Best gaming laptops for 2022
A good gaming rig may cost you, but for those serious about their gaming experience – and with a budget to match – it’s frequently worth it to drop some serious cash to build the ideal setup. Gaming laptops have evolved to keep up with the needs of even the most intense gamers, who know that having the right equipment can often be as important as skill to raise your stats. There’s more to a decent gaming laptop than raw speed. You can pack it with the best graphics card, the fastest, most colorful display around, a gazillion-core processor, tons of fast solidstate drive storage to hold your games and a rock-solid hard drive for secondary storage, but it can still fall short.
Those powerful components may overheat at the worst moments, your battery may die or you might experience an instability that impacts your gaming performance. Or maybe you don’t want to always use an external mechanical keyboard with per-key RGB backlighting, but the system’s WASD keys feel like mashed potatoes under your fingers.
The good news is that battery life, at least for 15-inch gaming laptops, has gotten significantly longer and processors, both CPUs and GPUs, are a lot better. Throw in advances in cloud gaming, and you’ve got the ability to play more games on lower-end hardware than ever before. So it’s not a given that you’ll need to bust your budget to pay for a new laptop. But budget gaming can be difficult if you’re not shopping carefully and we all know that there’s really no such thing as a “cheap gaming laptop.”
Check out CNET’s recommendations for the best gaming laptops below that will give you the best gaming performance for the price.
Best gaming laptop overall: Razer Blade 17
CNET take: We didn’t test the refreshed 2021 version of the Blade 17 (formerly the Blade Pro 17), but there’s nothing that should have changed our high opinion of it, as it’s gotten faster components and better screen options. Yes, there are faster 17-inchers, but I draw the line at dual humongous power bricks. The Blade is fast and provides powerful gaming performance with up to an Intel Core i9-11900H processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 GPU, but doesn’t sacrifice its svelte figure.
While I recommend getting this Blade 17 laptop with its 4K-resolution display option for creators, I’m a big fan of the newly ubiquitous 165Hz 1440p laptop screens, and that resolution is a great match for the screen size without the 4K overkill.
Best budget gaming laptop value: Dell G15
CNET take: There’s no such thing as a budget gaming laptop. But solid gaming graphics power and strong battery life are the foundation of a good gaming laptop, and the price makes this budget gaming Dell G15 a great bargain. It comes in two flavors, a standard Intel-based model and the AMD Ryzen-based edition. The naming’s a little confusing, since the line’s branding changed from “G5 15” to “G15” and the company seems to have dropped the all-AMD versions since we reviewed (and gave it an Editors’ Choice) a year ago.
That’s sad, but the lowerperforming RTX 30 series does allow Dell to hit cheaper entry prices than the AMD GPUs at the moment. And it’s a good budget gaming laptop, whichever processor’s inside.
Best midrange gaming laptop: Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition
CNET take: Asus’ $1,650 ROG Strix G15 all-AMD gaming laptop delivers excellent performance and battery life, with a top-of-the-line Ryzen 9 5900HX CPU and Radeon RX 6800M GPU – and that’s before you realize that the performance and components are way above its price class. It runs cool and quiet, even running close to full tilt. At current higher-than-$1,650 prices in some places it’s less of a no-brainer, though.