avoid - Large and heavy - Expensive. Purists will argue that you need a PC to truly play games, especially if you're a fan of pushing the levels of graphics quality beyond the capabilities of a mere gaming console. In this regard, the gaming desktop is still king, particularly when it comes to having the kind of components and horsepower needed to run 4K games smoothly and support virtual reality VR setups. But if you want or need something you can tote around the house or over to your friend's place, we're here to help you choose the right gaming laptop.
For that, you get a system that can play games at full HD resolution p with the settings turned down in most titles, or at maximum quality settings in simpler games.
Storage may be a hard drive, or a modest-capacity solid-state drive SSD. An SSD is always preferable. Want something better? Midrange systems give you smoother gameplay at high or maximum settings on a better-quality p screen often in concert with a special high-refresh screen; more on that in a moment , and should add support for VR headsets. High-end systems, meanwhile, should guarantee you smooth gameplay at p with graphics details maxed out, often with a high-refresh screen.
They even might let you play at 4K resolution, if the screen supports it. A high-end model should also be able to power a VR headset and support additional external monitors. Some laptops in this class support QHD 2,by-1,pixel or 4K screens, a hard drive to supplement the SSD, and ultra-efficient cooling fans as optional extras.
Thanks to modern advancements, an increasing number of these are even fairly thin and portable. With laptops in this tier, you'll either pay a premium for high-end performance in a thin chassis, or for pay for the most possible power in a chunkier build. The main attribute that makes or breaks a gaming laptop is its graphics processing unit GPU. We don't consider a laptop to be a gaming laptop unless it has a discrete graphics chip from Nvidia or less commonly AMD. A quick crash course for the uninitiated: In general, the higher the number in a GPU series, the more powerful it is.
Nvidia is the dominant player in the field right now, currently producing discrete mobile GPUs based its "Ampere" microarchitecture. This platform supplanted the previous "Turing" generation, though you will still find these Series GPUs for example, the RTX at online retailers in some laptops that released last year.
Unlike prior generations, the top-end Turing and Ampere GPUs available on laptops carry an "RTX" designation rather than "GTX," a nod to the ray-tracing technology that the platform offers for enhanced in-game visuals with games that support it. With Turing, we found that the laptop GPUs pretty closely matched their desktop counterparts, while there was a noticeable gap between the two with Pascal. Unfortunately, it's back to being a bit complicated with Ampere: RTX Series GPUs on desktops perform markedly better than their laptop counterparts, and there's can also be some sizable performance variance between the same GPU on one laptop versus another.
To see our findings on this topic, read our mobile Ampere testing article. Compared with the premium RTX and RTX , these two GPUs are available in more budget-friendly gaming laptops or in the base configurations of more premium machines , bringing Ampere architecture and, crucially, ray-tracing to entry-level machines. Below the RTX , things are slightly more complicated.
They are based on the same generation of architecture as the RTX GPUs, but they lack the cores for ray tracing and are less expensive, making them good fits for budget machines. These remain relevant for the time being despite the new GPUs, especially in the lowest-end gaming laptops, though the RTX and RTX Ti will begin to replace them in many cases.
You will also see, for example, the GTX Ti utilized in small gaming laptops like the Razer Blade Stealth 13 , and in non-gaming laptops that can benefit from some graphics oomph, like the Dell XPS Nvidia is still the main player in graphics, but chief rival AMD is seeing an increase in adoption. Even with all the above complexity, there are still some basic conclusions to be drawn about graphics performance. Additionally, the Series Ampere GPUs particularly the RTX have made smooth p and 4K gaming much more plausible than before, even with ray-tracing enabled in some titles.
The most demanding games may not hit 60fps at 4K with ray tracing on depending on the laptop, but it's much more plausible to do either on their own with these top-end options. In the past, the power of an RTX or RTX would look like overkill for smooth gaming at p, but several new factors can absorb that extra potential. A trend among high-end machines is a high-refresh-rate screen built into the laptop, which allows for display of lofty frame rates in full to smooth out the perceived gameplay.
You'll need a powerful graphics chip to leverage the benefits of a high-refresh panel with demanding games. You'll be able to identify machines like these by marketing lingo touting, say, a Hz, Hz, or Hz screen. A typical display on a laptop is a 60Hz panel, but most gaming models will have a Hz-plus display at this point. A Hz panel is emerging as the most common, but we're also seeing some Hz and even Hz options in pricey models , so they can display more than 60 frames per second for example, up to fps, in the case of Hz screens.
This makes gameplay look smoother, but only high-end GPUs can push those limits, in many cases. Additionally, the aforementioned ray-tracing techniques think real-time lighting and reflection effects are demanding to run, and as more video games implement the technology, the more you'll wish you could flip them on.
We'll spare you too many details here, but Nvidia is also implementing a rendering technique called DLSS to help ray tracing to run smoothly on less powerful hardware like the RTX with limited downsides, so you're not totally out of luck if you can't afford the top-end chips. DLSS support, though, applies to just a small subset of games for now.
They help increase the quality of the gaming experience and smooth out frame rates by letting the laptop screen rewrite the image onscreen at a variable rate that depends on the output of the GPU rather than the fixed rate of the screen. Look for support for one of those technologies if you're a stickler for perfectly rendered visuals.
These technologies, collectively known as "adaptive sync," are becoming more common, but they tend to show up in pricier machines, with G-Sync much more common. The processor is the heart of a PC, and in most gaming laptops that released back in , you'll likely find Intel's 10th Generation Core H-Series processors also dubbed "Comet Lake-H".
You'll still see plenty of these processors available in as well as the occasional older chip , even though they're technically no longer the latest and greatest offerings. Intel launched its first 11th Generation "Tiger Lake-H" processors in early often dubbed the "H35" class , with some newer, higher-powered chips debuting in May. The first ones "only" included four cores and eight threads, but thanks to improvements in Intel's manufacturing technology, that shouldn't always equal lower performance, especially on less multi-threaded tasks.
They also have the advantage of using less power and running cooler. Even better for gamers, that second wave of Tiger Lake-H chips are hitting a range of gaming systems in the second half of They include enthusiast Core i9 CPUs, Core i7 processors for thin-and-light gaming laptops, and fresh Core i5 chips for budget machines.
Unlike the processors from the initial wave, these more potent chips have at minimum six cores and 12 threads, and the Core i7 and i9 units boast eight cores and 16 threads.
We haven't reviewed any laptops with these chips just yet, but should have performance numbers soon. In general, more cores and higher clock speeds bring better overall efficiency and much-improved performance on multithreaded tasks like media projects, but it's less vital for gaming, making the four-core Tiger Lake H35 family a good fit going forward.
Gaming doesn't usually see as much of a boost from more threads as many media tasks do, but they certainly don't hurt. Theoretically, you may find a gaming laptop with an Intel Core i3 processor, but those are uncommon: Systems with Intel Core i3 and comparable entry-level AMD processors are certainly capable of playing many games, but why limit yourself from square one?
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