For gamers looking to get the most performance for their money, 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too much in other areas like the display and overall build quality while also avoiding older models on sale with outdated or soon-to-be-outdated parts. Here’s our expert advice on what to consider to get the most gaming laptop for your money.

Price

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

Operating System

Microsoft Windows is the most popular choice for gaming laptops, especially budget gaming laptops. If you’ve got a M3 Pro or better or M4 MacBook, Apple’s been working with developers to increase the prominent games for MacOS. So don’t give up.

Screen

Most gaming laptops feature large displays 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 might want to look for HDR support, which they don’t always have.

Processor

Intel and AMD are the main CPU makers 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 CPUs or faster.

Graphics

All gaming laptops will feature a dedicated GPU from either Nvidia or AMD (and to a far lesser extent, Intel). Nvidia is the most popular and generally the best performing for the money. Look for an RTX 40xx or Radeon 7000-series discrete GPUs or later.

Memory

For memory, we highly recommend at least 16GB of RAM; 8GB will hamper performance in a lot of cases.

Storage

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