The best gaming laptop of 2024

For gamers looking to get the best performance for their money, the trick to finding the right gaming laptop is to get enough performance to play 3D games without sacrificing too much in other areas such as the display and overall build quality. while avoiding older models on sale with obsolete or soon-to-be-obsolete parts. Here’s our expert advice on what to consider to get the best gaming laptop for your money.

Price

Gaming laptops start well under $1000 with slower GPUs (like an older model or an RTX 4050) aimed at 1080p playback, 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 playback—is roughly between $1,200 and $2,000, depending on what you’re willing to sacrifice.

Operating system

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

screen

Most gaming laptops have large displays between 14 and 18 inches; older and cheaper models usually have 15.6- or 17-inch models. OLED provides the highest contrast, most colorful and fastest displays, but you may want to look for HDR support, which they don’t always have.

Processor

Intel and AMD are the main manufacturers of processors for gaming laptops; most games depend on the GPU for their graphics performance, but sims and other games that populate worlds based on player interactions or the environment use the CPU quite a bit, so look for at least a Core i7 HX and better or AMD series CPUs 8040HS or faster.

Graphics

All gaming laptops will feature a dedicated GPU from Nvidia or AMD (and to a much lesser extent Intel). Nvidia is the most popular and generally the best value for money. Look for RTX 40xx or Radeon 7000 series discrete GPUs or higher.

memory

For memory, we strongly recommend at least 16 GB of RAM; 8GB will hinder performance in many cases.

Storage

For a gaming laptop, we don’t recommend using less than a 512GB SSD unless you only play one game at a time or 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 fine; more is usually better, depending on how much extra it costs.