5 Best Budget Gaming Laptops,It’s finally time for a gaming laptop. Gone are the days when you had to pay twice as much as a desktop computer for half the performance. Modern gaming laptops have the same performance components as their desktop siblings, and not at all the price premium you might expect.
We’ve rounded up five of the best budget gaming laptops you can buy right now. “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 available if you need them!
The lowest level you should reach – Acer Nitro 5 Gaming Laptop
Acer’s Nitro 5 is probably as low as you’d really want to go with a budget gaming laptop in terms of specs. With a quad-core i5 processor with eight threads and a GTX 1650 GPU, you can expect 30-60 frames per second in modern games with corresponding “high†presets. If you want to get the quality of your console game, you will probably be fine with a stable 60fps or better.
Apart from the two main gaming components, there are other sacrifices to be made at this price point. You only get 8GB of RAM, but that’s enough for gaming and most games still set this RAM figure within their requirement range. You also only get a primary 256GB PCIe NVME drive, but with a second slot open, adding faster storage will be easy without having to reinstall Windows.
The monitor is a 60Hz Full HD IPS panel (in-plane switchable) for brilliant colors and picture quality. A high refresh rate screen would be wasted on a GPU that is unlikely to hit more than 60 frames per second, so it shouldn’t hurt at all to miss it.
While the styling is of course subjective, the Nitro 5 does look appropriate. It doesn’t have RGB backlighting that changes color, but the red keyboard backlighting provides a classic gaming laptop look combined with beautiful corners. If your budget for a slot machine is very tight, the Nitro 5 is a great choice for a decent gaming experience on the go.
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Your best bang – MSI GF65 9SD-252
The GF65 is worth the magical $ 1,000 mark and is worth almost every item on the budget gaming laptop checklist. It has a 6-core 12-thread processor, GTX 1660Ti, high refresh IPS screen and a SATA solid state drive with a decent 512GB storage. It’s unfortunate the lack of performance from a PCIe solid state drive, but for modern PC gaming, SATA will do when it comes to load times.
A slightly deeper cut is the 8GB RAM allocation. It’s one stick, so you can’t get dual channel memory right away. On the other hand, you only need to add another stick of RAM in the second open slot to reach the 16GB mark. This is an update we highly recommend, but even with the default configuration, you shouldn’t have any problems playing most modern games at high settings at 60fps or higher.
The GF65 is relatively compact with plenty of USB ports and a sleek design. Overall, this is an incredibly well balanced system, and its biggest flaws can be addressed through subsequent updates.
The Beauty of the Big Screen – XPC ROG Strix G GL731 Gamer Notebook
The “ROG Strix” trademark is reserved for Asus notebooks focused on hardcore gaming. This particular model is sold by Xotic PC, a company known as a gaming computer reseller. However, this is still an Asus machine, no doubt about it.
At first glance, the GL731 may not look much better than, for example, the GF65 we reviewed above. After all, it has the same combination of CPU and GPU It’s easy to overlook the fact that this is a 17.3-inch machine, which is a significant improvement in screen size over the much more mainstream 15.6-inch devices.
This isn’t always good, but it means a much smoother viewing experience, much better keyboard spacing, and more cooling space. The downside is portability, but when carried in a backpack, there is little difference between the two.
You also get 16GB of RAM out of the box, but if you’re on a large budget, you can choose from a variety of RAM and SSD configurations that Xotic will install for you before shipping the laptop.
The design is great and this 17.3-inch 144Hz screen is definitely the star of the show. For the asking price, this is truly one of the nicest cars you can buy. It’s also rare to find 17-inch gaming laptops at this price point, so if that’s a priority for you, the XPC ROG Strix is ??highly recommended. However, if you want higher specs, you can get 15.6-inch laptops for the same price with better internals. The choice is entirely up to you.
Monster Budget Specifications – MSI GS65 Stealth
This is exactly the laptop that we just mentioned. 15.6-inch computer that uses its $ 1,500 budget to add faster hardware. The CPU is the same 6-core i7 found in most gaming laptops of almost any budget today. And that’s okay, since the i7-9750H is fast enough for gaming. Most likely, the budget was set aside for an RTX 2060, 32GB of RAM and a Full HD display at 240Hz .
Yes, you read that right. With a refresh rate this high, you’ll almost never have more frames than the screen can display. Input lag should also be virtually imperceptible, making it a great choice for competitive players moving from one location to another.
The GS65 also has a Thunderbolt 3 port, which opens up the possibility of using an external GPU We also like the gold and black styles. Nice change from red!
More Cores, Better – ASUS TUF Gaming VR Ready laptop
Ignore the “VR Ready” bit in the description. With the exception of the Nitro 5, all laptops are “VR Ready“. What really sets TUF apart is its 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen processor. AMD is giving Intel a good boost to this generation, and TUF takes full advantage of it.
Stream to Twitch, play games that require a lot of cores, and do other things like video editing. TUF will eat it and spit it out. With 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD, this might be the best all-in-one desktop replacement you can buy right now. Not just for games, but for anything else you want to do.
If you agree with the Intel team ditching (and why not?), This is the absolute killer of the deal. We’d love to see Thunderbolt 3 support, but that’s a mild niggle and you can always opt for the GS65 Stealth should you need an external GPU in the future.5 Best Budget Gaming Laptops