Check out the best low-cost gaming laptops we’ve tested in PC Labs. We’ve seen the lion’s share of the latest GeForce- and Radeon-equipped models—and have all the buying advice you need to land a fierce, fast-running bargain.
So, ready to buy a gaming laptop? We assume you want to do more than play games at low settings—you have a Steam account, and you ache to play some of the latest AAA games in all their glory. That’s where a dedicated graphics processor (GPU) comes in. It’s the starting point for getting serious about gaming on a notebook.
If you’re truly serious and insist on playing all your games at very high detail settings and the highest possible screen resolution (for most entry-level laptops, that’s 1,920 by 1,080 pixels, assuming you’re playing on the laptop’s screen and not an external display), you’re just going to have to shell out some bucks, especially if you want that laptop to stay game-viable at those settings for more than a couple of years.
High-end future-proofing like that demands top-end graphics silicon: Nvidia’s mighty GeForce RTX 3070 and 3080 were the latest and greatest by the end of 2021, and the RTX 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti launched on laptops in early 2022. You will likely still find these in some systems in 2023, but now the newest GeForce RTX 40 series defines the high end in gaming laptops. Getting one of those GPUs mostly still means big spending, though, and at current prices, they are well outside of the budget range, with most models containing them closer to $2,000 than $1,000. You’re more likely to find the RTX 30 family at this price level, though the lower-end RTX 40-series GPUs are becoming more common—you’ll find more detail on this in the GPU section below.
Take comfort, though, that times have changed. You don’t necessarily need one of the top-line GPUs for solid gaming performance. With scarce compromise, you can enjoy some very respectable gaming at 1080p in machines a notch or two down from the GeForce RTX elite. Pricing fluctuates considerably in 2023, but these machines are available for just under or just above $1,000, depending on the retailer and any sales. Budget-priced gaming laptops are now an established category, not outliers, and have been embraced by the major players. We’ve tested models from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and MSI, as well as a few others.
Here’s how to make sense of their components—and get the most for your money.Components in Cheap Gaming Laptops: What to Look For, Part by Part
Our first bit of advice? If gaming’s your primary focus and your budget really does dead-stop at $1,000, get the best GPU you can for the money, and let everything else follow from there. That may be at the expense of another spec or two—a little less storage, say, or a Core i5 processor instead of a Core i7.
That said, most notebooks aren’t upgradable, apart from their primary system memory (RAM, not to be confused with the graphics memory) and in some cases, the storage. You’re going to be stuck with the screen, the graphics chip, and the processor you buy now, so evaluate these parts wisely. If you can stretch your budget a bit to get the next-tier-higher component, it can pay dividends in terms of usable life.Which CPU Should You Get in a Cheap Gaming Laptop?
Some of today’s games, especially in the strategy and simulation categories, tend to hammer the processor. Dual-core processors are a thing of the past, for good reason: Some AAA games call explicitly for quad-core CPUs as a minimum.
Regardless, a maxed-out Core i7 or Core i9 CPU is less crucial for gaming than it is for processor-intensive tasks such as video editing and media-file production work. This is because you’ll get plenty of gaming pep even from Core i5 CPUs. Intel’s 13th Gen chips launched in 2023, and as expected, they increase both power and efficiency. A Core i7 is a super-efficient processor that we’d argue, while helpful to have and a marked performance difference, may be slight overkill for casual gamers stuck to a tight budget. A modern Core i5 chip will more than likely serve you just fine in a budget gaming laptop.
Intel’s 11th Generation „Tiger Lake“ processors were the chips to get in 2021; likewise, Intel’s 12th Gen „Alder Lake“ mobile processors ruled in 2022. But 13th Gen chips are now available in budget systems. For now, a fraction of the laptops you see in our recommendations still use 12th Gen chips, but 13th Gen has taken over, even in the budget tier, throughout 2023.
Meanwhile, on the AMD side of the fence, things are looking up, big time. Previously, AMD CPUs and GPUs were rarely seen in midrange and high-end laptops, but they were good fits for budget laptops (because the components were generally cheaper value plays, to begin with). Even then, there weren’t too many laptops with AMD chips. That started to change in 2020 across all price tiers with the release of laptop chips based on the company’s Zen 2 microarchitecture. As the Zen 2 processors did on desktops, these Zen 2-based „Renoir“ processors challenged Intel on laptops in 2020.
AMD upped the ante in 2021 with the launch of its Zen 3-based Ryzen 5000 mobile CPUs, and roughly kept pace with Intel with its Ryzen 6000 platform last year. Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 laptops launched in 2023, and some have made their way down to the budget tier, too. Long story short, we now see more laptops with AMD’s Ryzen 5 or 7 mobile CPUs than ever, but Intel is still more common overall.How Much Memory Is Enough for Gaming?
Given an around-$1,000 budget, 8GB is the minimum memory you should settle for. (We haven’t seen less in a machine with dedicated graphics for some years now.) Some sub-$1,000 machines with dedicated graphics won’t have any more than that, but 8GB is adequate for most moderate use and mainstream gaming. It used to be that 8GB of RAM was far more common than 16GB, but even in the budget tier these days, you’ll find many of our picks include 16GB.
Whether the laptop’s RAM is user-upgradable later on, and what the ceiling is, are further facets to investigate. That said, even if you can upgrade the memory, the laptop may come with memory modules occupying both slots, which would mean replacing them both when upgrading later. It’s best to get what you need up front.How Much Storage Is Enough in a Cheap Gaming Laptop?
Even in the budget tier, laptops now default to using solid-state drives (SSDs) as opposed to hard drives (HDDs) in 2023. The occasional 17.3-inch-screen model might offer a small-capacity SSD boot drive alongside a secondary-storage platter hard drive, but by and large, standalone SSDs now reign supreme. (Note that most budget gaming laptops under a grand will be 15.6-inchers.)
You can still opt for this dual-drive approach if you can find it and afford it, but it isn’t the norm any longer.
