The best gaming laptops in 2025 can finally be the do-anything notebooks we’ve always wanted them to be. As well as being just as capable 3D rendering in Blender, or thrashing the GPU with generative AI, now they’re not just frame rate-chewing gaming monsters when plugged into the power socket, they’re machines that can game when running on battery, too.
The new Nvidia GPUs paired up with either AMD’s mighty Strix Point APUs, or Intel’s Arrow Lake H-series CPUs, have delivered the best gaming laptops we’ve ever tested on PC Gamer. And the team here have been testing notebooks with a collective 60+ years of tech-prodding experience. We know what makes them tick, and what makes a great system.
We might well have seen the ultimate head-to-heads already, and that has given us a new winner for the best overall machine. The best gaming laptop today is the new Razer Blade 16, and it is a stunning machine that rights all the wrongs of its previously portly chassis of the past few years. It’s now a gloriously slimline machine, but still utterly on point in terms of the experience you want from a powerful notebook for gaming. It’s put the latest Asus Zephyrus G16 in the shade, though that’s largely down to its preference for Intel over AMD CPUs and a vastly improved Razer design. And it actually has battery life. Yes, this is the big change for gaming laptops in 2025, they actually have decent gaming battery life.
It’s the same situation when it comes to the compact machines, too, with the best 14-inch gaming laptop being the new Razer Blade 14, which has just pipped the Asus Zephyrus G14 to the title thanks to its gorgeous design and sumptuous gaming experience.
The quick list
The best overall
Now we’ve seen the new Blade 16 and Asus Zephyrus G16 laptops side-by-side we can categorically say that Razer has absolutely won this round. On all counts, the newly redesigned Blade 16 is the best gaming laptop you can buy today.
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The best budget
Gigabyte has created an excellent budget gaming laptop, and while the screen could be better, it offers a nice combination of components for very reasonable money.
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The best 14-inch
If you want your gaming laptop to actually be a proper mobile gaming device, then the newly redesigned Razer Blade 14 is the best compact notebook you can buy. It may top out at an RTX 5070, but that fits perfectly its slimline beautiful chassis.
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The best mid-range
We weren’t huge fans of MSI’s last-gen gaming laptops, but the mid-range Vector manages to deliver both high frame rates, a decent price, and a setup that allows for a balanced mode with decent performance and acceptable fan noise.
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5. Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10
The best high-performance
If you want the best gaming frame rates full stop, then Lenovo’s redesigned Legion Pro 7i is the gaming laptop you should covet. The new design looks great, and that thicker chassis allows for the absolute best gaming performance we’ve seen in a current-gen machine.
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The best 18-inch
Almost the best gaming laptop Alienware has made, only a better keyboard and screen are missing from the otherwise excellent package. Great performance and good looks make the 18-inch Area-51 the best desktop replacement around.
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Dave James
Dave has had his head in PCs and gaming laptops for a couple of decades now, and knows what makes them tick, and what makes the best gaming laptop for every budget. Whether it’s about looking for the highest performance, the best value, best screen, or just the best build quality, Dave has spent time prodding and tweaking pretty much all the laptops on this list.
August 29, 2025: I’ve dropped in the new Alienware 18 Area-51 as the best 18-inch gaming laptop, entirely replacing the best 17-inch category. It’s able to deliver outstanding performance from both its RTX 5090 GPU and Core Ultra 9 CPU, even if it suffers away from a plug socket. I’ve also added in all the gaming laptop reviews we’ve published in the past few months, and there have been a few. I’ve also made the page a bit prettier, I hope you like it.
July 5, 2025: I’ve added in every scrap of benchmarking data that we have collected on each of the gaming laptops that we recommend. We run a ton of tests on each and every machine we test, even the ones that don’t end up making the cut, so that we can give a fully definitive take on what the absolute best gaming laptops are.
June 25, 2025: I’ve spent weeks testing the two best compact gaming laptops around—the Razer Blade 14 and the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14—and while the Asus notebook is still an excellent machine, for my money the Blade 14 is now the best 14-inch gaming laptop you can buy. It was a close run thing, but the Razer just shades it with a beautiful slimmer design and far less fan noise than the higher-spec G14, yet with similar gaming performance.
The best gaming laptop
Our favorite config:
We tested: AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | RTX 5090 | 32 GB | 2 TB SSD
Buy if…
✅ You want a slimline PC equivalent of a gaming MacBook: The Razer Blade laptops have long been the embodiment of PC gaming power in a black MacBook form factor… that is until the past couple of generations. Now it’s been slimmed down, the cooling has been improved, and it’s an all-day machine.
✅ You want a quiet laptop: Despite housing up to an RTX 5090, the Blade 16 is surprisingly quiet even at full chat, and can game quite happily quietly, too.
✅ You’re after genuine gaming laptop battery life: While not totally unprecedented, the Blade’s PCMark 10 over two hours of uptime is impressive, but what’s more impressive is that actual experience of gaming on battery now. It’s slick, effective, and no longer restricted to 30 fps.
✅ You want the best laptop screen: There is no other gaming laptop that can match the Blade’s stunning OLED display. It was the best last generation and so far we’ve yet to see any other device beat it.
Don’t buy if…
❌ You’re after a budget option: Even though Razer has tried to be far more aggressive on price this time around, there is no cheap Blade 16. This is a premium gaming laptop, and you will have to pay for that experience.
❌ You just want top perf and don’t care about noise: There will absolutely be faster RTX 5090 laptops that let the fans go to top speeds, and provide an enormous chassis to deliver the ultimate cooling performance. But they will be big, loud laptops and won’t match the experience of using the Blade.
The bottom line
🪛 The 2025 edition of the Razer Blade 16 is easily the best gaming laptop I’ve ever tested. It’s a machine that’s perfectly sized and setup for PC gaming in modern times, but also one that delivers an unprecedented level of gaming prowess away from a power socket. It’s a do-anything notebook that can be your one PC to rule them all.
The new Razer Blade 16 is the best gaming laptop I’ve ever used, and I’ve been messing around with them professionally for the best part of 20 years now. But it’s not about the fact I’ve been using an RTX 5090-powered version, and that it’s simply the fastest, most powerful machine I’ve had the pleasure of toasting my lap. Because it’s not. The real kicker, the real reason why this is the best gaming laptop is because the experience of actually using the device itself is a genuine pleasure—whether that’s gaming, productivity, or just general laptopery.
The interesting thing about this new generation of gaming laptop GPU is that Nvidia hasn’t—too some disdain around the internet—made the RTX 50-series notably faster than what went before with the Ada mobile GPUs. The RTX 5090 in this Blade 16 is barely any faster than the RTX 4090 of the previous generation, and I’ve had RTX 5080-powered machines in my hands that delivered the same frame rates; sometimes even better.
What Nvidia has done with the mobile form of the RTX Blackwell GPU architecture is make it far more efficient and effective in a laptop form factor.
So yes, it’s not about the performance, it’s about the experience. Which sounds like a thoroughly unsatisfying way to recommend a gaming laptop, but do give me a chance to explain. High-performance gaming laptops are rarely the sorts of mobile devices that you would want to use day-in-day-out to use for all your computing needs.
They’re often super chonky, super loud, and deliver atrocious battery life. The Blade 16 is the antithesis to all of those failings, with a chassis that is has a 30% reduction in overall volume and uses a smart “thermal hood” which sits over the fans and heatsink, giving some extra space to shift air around without making the overall feel of the machine anywhere near as thick as the Blade 16 has been. We’re getting back to the slimline feel of the original Blade 15 and that is a welcome return to form.
That cooling hood, and improved overall thermal design, means the Blade 16, even at full volume, doesn’t get its fan noise up to the same level as something like the new Asus Zephyrus G16 or the Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 I’ve checked out. It is still noticeable, and you’re not going to want to sit in a library with the fans on full, but it has none of the turbine whoosh of the Gigabyte or the whine of the Asus.
And even when you rein the fans in, knocking the cooling performance down a notch or two, the thing will still deliver great frame rates. Partly that’s where Nvidia’s new Multi Frame Generation party trick comes into its own on mobile, allowing you to dial the hardware down while still enjoying high frame rates at the same time.
That also helps on battery when you’re gaming, as does the GPU architecture’s ability to quickly shift gears in terms of the frequency and power draw, within the timing of a single frame, even. That efficiency delivers a huge difference in gaming away from the plug, and Nvidia’s new BatteryBoost tech helps, too. Now, it will crush the in-game settings if you allow it to optimise them on its own, but it also comes with a context-aware algorithm that will drop the frame rate to 30 fps when it sees there’s limited action on screen. Think something like an inventory or dialogue screen.
The speed at which the GPU can pull things back means the RTX 50-series is able to deliver both excellent frame rates on battery while still delivering genuine gaming time away from a power source.
It’s worth noting the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 isn’t just twiddling its thumbs, either. The AMD silicon is definitely helping with efficient battery usage, too, and offers a quality iGPU for when you’re running less demanding games and want to take the discrete GPU out of the equation and really max out gaming battery life.
I will say that the Arrow Lake H CPUs are more powerful in gaming terms, and if there’s a title, such as Baldur’s Gate 3, which is heavily CPU-limited, then the Intel machines do pull ahead. But, they are also louder and have lower battery life numbers.
Then there’s the actual machine itself. I’ve already noted how much slimmer the chassis design is, but it’s still feels beautifully rigid—even if it is still a total fingerprint magnet—but the keyboard is soooo much better now, too. The extra travel really makes it a pleasure to type on, in a way not a lot of chiclet keyboards are. The vast trackpad from previous Blades remains, and it’s just as responsive as ever, so long as your digits aren’t either too dry or too sweaty.
And that screen. Oh my, there has not been another laptop screen that has impressed so much as the 1600p OLED in the Blade. Yes, it’s the same as last year, but there has been no other panel that can match it. We’ve had other 1600p OLED panels side-by-side with it and the Blade’s is absolutely best—and there aren’t a ton of actual OLED panel manufacturers so there must be something to Razer’s tuning and electronics going on here.
All told, the Blade 16 is the do-anything gaming laptop I’ve always wanted. It can game like a champ on the latest games at high resolution and frame rates, it can even do it on battery, and will do it quietly, too. But it can also be a productivity notebook I’ve been able to use in my day-to-day work away from the plug with no concerns about scrabbling around for a charger. It’s the best gaming laptop around today, and there’s going to have to be something special if another manufacturer wants to topple it.
Read our full Razer Blade 16 (2025) review.
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The best budget gaming laptop
Our favorite config:
We tested: Intel Core i7 13650HX | Nvidia RTX 4060 | 32 GB DDR5-4800 | 1 TB NVMe SSD
Buy if…
✅ You want solid 1080p gaming performance: With a decent RTX 40-series GPU at its core and a speedy 1080p screen, the G6X offers a simple, straightforward gaming experience.
✅ You want plenty of storage: The spare NVMe SSD slot within the G6X is easily accessed. Just a couple of screws to expand your storage even further.
Don’t buy if…
❌ You want silence: The fan noise on the G6X is noticeable. Like, really noticeable. That’s the same as most gaming laptops, though this is definitely not on the quieter end of the spectrum.
❌ You like a detailed screen: The 16:10 aspect ratio helps a bunch here, but it’s still only just over a traditional 1080p resolution. That means a lot less pixels compared to 1440p or 4K.
The bottom line
🪛 The Gigabyte G6X (2024) might not make a major splash with its standard specification, but it’s a healthy balance of performance, power and price. That’s what counts for the best budget gaming laptop.
The best budget gaming laptop is the Gigabyte G6X (2024). It takes the place of the Gigabyte G5 we had in this spot previously, mostly because it offers more affordable gaming performance but with newer, improved parts inside.
The model we reviewed contains a Core i7 13650HX, which is not actually Intel’s most recent mobile gaming processor generation. However, that’s an omission I’m happy to make. They’re mostly the same and the six P-cores and eight E-cores on this Core i7 are plenty for your needs.
That chip is combined with a 105 W RTX 4060—that’s actually a large power budget for this GPU, and that shows in the performance it delivers, as evidenced in the benchmark charts below. What’s more, it’s a small dose faster than the outgoing Gigabyte G5 KF I’ve replaced in this spot—those hardware changes do count for something in games.
Let’s talk about the screen. It’s a full 16 inches in size, with a 16:10 aspect ratio, 1920 x 1200 pixels, and a refresh rate of 165 Hz. It’s pretty darn good, in other words.
Importantly, that screen is a good fit for the hardware beneath it. Though it does suffer from a bit of the case of the blands—that is to say, it’s a bit dull and overly dark. These budget laptops often tend to suffer this fate and the G6X is no different to its predecessors on this point. Ultimately, I’d call it “perfectly average.”
The noise from the fans when they’re running at full bore is also quite average, which means this laptop is rather loud. That’s just part of the parcel with a gaming laptop, but more so these affordable models.
The design of this laptop is pretty standard stuff, too. Though it’s decisively less ‘gamery’ than some. A single zone of RGB LEDs illuminates the keyboard and there’s room for a reasonably big trackpad. Within the chassis, you can easily access the spare NVMe slot should you wish to bolster your storage above 1TB, which you probably will, and this machine comes with two DIMM slots. In our review model, these were accommodating 32 GB of DDR5-4800—though you could save some cash on the 16 GB model and get by in games just fine. It wouldn’t be difficult to swap out for a higher-capacity kit down the line.
Overall, the Gigabyte G6X offers exactly what we ask for in a budget gaming laptop. You could happily game on one right out of the box, though it’s an easily upgradeable platform if required.
Read our full Gigabyte G6X (2024) review.
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The best 14-inch gaming laptop
Our favorite config:
We tested: Ryzen 9 AI 365 | RTX 5070 115 W | 32 GB RAM | 1 TB SSD
Buy if…
✅ You want a genuinely portable gaming laptop: The Blade 14 is a supremely mobile machine, with a beautiful aesthetic and excellent cooling and battery performance.
✅ You care more for the experience than the raw numbers: The Asus G14 will deliver higher frame rate figures, but for that you have to deal with its horrendous turbine whine, while the Blade 14 goes about its business comparatively quietly.
Don’t buy if…
❌ Every penny must count: A more performant 14-inch laptop will cost you less, but it’s not a better laptop, yet the Blade is such a premium that any necessary concessions to cost should have you switching allegiance to the Asus G14.
The bottom line
🪛 The Razer Blade 14 has staged an impressive comeback, with a price cut compared with the previous generation, a better OLED screen, and a slimline chassis that makes it the perfect compact gaming laptop.
For my money, the new Blade 14 is absolutely the best 14-inch gaming laptop you can buy today. Though that was certainly not the case in the previous generation, where Asus went straight for Razer’s jugular, redesigning its Zephyrus G14 to create a beautiful little AMD-powered laptop that had our hearts aflutter.
But that forced Razer to go back to the drawing board, and its own redesign—one that’s also seen the Blade 16 given a nip and tuck—has now delivered a fantastic compact notebook that just about has the edge over Asus’ still impressive device.
The slimmer chassis design makes the new Blade 14 look more modern than last year’s far chonkier design, something that really put me off all the Blade laptops of the previous generation. But now we’re back with the MacBook-ish aesthetic that means the new machine would fit as well in a boardroom meeting as in your gaming den. Well, so long as you disable the green glow of that Razer logo on the lid anyways.
It’s a little heavier than the G14 still, despite being essentially the same size, but it’s still easily picked up in one hand and will comfortably slip into your day bag for your trip to the office or school and won’t weigh you down. It feels reassuringly solid, with Razer’s classic unibody chassis giving it a rigidity that speaks of a robust laptop you really can take everywhere with you. And it will also happily survive away from a plug socket on your travels, too, as we’ve tracked gaming performance that measures well over two hours, so standard desktop battery life is well above that.
That slimmer chassis does mean Razer has had to do away with configurable memory, which means soldered memory and no option to upgrade down the line, at least not for the folk without solder for blood. That’s mostly a non-issue for me, with the RTX 5070 version coming with 32 GB or 64 GB options at point of sale, but does give me pause for the RTX 5060 Blade 14. It’s still more than $2,000 and comes with just 16 GB LPDDR5X and nowhere to go after that.
The limited spec options are a bit of an issue on the surface for the Blade 14, especially with the inevitable comparison to the new Zephyrus G14. The Asus laptop can be configured with RTX 5070, RTX 5070 Ti, or RTX 5080 GPUs, making more powerful options on offer for those who want the raw performance, while the Blade 14 is restricted to the 8 GB RTX 5070 as the top GPU offering.
For some, with a bee in their bonnet about 8 GB GPUs, that will be a deal-breaker. But having personally tested the RTX 5070 Blade 14 against the RTX 5070 Ti G14 there really isn’t a lot between them even at the native 1880 x 1800 resolution of their identical (and identically gorgeous) 120 Hz OLED displays. And when you have the twin boons of DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation the Blade 14 remains a solid gaming device.
More concerning for the RTX 5070 Ti-toting Zephyrus G14, however, is its new cooling design. There is an unpleasant dual-tone fan noise which becomes truly distracting when pushing the Asus laptop at all in-game. The only solution I found to deliver a decent aural experience was to use the manual configuration options to restrict power, which ended up restricting the gaming performance to that of the lower spec Blade 14 anyway. With both machines running at a similar level of fan noise they essentially run at the same speed.
The weaker AMD APU in the Blade 14, however, is disappointing. Not necessarily for lacking a pair of Zen 5c cores from its make up—it’s still a 10-core, 20-thread chip—but for its integrated GPU. The iGPU in the G14 is the top-of-the-AMD-range Strix Point 890M, and that delivers notably better gaming performance, and in a 14-inch gaming laptop the ability to park the power hungry discrete GPU on the go makes for much longer battery life and still decent 1080p gaming frame rates.
The Ryzen AI 9 365 in the Blade 14 is more akin to the last generation of iGPUs, the sort you will find in something like the Asus ROG Ally X, so it’s certainly not awful, just not the top-spec I’d want when I’m spending $2,500 on a compact gaming laptop.
But the Razer Blade 14 is still the gaming laptop that I would actually want to be spending my own money on. I’ve spent a long while testing both this and the G14 together, and while the Asus is still a quality machine, there’s only one I’d be looking to buy myself, and that’s the Razer. It delivers a better experience, is a better looking system, and though it is pricey (while still being cheaper than the previous generation) it’s still the best 14-inch gaming laptop you can buy.
Read our full Razer Blade 14 review.
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The best mid-range gaming laptop
Our favorite config:
We tested: Intel Core Ultra 9 275X | RTX 5080 | 32 GB DDR5-5600 | 1 TB
Buy if…
✅ You want an affordable gaming-focused laptop: The new Vector 16 is all about gaming performance at a decent price, and that means it’s not necessarily a do-everything machine, but if gaming frame rates are all you want, the MSI will deliver.
✅ You don’t want excessive fan noise when plugged in: The broad chassis and impressive gaming performance of the MSI means that you don’t need to run at full speed to get great frame rates, and that means you don’t need the fans going into overdrive to play the latest titles.
Don’t buy if…
❌ You need one device to rule them all: The Vector isn’t a one-trick pony by any means, but its gaming focus and lack of true portability means that it’s not the sort of notebook you’ll be using for school or office work in the day. The form factor and battery life kinda see to that.
The bottom line
🪛 The MSI Vector 16 HX AI will deliver impressive frame rates that you may not have expected from its relatively affordable position. It’s not a budget laptop by any means, but considering the cost of competing RTX 5080 notebooks it’s a very compelling gaming package.
When I first pulled the Vector 16 HX AI out of its packaging and started benchmarking it, I certainly did not expect it to be finding a spot in our best gaming laptop list. It’s a chonky notebook and when you put it into top performance mode the thing sounds like a chinook trying to take off inside an echo chamber.
But then my testing showed that it delivers some of the highest gaming frame rates of any RTX 5080-powered gaming laptop we’ve tested in this generation. Now, if that performance comes at the cost of your sanity, as the constant roar of the cooling fans drills down to the core of your soul, then I’d probably suggest it matters not a jot. But, because of those high frame rates, and the way MSI has managed its different performance modes, you’re still getting gaming speeds in the balanced preset that matches many other systems’ full speed modes.
And that calms down the fan noise to a level that is completely acceptable. Suddenly I was looking at a gaming laptop which, while not a particularly svelte machine, was still able to deliver a thoroughly pleasing gaming experience.
And then I looked at the price. Even at its standard $2,500 price point that puts it below pretty much every other gaming laptop I’ve seen sporting the same Nvidia RTX 5080 mobile graphics chip. Cheaper and faster is a combo that I am always happy to get behind, and I will take a compromise if it comes in the shape of a bit of a thick machine.
Sure, it feels kinda anachronistic in terms of scale, but certainly not in performance.
Though I will say that chassis does have some design quirks which I’m not so happy with. Mostly that’s down to the severe, almost serrated edge that seems to have been explicitly designed to cut into your wrists as you type. The keyboard response also isn’t that pleasing, with a slightly squishy feel to the travel of the keys themselves, and—on a completely aesthetic note—I really don’t like the font, either.
As a whole package, the Vector 16 HX AI is still a quality machine, however. The 1600p IPS screen may not have the impact of an OLED display, but it’s still bright enough and fast enough at 240 Hz, to not have me minding overmuch. I’m also into this machine when the back panel has been removed; just look at those heatpipes! Oh, and when the back’s off you can also directly and easily access a spare M.2 slot to expand your storage—considering the RTX 5070 Ti version comes with a frankly miserly 512 GB SSD, the ease of expanding that is certainly welcome, and arguably necessary.
So, if you’re after top gaming performance without paying top dollar, the MSI Vector 16 HX AI will absolutely deliver, just don’t expect to be gaming on the go with this hefty chassis and limited gaming battery life.
Read our full MSI Vector 16 HX AI review.
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The best high-performance gaming laptop
Our favorite config:
We tested: Core Ultra 9 275HX | RTX 5080 | 32 GB DDR5-6400 | 2x 1 TB SSDs
Buy if…
✅ You just want the best gaming performance: Lenovo hasn’t gone down the slimmed-down, portable route Razer has taken with this generation, instead prioritising getting the most gaming performance out of its components as possible.
✅ You want to tailor your experience: Gaming laptops are loud, but with an unprecedented level of customization available to the end user, you can create a profile that maxes out the GPU without running at a frankly offensive fan noise level.
✅ You want a great screen and keyboard: It’s not just about the internals, the OLED screen and classically good Lenovo keyboard are also major highlights of the new Legion Pro 7i.
Don’t buy if…
❌ You’re looking to game on the battery: While the Blade 16 has made that a reality, don’t expect the same to be true of the Lenovo. The Intel CPU and the Legion tuning means that your gaming battery life is sadly minimal.
❌ You want a thin device: The Legion Pro 7i is unashamedly chonky, with a design aimed squarely at maximizing gaming frame rates over portability.
The bottom line
🪛 The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i is simply the most powerful gaming laptop I’ve tested from this generation, beating even the gaming performance of the vastly more expensive RTX 5090 Blade 16. It doesn’t have the portability or battery life, but if you’re specifically after a gaming machine first and foremost, Lenovo has made a laptop just for you.
It may be a real chonker of a gaming laptop, but there is a real style to Lenovo’s new Legion Pro 7i design, and more than a little Alienware-esque flair, too. The geometric RGB rings around the rear exhaust ports on the machine, and the front light bar give it that effect, and a real eye-catching style. But it’s the gaming frame rates which have made this Legion Pro 7i the best high-performance gaming laptop on our list.
Lenovo has also ditched the side vents in this generation, leading to a far slicker look to the Gen 10 chassis. And, while it is a thick laptop, it doesn’t feel like some sort of notebook throwback to the naughties, and that extra girth has allowed it to create the conditions to deliver, on the whole, the best gaming performance I’ve seen in any of the laptops I’ve tested from this latest generation of machines.
And I’ve tested a bunch of them now. For me, if it’s a question of a top two, then it’s between the Blade 16 and this new Legion Pro 7i. In terms of pure performance alone you couldn’t look beyond the Lenovo—it tops the Razer machine’s RTX 5090 with a lower sticker price and theoretically weaker GPU—but if you want a do-everything notebook with genuine battery gaming chops, the Blade is 100% where it’s at.
That Legion gaming performance comes at a cost, however. As is often the case with high-end Lenovo machines, the battery life is pretty poor, and if you stick the Legion Pro into its high performance mode then the fan noise is a distraction. I will note that it’s not as bad as the Legion 9i I’ve tested in previous generations, which is a definite plus, but it’s still very noticeable.
And if you kick the performance preset back to balanced, then Lenovo seems to have chosen to hack away GPU power while leaving the CPU to run at unnecessarily high frequencies. That means gaming performance is more heavily compromised when compared with other devices running in their own balanced presets.
That would have been it for the Legion Pro 7i for me if that was the whole picture. I wouldn’t want to game with the level of fan noise you get at peak settings, and the balanced compromise a step too far. But the LegionSpace app comes to the rescue, offering a custom mode with a granular level of tweakery to please any PC nerd.
It’s unprecedented and the sort of thing gaming laptops have been crying out for, and with it I can restrain the excesses of the Intel CPU while letting the Nvidia GPU run free, keeping fan noise in check while I do so. This means there’s little compromise to gaming performance, fan noise stays relatively low, and I can flip on the DLSS 4 extras, such as Multi Frame Gen and see frankly ludicrous gaming performance from this machine.
Obviously the gaming performance is why the Legion Pro 7i has a place in our best gaming laptop list, but it’s absolutely worth mentioning the stellar OLED screen—it’s bright and crisp, and comes with a glossy coating to accentuate its contrast levels—and the always excellent Lenovo keyboard.
I’m not such a fan of the small, yet responsive, trackpad, but honestly I’m going to have a gaming mouse plugged into this thing for the most part.
If all I wanted was the most performant gaming laptop around, then I would be absolutely hell bent on trying to find the cash to bag myself a Legion Pro 7i. The package as a whole is excellent, with just a note of concern over the launch price of the RTX 5080 system. Fingers crossed it follows past Lenovo history and we see this machine drop in price—that could make it one of the best value gaming laptops, too.
Read our full Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 10 review.
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The best 18-inch gaming laptop
Our favorite config:
We tested: Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX | Nvidia RTX 5090 | 64 GB DDR5-6400 | 2 TB SSD
Buy if…
✅ You want that Alienware badge. Even the most casual of gamers will know the name, so for pure kudos, that alien logo beats them all.
✅ You want desktop-like performance in a compact form factor. The Area-51 is a big laptop but won’t leave you wanting in games or content creation.
Don’t buy if…
❌ You value your wallet. You could buy a fine gaming laptop and a full desktop PC for the same amount of money.
❌ You fancy a spot of unplugged gaming. Even with Nvidia’s Battery Boost option disabled, the GPU is still hit with an aggressively low power limit, which can noticeably impact performance.
The bottom line
🪛 The Alienware 18 Area-51 is one of the best gaming laptops the company has produced in recent years, delivering top-tier mobile performance in a classy-looking chassis. Our only slight issues are with the lacklustre screen and keyboard.
There’s something delightfully old-school about the new Alienware 18 Area-51. Its anodised aluminum chassis is anachronistic in all the right ways, while still feeling modern. I’m into it, is what I’m saying, especially in this large, desktop replacement form. In fact, right now, the Alienware 18 Area-51 is the best 18-inch gaming laptop you can buy. And we’ve tested a good few of this generation.
Previously, that desktop replacement form factor was given over to the 17-inch machine, but as bezels have shrunk, and we’ve been able to squeeze 18-inch displays into practically the same chassis as 17.3-inch panels, the measurements have shifted.
And if you’re going to be using a clamshell device almost exclusively on a desktop, then having a bigger screen than a 14- or 16-inch gaming laptop makes sense. Especially if you’re looking at this as maybe even a productivity system.
The Alienware’s 2560 x 1600 screen maybe doesn’t necessarily lend itself perfectly to that notion, maybe not for the budding video producer managing 4K video day-in, day-out. But what it does mean is that you can get great gaming performance out of both the mobile GPU at the machine’s heart and the panel it’s pumping pixels onto.
This is what the Alienware 18 Area-51 is actually best at, because when paired with the RTX 5090 mobile graphics chip you are able to get the most out of that powerful slice of GPU silicon. I have tested an RTX 5090 version of the HP Omen Max 16, and that does deliver marginally higher frame rates, but it’s clear the serious cooling on offer with the Alienware machine is letting the Nvidia chip do its thing more than capably.
And certainly more so than the Razer Blade 16. Though, in its defence, that was a necessary concession from Razer to make a deliciously slim chassis.
The gaming performance is excellent with the RTX 5090 version we reviewed, and so is the content creation and productivity chops of this machine. The Intel processor at its heart may not be as efficient, or have as good an integrated GPU inside it, but it’s still an outstanding computational architecture.
Even the nominally faster Core Ultra 9 285HX inside the MSI Raider 18 HX AI can’t keep up with what Alienware’s cooling allows its Core Ultra 9 275HX chip to deliver in terms of raw compute power.
Another area where the Area-51 stands out is in the storage stakes. The fact you can order it to arrive at your door with fully 12 TB of fast SSD storage is impressive, but when the standard machine comes with a pair of spare M.2 slots in the board alongside the already installed one, that gives you a ton of upgrade options down the line. As does the fact the big 18-inch chassis allows Dell to use SODIMMs in the Alienware machine. That means you can switch out the memory if you need more, or faster RAM in the future.
It’s not a perfect desktop replacement, however. Honestly, in a high-priced 18-inch laptop I want a great screen, and this one just isn’t. It’s fine, but an OLED at least would be more than welcome, as would even a higher resolution panel. Sure, you do get 300 Hz refresh when powered directly from the discrete GPU itself, but it’s still not a winner.
Neither is the optional low-profile mechanical keyboard upgrade. We’ve tested it in our sample and it’s a bit rattly, a bit squeaky, and really feels oddly cheap. The standard keyboard would be fine, in our opinion.
The final issue we had was when we pulled the plug. Inevitably it has a pretty mediocre battery life, which is what we’ve come to expect from a big boi laptop, but the on-battery gaming performance of the Razer Blade with its own RTX 5090 was something that really turned my head when I was testing it out. The Alienware, however, is either restricted to 30 fps if you have Nvidia’s Battery Boost enabled, or struggles to get above 50 fps without it. Something in the Area-51 is really limiting power to the GPU when it’s not plugged in.
As I said, that’s not a huge issue for a massive laptop like this, but still not ideal. Otherwise, this is an excellent big-screen gaming laptop that beats out the rest of the 18-inch competition because of its quality cooling, funky chassis, and excellent overall gaming and computational performance.
Read our full Alienware 18 Area-51 review.
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How we test gaming laptops
For the new generation of gaming laptops we have changed our testing suite for the new machines coming through in 2025. Part of that is bringing in more up to date games, but also ensuring that we’re capturing both gaming at a consistent, comparative 1080p resolution as well as at each machine’s native resolution.
We are currently using Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur’s Gate 3, Black Myth Wukong, F1 24, and Metro Exodus Enhanced Ed. as our GPU testing suite. This gives us a spread of third-person, first-person, driving, and RPG/strategy games to really push the machines being tested, and also allows us to feature the latest in GPU features, such as upscaling and frame generation.
As such, we have also included a ‘real-world’ benchmark for games where that makes sense in our reviews, where we utilise both Quality upscaling as well as frame generation where available. We also test without so that we can get a bead on how the hardware performs, but this metric allows you to see what sort of frame rates you can get in standard gaming.
As well as games, we use the industry standard 3DMark benchmarks of Time Spy Extreme, Port Royal—for ray tracing performance—and the storage benchmark to see how the system will work in terms of slick game loading.
We track both gaming temperatures, using Nvidia’s Frameview application while capturing both average and 1% Low frame rates, and we also capture thermals of both CPU and GPU while engaging in more productivity lead testing.
On that count we run Cinebench 2024 for CPU-based rendering, 7zip 24.07 for general CPU performance, Blender 4.2.0 to test both CPU and GPU rendering performance, and Procyon to test a machine’s AI image generation capabilities.
Finally, we use the PCMark 10 Gaming battery life benchmark to allow us to get a standard number for how long a machine will stand up to the rigours of modern gaming.
But we also run some experiential tests on a given system, which will involve using it as a day-to-day PC for work and play, ensuring we get a read on how well a machine performs across different use cases. We also check out a system’s panel—we use Lagom’s LCD test images to help discern things like black levels and white saturation as well as general desktop and gaming testing to see how it feels to use a laptop’s screen.
It’s also important to check the actual gaming frequency of both a laptop’s GPU and CPU, to see how a given slice of silicon performs given the thermal constraints of different notebook chassis.
We will also open up every laptop, not only to see how easy it is to get the back off the different machines, but also to see whether it’s possible to upgrade or repair anything inside them. It’s important to see whether there might be a second M.2 SSD slot hiding away in there, or whether there is upgradeable memory, or whether some unscrupulous manufacturer has decided to just go with single channel memory or some such poor play.
Personally I also like to always write a review of a given laptop on the machine itself. That gives you a good feel about both the trackpad and keyboard, as well as the ergonomics of the chassis design, too.
We then bring all of that subjective and objective data together alongside the price to decide how well each machine we test stands up against all the other gaming laptops we’ve looked at in our combined decades of PC hardware testing.
Also tested
The above gaming laptops are the ones we recommend you spend your hard-earned cash on if you’re looking for a new machine, but they aren’t the only ones we’ve reviewed. We regularly test different gaming laptops to make sure we’re recommending only the absolute best.
These are the machines we’ve looked at recently that didn’t make the cut…
How to spot the best deal
Five things I want you to think about before you buy your first gaming laptop
Where are the best gaming laptop deals?
In the US:
Amazon – RTX 3050 laptops from Acer and Dell starting at $650
Walmart – cheap Gateway laptops. Remember them?!
B&H Photo – up to $500 off Lenovo, Asus, & MSI gaming laptops
Target – sub-$1,000 gaming laptops
Staples – up to $300 off MSI gaming notebooks
Lenovo – $1,000+ discounts on Legion laptops
Newegg – $500+ off RTX 30 series gaming laptops
Best Buy – save up to $500 on gaming laptops
Microsoft – up to half price on last-gen laptops
Dell – save over $300 on Dell and Alienware gaming laptops
In the UK:
Amazon – save on Asus, Razer, and Acer gaming laptops
Dell – Alienware and Dell Gaming laptops with up to £500 off
HP – Save £450 on HP Omen laptop powered by an RTX 3070 Ti
Overclockers – gaming laptop deals and components
Ebuyer – RTX 3060-powered gaming laptop for just £799.98
Very – save up to £450 on RTX 3070 MSI gaming laptops
Box – Just £1,916.99 for a Razer Blade 15 Base gaming laptop
Scan – up to £400 off gaming laptops from different manufactures
FAQ
What’s the most important gaming laptop component?
When it comes to gaming, the obvious answer is the graphics card, but that’s where things have gotten a little more complicated recently. With GPU performance now so dependent on cooling, you have to pay attention to what wattage a graphics card is limited to and what chassis it’s squeezed into.
As we said at the top, an RTX 4080 confined in an 18 mm chassis will perform markedly slower than one in a far chunkier case with room for higher-performance cooling.
Which GPU is best for a laptop?
We’ve done a host of testing and you can check out our Best graphics card for laptops guide for all the details, but we think the overall best GPU for gaming laptops is the Nvidia RTX 4080 mobile. It can sometimes outperform RTX 4090 GPUs that have been jammed in the wrong kind of laptop chassis, and is starting to become more and more affordable.
If you’re on a more limited budget, our pick as the best budget GPU for gaming laptops is the Nvidia RTX 4060 mobile. It has more of the graphics silicon to deal with the ray tracing good stuff, even if the RTX 4050 can often post similar rasterised gaming figures.
Should I worry about what the CPU in a gaming laptop is?
That really depends on what you want to do with your laptop. An 8-core, 16-thread AMD Ryzen chip will allow you to do a whole load of productivity on the road, but honestly, it will have little benefit in gaming. As long as the CPU has at least six cores and 12 threads, and they’re clocked high enough, it will be more than enough to deliver high-end gaming performance when paired with something like the RTX 4070.
What screen size is best for a gaming laptop?
This will arguably have the most immediate impact on your choice of the build. Picking the size of your screen basically dictates the size of your laptop. A 13-inch machine will be a thin-and-light ultrabook, while a 17-inch panel almost guarantees workstation stuff. At 15 inches, you’re looking at the most common size of the gaming laptop screen.
Are high refresh rate panels worth it for laptops?
We love high refresh rate screens here, and while you cannot guarantee your RTX 4060 will deliver 300 fps in the latest games, you’ll still see a benefit in general look and feel running a 300 Hz display.
Should I get a 4K screen in my laptop?
Nah. 4K gaming laptops are overkill; they’re fine for video editing if you’re dealing with 4K content, but it’s not the optimal choice for games. The standard 1080p resolution means that the generally slower mobile GPUs are all but guaranteed high frame rates, while companies are slowly drip-feeding 1440p panels into their laptop ranges.
A 1440p screen offers the perfect compromise between high resolution and decent gaming performance. At the same time, a 4K notebook will overstress your GPU and tax your eyeballs as you squint at your 15-inch display.