We’ve rounded up a handful of the best cheap gaming laptop deals you can score online right now, including a couple picks that ring in at less than $500.
Laptops has transformed a lot in just the last few years. Touchscreen laptops,2-in-1 designs, and featherweight ultrabooks are all the rage today, but arguably the biggest leaps forward have been made in the gaming laptop market. Once seen as a dubious value that lagged far behind desktop machines, today’s best gaming laptops can hang with custom-built PCs. You’ll pay extra for the built-in displays, downsized hardware, and portability that you get with a laptop, of course, but we can help soften the blow to your wallet a bit: Here, we’ve rounded up the best cheap gaming laptop deals available right now from online retailers, with each one coming in at less than $1,000 — including a couple very affordable picks that will set you back less than half of that. If you’re ready to get your game on and save some money, keep reading. You’re not likely to find a good gaming laptop with a dedicated GPU for less than $500, and you’re almost certainly not going to find a new one for less than $400. AMD has largely bridged this gap between dedicated and integrated graphics, however, with its unique APUs (accelerated processing units, although AMD no longer uses this moniker) which are CPUs that feature built-in graphics processing capabilities. The 14-inch Motile performance laptop packs one of these processing units, the dual-core AMD Ryzen 3 with Vega 3 graphics, combining the convenience of a super-cheap work laptop with a bit of light gaming power. You’re not going to be running the latest games at high settings, of course, but if you’re looking for what is easily the cheapest of cheap gaming laptops, this Ryzen 3 PC might be the one. Its vibrant 14-inch display has a 1080p resolution (no 720p corner-cutting here, thankfully), and its Ryzen APU is paired with 4GB of RAM and a 128GB solid-state drive. At just $399 ($200 off retail), you’d be hard-pressed to find a cheaper laptop than this that’s still capable of handling some light gaming. The previous laptop is admittedly pretty bare-bones, so if you’re willing to up your budget (but still want something that slides in under $500), the Asus VivoBook 14 is a worthy upgrade that will give you a bit more juice for gaming. It packs a Ryzen 5 CPU with Vega 8 graphics — a nice upgrade over the Ryzen 3 — and you get a full 8GB of RAM, which is twice the minimum 4GB of memory that you usually see on cheap sub-$500 gaming laptops. This laptop also offers a nice snappy 256GB SSD and it comes sporting a 14-inch Full HD display. Ryzen 5 laptops usually sail north of $550, but you can score this cheap gaming laptop for just $429. If the Radeon Vega laptops whetted your appetite but you’re willing to shell out a little more for a discrete GPU and bigger display, then the 15-inch Dell G3 gaming laptop offers some nice upgrades for the money. It runs on a 10th-generation Intel Core i5-10300H CPU along with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 GPU,8GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 256GB SSD, which are excellent specs for modern gaming at this price.
