Best Cheap Gaming Laptop of 2025
For gamers on a tight budget, the trick to finding the right gaming laptop is to get enough performance to play 3D games without sacrificing too much in other areas such as display and overall build quality – updated parts. Here are our expert advice on buying the most gaming laptops.
price
The search for affordable gaming laptops for most people starts with the price. The good news is that you can find a perfectly available gaming laptop with modern components capable of playing today’s games for around $1,000. Sometimes, if you find a sales model, it’s less than that. Dell, HP, Lenovo and other manufacturers are constantly spinning the discount, so if you have the right time, you can lock in a lot.
If your budget allows you to spend more than $1,000, you’ll find models with more powerful components, brighter, faster monitors, and other bonuses, as well as designs like per-key RGB lighting and thinner.
operating system
MacBooks running Apple Macos are popular for home, work and school use, but Microsoft Windows is the choice for gaming laptops, especially budget gaming laptops. You can run some games on a high-end MacBook Pros, but they are very expensive compared to cheap Windows-based gaming laptops.
If you have a tight budget, you can consider a Chromebook. Chromeos is different from Windows. It is more simplified and easy to use. Basically everything is limited to Chrome. However, there are some Gamers’ Chromebook.
Screen
Most gaming laptops have a 15-inch or 16-inch screen, although you’ll see some smaller 14-inch models and several 17-layer or even 17-inch 18-inch behemoth. Newer 16-inch models with a taller 16:10 aspect ratio start replacing the 15.6-inch with a more traditional 16:9 widescreen ratio, and we usually prefer the Boxier 16-inch model. You might be playing most games at a resolution of 1,920×1,080 pixels, with a 16:9 ratio, but the vertical space provided by the 16:10 monitor makes the laptop more useful when gaming.
Another important display specification for gamers is refresh rate or the number of times the monitor is refreshing its image. Most gaming laptops, even cheaper laptops, have variable refresh rate displays that synchronize the game’s per second frame to prevent tear (it looks like parts of different screens are mixed together) and stuttering (screen updates, The part that looks like torn (where it looks like it is mixed together) under noticeably irregular intervals).
All major companies have knocked their flagship 1080p configuration to 360Hz, but they aren’t essential for many gamers: a maximum of 240Hz should get frame rates above 240fps in a few times. On cheap gaming laptops, you will usually see 120Hz, 144Hz and 165Hz refresh rates, which should be enough if your GPU has a lower GPU that won’t push the frame rate higher than 165 fps.
Even if you don’t plan to play games on resolutions above 1080p, we recommend you get the highest resolution. Because on larger 15 or 16-inch laptop displays, the edges of text and images look blurry on 1080p, or the 1,920×1,200 pixel resolution on the laptop has a 16:10 aspect ratio . Quad HD (QHD) resolution of 2,560×1,440 pixels (2,560×1,600 on a 16:10 display) will result in clearer text and images, and you can always choose to play the game at a low point below the maximum.
processor
A processor (also known as a CPU) is the brain of a laptop. Intel and AMD are the major CPU manufacturers for Windows laptops, and Qualcomm is the new third option Arm-based Snapdragon X processor. Both Intel and AMD offer amazing mobile processor options. Making things a little trickier, both manufacturers have chips designed for different laptop styles, such as battery-saving chips for supercapacity or faster processors for gaming laptops. Their naming convention will let you know which type is used. You can go Intel’s or AMD’s Explain the website so that you get the performance you want. Generally speaking, the faster the processor is, the more core it has, the better the performance will be.
Battery life is not related to the number of cores, but to the CPU architecture, and ARM is related to the X86. Apple’s ARM-based MacBook and First Arm Basics Copilot plus PC We have tested higher battery life than laptops based on Intel and AMD’s X86 processors.
Graphics
The graphics processor processes all the work that drives the screen and generates the displayed content, and accelerates many graphics-related (and increasingly AI-related) operations. For Windows laptops, there are two types of GPUs: Integrated (IGPU) or Discrete (DGPU). As the name implies, an IGPU is part of the CPU package, while a DGPU is a separate chip that is faster than sharing memory with the CPU than the dedicated memory (VRAM) it communicates directly. All gaming laptops will be equipped with DGPUs from NVIDIA or AMD. Nvidia is the most popular of the two. For budget gaming laptops, you’ll see many models with entry-level RTX 4050 GPUs or upgraded RTX 4060 GPUs and older models with previous generation RTX 3050 or 3060 GPUs.
memory
For memory, we strongly recommend 16GB of RAM, where 8GB is the minimum value that is absolutely bare. RAM is where the operating system stores all the data that is currently running the application and can be filled quickly. After that, it starts swapping between RAM and SSD, which is slower. Additionally, many laptops now solder memories to the motherboard. Most manufacturers reveal this, but if the RAM type is LPDDR, it is assumed to be soldered and cannot be upgraded.
Some PC manufacturers will solder the memory and leave an empty internal slot to add a stick of RAM. You may need to contact the laptop manufacturer or find the full specifications of your laptop online to confirm. Check the network for a user experience, as the slot may still be difficult to obtain and may require non-standard or difficult to obtain memory or other pitfalls, including an invalid warranty.
Storage
You’ll still find cheaper hard drives in budget laptops and larger hard drives in gaming laptops, but faster solid-state drives almost all replace hard drives in laptops. They can have a big impact on performance. For gaming laptops, we do not recommend using an SSD that is less than 512GB unless you really like to uninstall the game every time you want to play a new game.
