The Best Gaming Laptop

You could spend upwards of $3,000 on a gaming laptop, but you shouldn’t. Although such models do perform better, the improvements they make in the frame rate and the visuals aren’t always tangible in games, especially on a 15-inch screen. Most high-end laptops also can’t handle the heat that higher-end components produce, so you pay for performance you can’t use. Unless you need one computer that can do everything, you’re better off with two. For a little more than the price of a good gaming laptop, you can get both a desktop gaming PC that’s about as powerful and more upgradable and an ultrabook that can handle non-gaming tasks with twice the battery life, much better build quality, and a better keyboard and trackpad. If you’re dedicated to the idea of buying a single machine, you can even get an ultrabook, an external GPU enclosure, and a desktop RTX 2070 GPU—which performs significantly better than the laptop equivalent—for less money than the price of similarly equipped gaming laptops. However, if you still want a high end laptop, remember. Laptops in general (and pricey gaming laptops in particular) should last at least three years. If your aging machine can’t handle new games at 1080p, it’s time to make a change.