For gamers on a tight budget, the trick to finding the right gaming laptop is getting enough performance to play 3D games without sacrificing too much in other areas like the display and overall build quality while also avoiding older models on sale with outdated or soon-to-be-outdated parts. Here's our expert advice on what to consider to get the most gaming laptop for your money.
Price
The search for an affordable gaming laptop for most people starts with price. The good news is you can find a perfectly serviceable gaming laptop with modern components capable of playing today's games for roughly $1,000. Sometimes less than that if you find a model on sale. Dell, HP, Lenovo and other manufacturers are constantly rotating discounts, so you can lock in a great deal if you time it right.
If your budget allows you to spend more than $1,000, you'll find models with more powerful components and brighter and faster displays along with other bonuses like per-key RGB lighting and thinner designs.
Operating system
MacBooks running Apple's MacOS are popular for home, work and school use, but Microsoft Windows is the choice for gaming laptops, especially budget gaming laptops. You can run some games on higher-end MacBook Pros, but they are very expensive compared with cheap, Windows-based gaming laptops.
If you're on a tight budget, you could consider a Chromebook. ChromeOS is a different experience from Windows; it's more streamlined and easier to use. It is limited in that basically everything runs through the Chrome browser, so it's not possible to install Windows PC games directly on a Chromebook. However, there are some Chromebooks for gamers designed mainly to be used with cloud gaming services like Xbox Game Pass.
Screen
Most gaming laptops feature either a 15-inch or 16-inch screen, although you'll see some smaller 14-inch models as well as a few 17- and even 18-inch behemoths. Newer 16-inch models with taller 16:10 aspect ratios are starting to replace 15.6-inch with a more traditional 16:9 widescreen ratio, and we generally favor the boxier 16-inch models. You'll likely do most of your gaming at a 1,920x1,080-pixel resolution, which has a 16:9 ratio, but the more vertical space afforded with a 16:10 display makes the laptop more useful outside of gaming when you are scrolling through web pages and long documents. In general, a larger the delivers a more immersive gaming experience.
Another important display spec for gamers is the refresh rate or the number of times per second a display refreshes its image. Most gaming laptops, even cheap ones, have displays with variable refresh rates that can sync to the frames per second of a game to prevent artifacts like tearing (where it looks like parts of different screens are mixed together) and stutter (where the screen updates at perceptibly irregular intervals).
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