Grab power now! Check out the best low-cost, GeForce- and Radeon-equipped gaming notebooks we’ve tested in our labs. We’ve got all the buying advice you need to land a fierce, fast-running bargain.
How do you define what makes for a “real” gaming laptop? We don’t consider any laptop a true gaming machine unless it comes with a dedicated graphics chip (aka, a “GPU”), as opposed to the integrated graphics built into the PC’s main processor. For us—and for sellers of laptops—that’s the bright line that divides a gamer from a pretender. Still, depending on the kind of games you play and how fussy you are, sometimes a laptop doesn’t have to pretend. On some level, almost any recent notebook PC can work as a gaming laptop. Current general-use laptops with 11th and 12th (or even slightly older 10th) Generation Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs can play some games passably if you roll back the screen-resolution and graphical-detail settings far enough. These chips have modest graphics acceleration built in, and that’s all you need for casual or Web-based games. The 11th Generation “Tiger Lake” CPUs changed the calculus on this somewhat, as they introduced notably improved integrated graphics. These, and the latest 12th Generation “Alder Lake” chips, can run real games at low-to-moderate settings, as shown in our integrated graphics testing. Ultimately, though, they too are still well short of the performance of a discrete GPU found in a gaming laptop. The traditional $1,000 mark for budget gaming systems has gotten a bit murkier in 2022, with average component costs both rising and fluctuating, but we’ll run down what to look for to hew as closely to that figure as possible. A True GPU Is the Difference-Maker
We assume you want to do more than harvest potato mines and pea-shooters, or play games at low settings—you have a Steam account, and you ache to play some of the latest AAA titles in all their glory: the newest rev of the Battlefield series, the latest Tom Clancy-fest, the newest iteration of Tomb Raider or Far Cry. Or, you’re looking to play the latest mega-trending online titles—Fortnite, Apex Legends, Valorant—at the highest possible frame rate that your gaming laptop’s panel supports. That’s where a dedicated graphics chip 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 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. Getting one of those GPUs means big spending, though, and at current prices they are well outside of budget range, with most models closer to $2,000 than $1,000. You’re more likely to find the newer RTX 3050 family (and the occasional RTX 3060) at this price level—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 increasingly little 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 2022, but these machines are available for just under or just above $1,000, depending on 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. Here’s how to make sense of their components—and get the most for your money. Budget 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. The Processor: Yes, It’s Important, But Don’t Overbuy
Some of today’s games, especially in the MMORPG and real-time-strategy (RTS) 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. That said, 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. With the 11th Generation Intel CPUs that dominate budget gaming laptops at the moment (newer laptops will see more 12th Generation chips as the year progresses), you’ll get plenty of pep even from Core i5 CPUs. A Core i7 of the same generation is actually a hefty six-core or eight-core processor that, we’d argue, is overkill for casual gamers who need to mind what they spend. A modern Core i5 chip will more than likely serve you just fine. Intel’s 11th Generation “Tiger Lake” processors took over in 2021 models, with even budget laptops like the MSI Katana GF66 utilizing the very capable H-Series Core i7 chips. The 12th Generation “Alder Lake” mobile processors arrived on more expensive gaming laptops early in 2022, and are slowly starting to appear in the budget tier midway through the year. This should be a similar pattern to what we saw with the Tiger Lake-H processors, which launched in more premium gaming laptops first. For now, plenty of the laptops you see in our recommendations will still use 11th Generation chips (that is Core i7 processors whose names start with “11”), but newer releases will run on 12th Generation. Meanwhile, on the AMD side of the fence, things are looking up, big time. Previously, AMD processors and GPUs were rarely seen in midrange and high-end laptops, but 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 desktop, these Zen 2-based “Renoir” processors challenged Intel on laptop in 2020. AMD continued to up the ante in 2021 with the launch of the Zen 3-based Ryzen 5000 mobile CPUs. We now see many more laptops with AMD’s Ryzen 5 or 7 processors. Ryzen 6000 CPUs have already launched as well, but like Intel’s 12th Generation processors, these arrived first in more expensive laptops, and haven’t hit budget systems just yet.
