Best gaming laptop of 2024

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sacrificing too much in other areas like the display and overall build quality while avoiding older models on sale with outdated parts. Outdated or soon to be outdated.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

price

Gaming laptops start well under $1,000 with slower GPUs (like the older model or RTX 4050) geared toward 1080p gaming and at the higher end, the sky’s the limit. The sweet spot — for mainstream gaming at 1440p and an RTX 4070 GPU that will last longer without sacrificing AAA gameplay — is around $1,200 to $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 bring more notable games to macOS. So don’t give up.

a screen

Most gaming laptops feature large screens between 14 and 18 inches; Older, cheaper models generally have 15.6 or 17-inch models. OLED technology offers 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 CPU makers for gaming laptops; Most games rely on the GPU to perform their graphics, but sims and other games that populate worlds based on player or environment interactions use the CPU quite a bit, so look for at least a Core i7 HX or better CPUs or an AMD 8040HS series or faster .

Graphics

All gaming laptops will have a dedicated GPU from Nvidia or AMD (and to a much lesser extent Intel). Nvidia is the most popular and generally the best performer for the money. Look for 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 many cases.

storage

For gaming laptops, we don’t recommend using less than a 512GB SSD unless you’re only playing one game at a time or want to spend a lot on an external SSD and your system at least has a Thunderbolt/USB4 port to power it. At least the game storage is in progress. 1TB is fine; More is usually better, depending on how much extra it costs.