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Gaming laptops for any budget
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 solid-state 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. 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 Intelbased 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 lower-performing 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.