Gaming laptops can be excellent, but you need to shop wisely to avoid making a mistake. Here's my advice.
A gaming laptop can be a fine investment in this age of mobile computing. With GPU prices increasing every year and the added expense of fitting out a desktop with a monitor and more, investing in one svelte, portable machine is a pretty good way to save some cash. Though that’s only true if you don’t buy a gaming laptop you come to regret.
That’s the thing with gaming laptops: you can’t upgrade them all that much once. While it’s possible to swap out the SSD and even often the RAM, unless you bought a modular Framework you’re stuck with the screen, processor, GPU, trackpad, webcam, and more. Some of which you could upgrade with a discrete product—just plug in a gaming keyboard or webcam—but if you still want a portable PC, it’s what’s inside that counts.
So it’s important to choose wisely. That means heading to the checkout with a firm idea of what you’re after, some helpful tips from your local hardware journo (i.e. a glance at our best gaming laptop guide), and a pocket full of change.
There are heaps of deals on gaming laptops regularly—we’re actually approaching the best time of the year to buy a gaming laptop and you can see our recommendations for early deals in our Black Friday gaming laptops deals page. But we only recommend products we think are actually any good, which means sifting through piles of crap. I’ve been doing this for over half a decade now and these are the things I look out for when choosing a gaming laptop, which will hopefully help you make an informed decision yourself—even if it’s buying one that we’ve not recommended ourselves.
- A 16-inch gaming laptop is almost always ideal
- Check for a spare NVMe SSD slot
- Spend your money on the better GPU
- Make sure you’re not missing out on memory
- Do the laptop’s specs make sense together?
14-inch or 16-inch
1. A 16-inch gaming laptop is almost always ideal
In the modern era of laptops there are two dominant form factors: 14-inch and 16-inch. Those two inches make a big difference, but before we get to that I should note that 18-inch laptops, such as the MSI Titan 18 HX A14V, make less sense for your average laptop user. That’s not to say they don’t serve a niche, but that niche is effectively acting as a replacement for a desktop PC tower or pulling maximum performance for more creative endeavours—you probably won’t want to whip an 18-inch laptop out onto a tray table during a long-haul flight, for example.
No, if you’re after an all-rounder for work, school, travel, and leisure then you’ll want to go with a 16-inch laptop most of the time. Some are pretty compact, such as the ROG Zephyrus G16, while other budget models are quite a bit thicker. Generally, though, you won’t struggle to fit a 16-inch laptop into a standard laptop-friendly backpack, and they tend to offer a good blend of performance and battery life.
The 16-inch screen size is also a good balance of being large enough to actually benefit from higher resolutions, such as 1440p, and being able to make out exact details; but not too big to be convenient. On the flipside, if you go for a smaller 14-inch gaming laptop, it might be a little too cramped for the best visibility in games.
One game I play a lot of is Hunt: Showdown. The game has a handful of maps all based in various locations in the American South, but they all share a common graphical style. No reflection on where these maps are based, but they’re the site of a horrific haunted invasion and as such are filled with dirt and mud, they’re run-down, a little hazy, filled with bogs, bog-dwellers, and broken buildings. The reason I bring this up is it’s a good test of a gaming laptop’s screen size: it’s tough on a full 32-inch monitor to make out an enemy player, a hunter, wearing brown and black hiding in the bushes. It’s tougher still to do that on a 14-inch gaming laptop. Even the leap to a 16-inch screen helps a lot here, and that’s something to consider if you’re considering a 14-inch design.
But the 14-inch form factor has many other benefits. Combined with a sleek chassis, you can score yourself a truly portable device that can slip into a backpack without much of a thought to its size or weight. That’s excellent for travel. You might have to deal with a slimmer battery life or more cramped controls, but a 14-inch gaming laptop can still offer many of the same features and functionality as its larger siblings. Just note, performance can be a little lower, on account of the restricted thermal solution.
Optional NVMe
2. Check for a spare NVMe SSD slot
One thing I always look for when either reviewing a new model of gaming laptop or scouting for a good deal is check whether there’s a spare NVMe SSD slot available. This isn’t just needless future proofing—a spare NVMe SSD slot means you can both upgrade your storage with another SSD or transfer your existing storage to a bigger drive with ease.
This is especially important as most gaming laptops only come with 1 TB of storage, or possibly less, and that will be gobbled up very quickly by any of today’s biggest games. It’s a bugbear of mine with so-called ‘premium’ gaming laptops that spare no expense… except the SSD capacity.
It’s a more common issue than you’d think. Even the Zephyrus G14 and Blade 14 usually come with no more than 1 TB and no spare NVMe slot.
Let’s hope manufacturers get the memo and start shipping more 2 TB SSDs as standard in 2025. For now, just make sure you have access to a spare slot and you can upgrade your storage with one of the best SSDs for gaming with just a few simple steps.
Generally, gaming laptops come with a a handful of cross-head or Torx screws holding on the underside cover. These can be easily removed with a good electronics screwdriver set. You might need to use some sort of plastic prying device to get under the edge of this cover, but it should come away relatively easily without too much force. I’ve only reviewed a handful of laptops where this felt like a hassle—if in doubt, don’t force it. Once removed, look for a spare NVMe slot, as per the image above.
GPU rich, CPU poor
3. Spend your money on the better GPU
When searching the web for laptop deals, I often find gaming laptops with budget GPUs inside them. However, they’re usually not on sale for the sort of discount you might expect relative to their performance. I’ll usually spot models with an RTX 4050 or RTX 3050/3060 for around the same price as those with an RTX 4060 or better. That’s obviously a bad deal, but there’s more to it than that.
Sometimes you’ll end up with a better model of CPU in exchange for a lower-end GPU. That’s fine for people that are only relying on the GPU for acceleration, encoding/decoding, or the odd spot of gaming; and who otherwise would use a more powerful CPU to its fullest. But for most PC gamers, it’s better to buy a more powerful GPU and accepting the slower CPU—your frame rates will thank you.
Sure, the CPU is a part of the processing equation and matters for frame rates, but often it won’t matter anywhere near as much as the GPU.
Remember memory
4. Make sure you’re not missing out on memory
Single-channel memory winds me up. This is when a manufacturer uses a single stick of RAM inside a single SO-DIMM slot and leaves the second SO-DIMM slot empty. It doesn’t sound that bad, but that’s performance left on the table for a very small monetary saving, and one which it doesn’t appear to me is passed along to the consumer that often.
What you want is two SO-DIMM slots occupied, as this means all the channels available on a CPU are being utilised at once for higher bandwidth. Higher bandwidth equals more performance. When you only use one stick, the bandwidth is fairly needlessly halved. It depends on what you’re doing at the time as to how much performance you might lose: in some memory-intensive workloads it could be double digit performance loss, in others, even often games, it might not be anywhere near as much. Though when dual-channel kits are so ubiquitous and similarly priced to just a single stick, why settle for anything less?
My advice then is to always check the full specs of any laptop you’re thinking of buy and check to see if it either specifically says “dual channel” in the memory specifications, or instead denotes it as, for example, a 16 GB (2x 8 GB) setup.
Clever combo
5. Do the laptop’s specs make sense together?
This is as much about a screen’s resolution as it is your choice of GPU. If you have an RTX 3050 inside your machine, you probably don’t need a 1440p screen with a refresh rate above 144 Hz. You won’t see much of a benefit in any sort of moderately demanding game. I’d even go as far to say you can probably spend the same money you were going to spend on that ‘premium’ RTX 3050 gaming laptop on a more sensibly balanced machine with a better GPU and a smarter screen choice. That’s depending on the deals at hand, but it’s not as unrealistic as it sounds.
I’d recommend sticking to 1080p with an RTX 4060 laptop or below. For an RTX 4070 or above, you can dive into 1440p, unless you want to push high frame rates for competitive gaming. In which case, 1080p is likely still the pick for you.
For gaming laptops alone, I’d generally recommend steering clear of 4K, as even the best RTX 4090 laptop is using a power-limited GPU akin to a desktop RTX 4080. While that’s still plenty powerful, 4K gaming is a tougher ask of a laptop than it is a desktop, and you won’t be able to extract your screen’s top performance without a large dose of DLSS. Even then, 4K does feel a little wasted on a gaming laptop with a compact display, whereas it makes much more sense for a content creation device.
It’s worth mentioning that it’s common to find gaming laptops with irregular resolutions. I’m talking about 2560 x 1600, mostly. That’s a result of pushing the vertical resolution higher on a 2560 x 1440 screen to accommodate the 16:10 aspect ratio. Some of our favourite laptops have this resolution today, such as the Zephyrus G16 2024, though it does pair that with a 240 Hz refresh rate, which can get a little too much for its components in a thermally-constrained chassis.
A 2560 x 1600 resolution with a 165 Hz refresh rate is a golden combo.
You can always drop down to 16:9 from 16:10 for a little performance boost in a given game, and still enjoy the same clear picture quality. However, if you drop a 4K laptop down to 1080p or 1440p, and it’s not a dual-mode screen like the one found on the Razer Blade 16, the picture can get pretty fuzzy. That’s why it pays to pick the best resolution before you buy.
Bonus: downsides
Bonus: Gaming laptop or gaming PC—be aware of the downsides
Noise, heat, longevity—these are three very important factors to consider when deciding between a gaming laptop and a gaming PC. The benefits of a gaming laptop are clear, but when it comes to these three things, you will find a gaming PC easily outflanks even the best gaming laptop around.
A gaming laptop might not always be empirically louder than a comparative gaming PC, but it’s almost certainly more noticeable to the user. You’re closer to the fans, and those fans are working harder. A gaming PC, on the other hand, will usually have a higher quantity of larger fans. These can run slower and therefore will operate at lower noise levels. Combined with the fact you’ll have a gaming PC under a desk, or at least not directly under your nose, it can be a much quieter experience. This also helps the gaming PC cool off quicker than a comparable laptop.
As mentioned earlier, you’re largely stuck with your choice of components in a gaming laptop when you buy it. Maybe you can upgrade the RAM or SSD, but the CPU and GPU are soldered in place. Compared to an easily repaired or replaced gaming PC, you might find a broken part kills your laptop prematurely, and you’re reliant on a warranty claim with the manufacturer or an expensive repair elsewhere.
This might sound like I’m trying to dissuade you from buying a gaming laptop. I’m not. They can be extremely convenient and flexible in a way that a gaming PC could never. They can cover a multitude of use cases—not just gaming but school or office work, too. Though it’s good to be sure of your reasons to buy a gaming laptop over a more traditional gaming PC before you head to the checkout. Otherwise, if you are planning to keep your machine mostly tethered to your desk, you can usually score a better deal and a more easily upgraded or repaired on a traditional gaming PC.
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