Gaming laptops used to be pretty straightforward. They were powerful but thick and unwieldy. These days, you have options. There are gaming laptops that prioritize performance at all costs and others that hone in on thinness, cost, or design. Heck, there are even gaming tablets and 2-in-1s.
That breadth of choices means choosing a gaming laptop in 2025 isn't simple. While picking any option from our Best Gaming Laptops guide is a good place to start, you still might not end up with a gaming laptop perfectly suited for your needs. Having tested many gaming laptops in over a decade of reviewing products, I'll break down each element of these spendy machines to lead you in the right direction, as well as explain what to expect from the major laptop brands.
What Size Gaming Laptop Should You Get?
Photograph: Luke Larsen
This is a great place to start when shopping for a gaming laptop. When we talk about “sizes” of these machines, we're usually comparing display sizes, measured diagonally. You'll often see three sizes across brands: 14-inch, 16-inch, and 18-inch.
16-inch is the happy medium. Though they are large laptops, they give the powerful gaming hardware enough space for the thermals to breathe. Having a larger screen is certainly not a bad thing either. These 16-inch gaming laptops replaced the 15.6-inch gaming laptops of the past, which used a 16:9 aspect ratio screen. With a few exceptions, most modern displays use a 16:10 aspect ratio display with thinner bezels. 16-inch laptops can be thin like the Razer Blade 16 or Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 or thick like the Lenovo Legion Pro 5 or Asus ROG Strix G16.
14-inch and 18-inch gaming laptops are more niche, but still have specific use cases where they are good solutions. 14-inch laptops are a newer development, tending to be highly portable and compact. The two primary standouts are the Razer Blade 14 and the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, but there are other models like the Acer Nitro 14, Asus TUF A14, HP Omen Transcend 14, and others.
18-inch gaming laptops are the exact opposite. They're too big for bags, too heavy to comfortably travel with, and are often quite thick. These are gaming laptops meant to primarily be left at a desk or workstation. Why buy them? Well, if you plan to mostly game at home, you might not mind the extra heft. The 18-inch screen gives you lots of screen real estate to game on. This is especially nice if you aren't playing on an external monitor. Some of the notable options are the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 or MSI Titan 18 HX AI.
How to Navigate Performance
Photograph: Brad Bourque
There's a lot to consider when it comes to performance, but the place to start is with graphics cards. A gaming laptop needs a discrete GPU to be ready for 3D gaming, and typically, that means choosing from something in Nvidia's RTX lineup. The latest options, the RTX 50-series, have been launching throughout 2025, which include the RTX 5090, 5080, 5070, 5070 Ti, 5060, and 5050. Nvidia will have you believe that multi-frame generation is the reason to buy a new laptop with one of these GPUs, though in my testing, that hasn't always proven true. Either way, the feature is there to play with regardless of which GPU your laptop has.