We’ve been testing the best gaming laptops, digging deep into the latest flavors of AMD processor and Nvidia graphics silicon, and we know which notebooks sing and which are just tone-deaf. We’re not just talking about sleek, expensive new machines, either, we’ve picked a range of gaming laptops at different price points to highlight which give you the best bang for your buck and which are just outright awesome.

The current generation of mobile GPU and CPU are now established, offering the best Nvidia, AMD, and Intel have to offer, and Intel’s Meteor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh machines are starting to filter out, too. I’ve already tested a host of potential alternatives, but the best gaming laptop remains the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i. It makes the best RTX 4090 gaming laptops, including the Razer Blade 16 and Asus ROG Zephyrus M16, and even the frankly ridiculous MSI Titan GT77 HX, look like overkill.

If you can’t face spending the big bucks to bag a fine mobile machine, our pick for the best budget gaming laptop is the Gigabyte G6X. You may need to add in some extra RAM to make it really fly, but that’s easy enough and cheap enough to do.

Managing Editor

The quick list

The best overall

The Lenovo Legion Pro is the best gaming laptop from all the new machines we’ve tested of this generation. It’s also the best 16-inch notebook, too, which is our new favorite form factor, offering the best screens we’ve seen in modern laptops.

Read more below

The best budget

Gigabyte has created the most affordable, most powerful budget gaming laptop around. It’s a great mix of value and gaming silicon for its 13th Gen CPU and RTX 4060.

Read more below

The best 15-inch

The Blade 15 is that holy grail of gaming laptops. MacBook aesthetic and desktop gaming prowess. They’re lovely things of brushed black aluminium and with some seriously powerful gaming hardware baked inside.

Read more below

The best 14-inch

If a 15-inch machine is too big for your lap, then the G14 is the notebook for you. It’s a lovely little device with a gorgeous screen, solid specs, and tons of connectivity. The new design for 2024 is absolutely gorgeous, too.

Read more below

The best 17-inch

The latest Aorus 17X shows that Gigabyte has been paying attention and it has delivered a beefy 17-inch machine that we’d be happy to lug about with us. It’s got a great spec, the screen is sweet, and the battery life does not suck.

Read more below

The best laptop screen

This 240Hz 1600p OLED panel is one of the finest we’ve laid eyes on. HDR content is wonderfully balanced and natural, and your games will look utterly stupendous. There again, so they should do on something that’s this expensive. But if you need the best screen, then you sadly have to pay for it.

Read more below

Updated July 22, 2024 added the Gigabyte Aorus 17X as our pick for the best 17-inch gaming monitor, and added a new review to the ‘also tested’ section.

The best gaming laptop

Our favorite config:

We tested: Intel Core i9 13900HX | Nvidia RTX 4080 (150 W) | 32 GB DDR5 | 1 TB NVMe SSD

The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i is the best 16-inch gaming laptop, and since 16-inch is the best form factor for a gaming laptop, it is therefore the best gaming laptop overall as well. Win and win.

It’s a machine that comes in at a price point that makes the rest of the high-end RTX 40-series look even more ridiculous on their lofty $4,000+ perches. And it’s the RTX 4080 model that has us impressed in testing, offering the sort of gaming performance that has mequestioning why anyone would want an RTX 4090 machine.

TheLegion Pro 7i runs its RTX 4080 at a 150 W TGP, which is the effective maximum of the GPU. Manufacturers are given an extra 25 W leeway to bulk up their own specs if they feel they can push a little extra juice through their own systems. Lenovo hasn’t gone down that route, the Legion Pro knows what it likes, and it likes the 150 W TGP and no more.

This Gen8 machine uses a 13th Gen Intel chip—the Core i9 13900HX. If, like me, you were to assume that would essentially be a slightly higher-clocked version of the Core i9 13900H Asus has used in its excellent Zephyrus M16 gaming laptop, then you’d be wrong.

There are obviously similarities, they are both using the same essential Raptor Lake architecture after all. But the HX isn’t just quicker, it has eight Performance cores, versus the 13900H’s six, and twice the number of Efficient cores taking its total up to 24 cores of processing grunt. The clock speeds remain the same, with 5.4 GHz boost clocks, though inevitably the bigger chip has a higher base TDP of 45 W. This will go some way to explaining the terrible battery life you get when gaming.

We’ve tested a host of Legion laptops over the past year, and to a machine they all suffer from very poor gaming battery life, though are admittedly still performance heroes when they’re powered from the wall. Realistically, you’re going to do most of your PC gaming when you’re plugged in, largely because all gaming laptops have pretty terrible gaming battery life metrics.

The only other place we feel a little conflicted over is the screen. We’ve been spoiled by gorgeous mini-LED panels in recent times, most recently by that in the Lenovo Legion 9i, which makes the standard backlighting in this 1600p 240 Hz screen feel a little lacklustre.

It’s still a good screen, though, and the16:10 aspect ratioand 2560 x 1600 native resolution are a great match for the 16-inch screen size the Legion Pro comes rocking with.

The Legion Pro 7i manages to outperform both the Razer Blade 16 and the Asus Zephyrus M16 regularly, at both 1080p and 1440p resolutions. Only the chonky boi MSI Titan GT77 is able to utilise its RTX 4090-ish GPU to its fullest potential. And then at the expense of acoustics and potentially your sanity.

This is the thing we keep coming back to when looking at this Lenovo machine—it’s not the prettiest, but it sure can smash out them high gaming frame rates, and it does it for around $2,000 less than the Blade 16.

The other thing that makes us love the Legion Pro 7i so well is that it’s been on sale for the last eight months or so, making the RTX 4080 version around the $2,000 mark and sometimes even below that. It’s a laptop with grown-up looks and serious gaming performance behind it. And it’s seriously good value to boot.

Read our full Lenovo Legion Pro 7i (Gen 8) review.

The best budget gaming laptop

Our favorite config:

We tested: Intel Core i7 13650HX | Nvidia RTX 4060 | 32 GB DDR5-4800 | 1 TB NVMe SSD

The best budget gaming laptop is the Gigabyte G6X (2024). It takes the place of the Gigabyte G5 we had in this spot previously, mostly because it offers more affordable gaming performance but with newer, improved parts inside.

The model we reviewed contains a Core i7 13650HX, which is not actually Intel’s most recent mobile gaming processor generation. That’s the 14th Gen. However, that’s an omission we’re happy to make. They’re mostly the same and the six P-cores and eight E-cores on this Core i7 are plenty for our needs.

That chip is combined with a 105 W RTX 4060—that’s actually a large power budget for this GPU, and that shows in the performance it delivers, as evidenced in the benchmark charts below. What’s more, it’s a small dose faster than the outgoing Gigabyte G5 KF we’ve replaced in this spot—those hardware changes do count for something in games.

Let’s talk about the screen. It’s a full 16 inches in size, with a 16:10 aspect ratio, 1920 x 1200 pixels, and a refresh rate of 165 Hz. It’s pretty darn good, in other words.

Importantly, that screen is a good fit for the hardware beneath it. Though it does suffer from a bit of the case of the blands—that is to say, it’s a bit dull and overly dark. These budget laptops often tend to suffer this fate and the G6X is no different to its predecessors on this point. Ultimately, we’d call it “perfectly average.”

The noise from the fans when they’re running at full bore is also quite average, which means this laptop is rather loud. That’s just part of the parcel with a gaming laptop, but more so these affordable models.

The design of this laptop is pretty standard stuff, too. Though it’s decisively less ‘gamery’ than some. A single zone of RGB LEDs illuminates the keyboard and there’s room for a reasonably big trackpad. Within the chassis, you can easily access the spare NVMe slot should you wish to bolster your storage above 1TB, which you probably will, and this machine comes with two DIMM slots. In our review model, these were accommodating 32 GB of DDR5-4800, though you could save some cash on the 16 GB model and get by in games just fine. It wouldn’t be difficult to swap out for a higher-capacity kit down the line.

Overall, the Gigabyte G6X offers exactly what we ask for in a budget gaming laptop. You could happily game on one right out of the box, though it’s an easily upgradeable platform if required.

Read our full Gigabyte G6X (2024) review.

The best 15-inch gaming laptop

Our favorite config:

We tested: Intel Core i7 13800H | Nvidia RTX 4070 | 16 GB DDR5-5200 | 1 TB NVMe SSD

The latest spin of the Razer Blade 15 once again improves on one of the greatest gaming laptops ever made, and the best 15-inch gaming laptop today. It has the same gorgeous CNC-milled aluminum chassis as its predecessor, only this time it can house one of Nvidia’s latest RTX 40-series GPUs and an Intel 13th Gen Core i9 CPU.

Though its days may well be numbered. Right now, it doesn’t look like Razer is going to release a new Blade 15 with the 14th Gen Intel chips inside it, which could indicate that this is the last run for the venerable machine.

In a way, that’s understandable given the Blade 16 isn’t much bigger yet can house a larger screen. But, importantly, it is thicker. Yes, the Blade 16 is a fair bit chonkier than the older Razer chassis, and I very much prefer the more svelte, older design.

Missing out on the 14th generation of Intel’s mobile Core CPUs isn’t an issue in real terms, however, as the Raptor Lake Refresh is just that, a mild refresh of the 13th Gen chips. So, with the current Razer Blade still sporting up to the RTX 4070 as its GPU component it still represents the best 15-inch gaming laptop you can buy.

As hinted at before, that scale does limit the screen. In the Blade 15 you have a QHD 240 Hz panel, so that’s a 2560 x 1440 native resolution. I mean, that’s still great and all, but I’ve been spoiled by the 16:10, 1600p mini-LED displays modern laptops can offer. It does also mean the Blade 15 has a fairly sizeable ‘chin’ by which I mean a large bezel along the bottom side of the panel.

I’d maybe want the screen to be brighter, but it’s certainly responsive and that 240 Hz refresh makes it feel super slick. It’s sharp, too, with that 1440p res squished down to only 15-inches of real estate.

The gaming performance certainly isn’t impacted by the lack of the latest CPU, with the 115 W RTX 4070 proving a very capable gaming GPU, even in the confines of the slight Blade 15 chassis. The RTX 4070 inside our latest review machine easily outpaces the mobile RTX 3080 in the last version we tested of Razer’s 15-incher, and that’s without the added benefits of DLSS 3 and Frame Generation.

The issue, as ever with Razer gaming laptops, is the price premium. Our pick for the best gaming laptop, the 16-inch Lenovo Legion Pro 7i is consistently much cheaper than the top RTX 4070 SKU of the Blade 16 and that comes with a much faster RTX 4080. It isn’t quite as nice a device, given the unibody aluminium chassis of the Razer machine, but if you’re on a tight budget it’s hard to recommend the Blade.

But it is a lovely device, even if it has barely changed in the past few years. It’s also pretty well connected, with a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports and three USB 3.2 Type-A connections, too. There’s also the requisite combined 3.5mm audio jack and a full HDMI 2.1 output.

For me, it’s still the best 15-inch gaming laptop on the scene and as ever really does nail that gaming MacBook aesthetic, which has always made the Blades such a hit.

The best 14-inch gaming laptop

Our favorite config:

We tested: AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS | Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 | 32 GB LPDDR5X | 1 TB NVMe SSD

The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024) is the best 14-inch gaming laptop, taking the spot from the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023). That might make it seem like the newer model was a shoe-in for the top position in this guide, but actually there have been some serious design changes and improvements made to the newer model. Those which make it entirely deserving of a top spot all on its own.

The G14 2024 comes with a new all-metal chassis that is quite simply lovely. It’s the chassis that has finally convinced a few of us in-office to look beyond the Razer Blade, which is famed for its all-metal construction. The metal build on the Zephyrus feels great, looks great, and importantly trims down the footprint of the Zephyrus G14 to an even more travel-friendly size. It’s just 1.63 cm at its thickest point.

Now before we get to the other good bits, it’s worth saying that the shrunken form factor has led Asus to sacrifice the single removable SO-DIMM slot found on previous years’ G14 models. There’s no longer an upgrade path for the memory. That said, 32 GB of LPDD5X is included as standard on all the available models at the time of writing.

That should see most people through for years to come, but I understand some users won’t like the lack of options here. Also while you can replace the SSD, there’s only one NVMe slot available, which can make transfers a pain, as you’d need to make a complete switch, SSD for SSD.

If you’re still with me, let’s talk about one of the G14’s best features: the OLED screen. If it looks good in the gallery images above, it looks even better in person. Excellent breadth of colour and contrast make for a stunning display for gaming. The increased resolution of 2880 x 1800 and slightly larger aspect ratio at 16:10 help to prevent that compact screen from feeling too closed-in.

A surprising plus point on the G14 is its speakers, which have seen significant improvement year-on-year. There are now four tweeters and two woofers built into the G14, split on either side of the keyboard, and they sound genuinely good. Our Andy was also impressed with the Zephyrus G16’s speakers, which have similarly been zhushed up with the latest laptop.

For a compact 14-inch gaming laptop, which remains one of the more desirable form factors around, there’s no beating the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 2024.

Read our full Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024) review.

The best 17-inch gaming laptop

Our favorite config:

We tested: Intel Core i9 14900HX | Nvidia RTX 4090 | 32 GB DDR5-4800 | 2x 1 TB SSD

The Gigabyte Aorus 17X is the best 17-inch gaming laptop we’ve tested in recent times. Not because it’s the outright fastest—the Strix Scar 17 X3D still holds that title—but because it’s the one we’d actually want to own ourselves. There’s a big difference between a super-powerful gaming laptop that is all about the power, and one that is able to get the balance just right.

And Gigabyte has been paying attention to that in recent times and is actually delivering a new version of its Aorus 17X that has been created with the end user in mind, and not just as the person who has to sit and listen to a turbine whine of fans while the damn things sounds like it’s going to take off.

This is still one of the problems with gaming laptops, and specifically an issue with Asus’ Strix Scar 17 X3D which held this position in our guide for so long. It’s a very, very powerful machine, capable of posting the most outstanding gaming performance—thanks to that mix of 3D V-cache on the Zen 4 processors and the RTX 4090 GPU—but you are going to need some equally very, very good noise cancelling headphones.

That’s not necessarily been an issue during our testing of the Aorus 17X and, as Katie says in our review: “I’d take the Aorus’ quiet wins over the Strix Scar’s unnecessarily power-hungry performance.”

The other issue with the 3D V-cache version of the Strix Scar 17 is that it’s not easy to find, and less so at a decent price. Again, this is where the Aorus 17X has it beat, the price, especially of the almost-as-powerful RTX 4080 version is so much cheaper and you’re not going to really feel the miss of a few fps here and there once you’re running at 1440p.

You might look at those 1080p numbers below and worry about the delta between the Strix and the Aorus, but that delta gets a lot smaller when you boost the resolution up to the screen’s 2560 x 1440 native, and then it becomes far less of a concern. Especially when you can actually hear yourself think at the same time.

Though that screen is one of the things that might have you considering something higher up the laptop food chain, potentially even looking up a hulking Razer Blade 18. Though you will have to spend the mega-bucks if you do want a good 4K panel inside your big-screen laptop. This 1440p 240 Hz display is good, though not as stellar as the Nebula displays of the smaller Asus ROG machines or the stunning OLED the Blade 16 sports.

There is also a lack of USB Type-C connectors to consider, too. If you’re picking this for content creation, and the multiple Type-A ports aren’t doing it for you, then a good Type-C hub will be in order. But if you’re looking for a well-balanced, big-screen gaming laptop, with a decent battery life and effective cooling, then the Aorus 17X is the one to beat right now.

Read out full Gigabyte Aorus 17X review.

The best gaming laptop screen

Our favorite config:

We tested: Intel Core i9 14900HX | Nvidia RTX 4080 | 32 GB DDR5-5600 | 1 TB NVMe SSD

It’s not hard to see why the gaming laptop with the best screen is the Razer Blade 16 (2024). Before you even open it up, you know that there’s something special about it just by the fact that Razer only offers one of two CPUs: an Intel Core i9 13950HX or 14900HX. And then there’s the fact that the MSRP for the model we tested, with an RTX 4080 GPU, is an astonishing $3,600.

Razer’s laptops could never be described as being cheap and their solid build quality goes no small way to justifying the price tag. But in this particular instance, it’s all about the display. It’s 16 inches, obviously, with a 2560 x 1600 resolution and 240 Hz variable refresh rate. It also just so happens to be one of the best OLED panels we’ve ever seen.

Mere words are not good enough to describe how good it is. Less overt and in-your-face than a mini-LED, richer and more natural than a top-end IPS panel, Razer’s choice of display is inspired. Games that offer an HDR mode, such as Cyberpunk 2077, will look so good that you’ll probably never want to use another screen again.

The rest of the hardware is, fortunately, up to scratch with the Core i9 14900HX and RTX 4080 in our review sample blasting through our usual benchmarks with ease. That said, we’ve tested some RTX 4080 laptops that are just as fast and quite a lot cheaper.

Razer hasn’t just spent all the extra money on the OLED screen and nice chassis, though. The huge trackpad is responsive and easy to use and gives the whole machine an air of quality. The distinct heft of the Blade 16 also lends a helping hand in this area, though it does make it somewhat less portable than we’d like.

Not that you’d want to travel around much with something so expensive. It isn’t because the Razer is fragile—far from it, especially the hinges—but you’ll barely get a chance to use it, from having to push people away from staring at that stunning OLED display.

If you really must have the very best screen in your gaming laptop and money is no object whatsoever, then there’s just one choice: Razer’s Blade 16. Just don’t expect it to play games any faster than other laptops with the same price tag.

Read our full Razer Blade 16 (2024) review.

How we test gaming laptops

We dedicate a lot of time to our gaming laptop testing to ensure that we’re capturing all the objective performance data we need and that we have the opportunity to catalogue the subjective experience of actually using a given device. Gaming laptops are expensive items, and you’re right to do your research before buying, so we’re passionate about making sure we’re able to tell you what a notebook is like to use as well as how powerful it is.

The objective side demands that we put each system through our standard benchmarking suite. That allows us to confidently compare systems on a directly referential basis. We test the raw performance of the CPU, GPU, and storage components of a system using the Cinebench R23 and Blender 3.3.0 benchmarks to get a bead on the processor and graphics card rendering performance. We also use X264 to test the encoding power of a laptop CPU.

3DMark’s Storage test and the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker benchmarks are a great way to highlight the gaming performance of a laptop’s storage subsystem. And 3DMark also gives us a way to get a synthetic read on both the gaming and ray tracing performance of a GPU.

We also put a system through gaming performance tests of Cyberpunk 2077, F1 22, Hitman 3, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Metro Exodus Enhanced, at both 1080p—so we have a base reference score no matter what a system’s native resolution is—and at 1440p and 4K where that is available.

We also run some experiential tests on a system’s panel—we use Lagom’s LCD test images to help discern things like black levels and white saturation as well as general desktop and gaming testing to see how it feels to use a laptop’s screen.

It’s also important to check the actual gaming frequency of both a laptop’s GPU and CPU, to see how a given slice of silicon performs given the thermal constraints of different notebook chassis.

We then use PCMark 10’s gaming battery life test to give us a comparative battery life metric.

Personally I also like to always write a review of a given laptop on the machine itself. That gives you a good feel about both the trackpad and keyboard, as well as the ergonomics of the chassis design, too.

We then bring all of that subjective and objective data together alongside the price to decide how well each machine we test stands up against all the other gaming laptops we’ve looked at in our combined decades of PC hardware testing.

Also tested

The above gaming laptops are the ones we recommend you spend your hard-earned cash on if you’re looking for a new machine, but aren’t the only ones we’ve reviewed. We regularly test different gaming laptops to make sure we’re recommending only the absolute best.

These are the machines we’ve looked at recently that didn’t make the cut…

How to spot the best deal