The time of the gaming laptop has finally come. Gone are the days where you needed to pay twice the price of a desktop for half the performance. Modern gaming laptops have the same performance components as their desktop cousins and not nearly the price premium that you might expect.
We’ve rounded up five of the best budget gaming laptops you can currently buy. “Budget” in this case means less than $1,500, but we are talking about gaming laptops here. $250 laptops for web browsing and Microsoft Office are still there if you need them!
**As Low As You Should Go – ****MSI GF65 9SD-252**
Coming in at the magic thousand dollar mark, the GF65 ticks virtually every box on the budget gaming laptop checklist. It has a 6-core, 12-thread CPU, a GTX 1660Ti, high-refresh IPS screen and a SATA SSD with a decent 512GB of space. A lack of PCIe SSD performance is regrettable, but for current PC gaming, SATA is going to be just fine when it comes to loading times.
A slightly deeper cut comes in the form of the 8GB RAM allocation. It’s a single stick, so you don’t get dual-channel memory performance out of the box. On the bright side, you only need to add another stick of RAM in the second open slot to hit the 16GB mark. This is the upgrade we most strongly recommend, but even with the standard configuration, you should have no issue playing most modern games at high settings at or above 60 frames per second.
The GF65 is relatively compact, has plenty of USB ports and an understated design. Overall it’s an incredibly well-balanced system and its biggest weaknesses can be addressed by upgrades down the line.
**The Big-Screen Beauty – **XPC ROG Strix G GL731 Gamer Notebook
The “ROG Strix” branding is reserved for Asus laptops that are geared towards hardcore gaming. This particular model is sold by Xotic PC, which is known as a custom gaming computer reseller. It is however still an Asus machine, make no mistake.
At first glance, the GL731 might not look much better than, for example, the GF65 we looked at above. It has the same CPU and GPU combination after all. It’s easy to miss the fact that this is a 17.3” machine, a significant step up in screen size from the much more common 15.6” units.
That’s not automatically a good thing, but it does mean a much more comfortable viewing experience, far better keyboard spacing and more headroom for cooling. The downside is portability, but there’s little difference between either sizes when lugging them around in a backpack.
You also get 16GB of RAM out of the box, but if you have a larger budget, you can choose from a variety of RAM and SSD configurations which Xotic will install for you before shipping the laptop.
The design is gorgeous and that 17.3” 144Hz screen is definitely the star of the show. For the asking price this is really one of the nicest overall machines you can buy. It’s also scarce to find 17” gaming laptops at this price, so if that’s a priority for you, strongly consider the XPC ROG Strix. However, if you want higher specifications, you can get 15.6” laptops for similar money with better internals. The trade-off is entirely up to you.