If you plan to do more VR gaming, get an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 card with 6 GB of dedicated memory instead. In general, we recommend a minimum configuration of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050Ti graphics card with 4 GB or 6 GB of dedicated memory an Intel Core i5-7300HQ or Core i7-7700HQ processor a 256 GB solid-state drive and 8 or 16 GB of RAM. The most important features in a cheap gaming laptop are price, performance, heat and noise management, keyboard, display, trackpad, and battery life, more or less in that order. A $1,000 laptop won’t perform as well as a top-of-the-line one, and a $1,200 desktop is even more powerful than a $2,000 gaming laptop.

There’s no such thing as a perfect budget gaming laptop all of them make at least one serious compromise to keep prices low. We tested each gaming laptop by playing The Witcher 3 and other games. If you can afford to spend more or want to play virtual reality games, we recommend the Acer Predator 15 -although at that point, you may as well save up the extra couple hundred for our main gaming laptop pick, which is lighter and comes with a more powerful graphics card. If the Lenovo is sold out or you need a laptop that lasts longer on a charge, get the Dell InspiGaming, even though it tends to gets warmer and louder (it’s also worth the $50 upgrade for the IPS screen). It has shorter battery life than our other picks, however, and it’s a bit trickier to upgrade as well. It’s comfortable, functional, and affordable, and doesn’t overheat during demanding gaming sessions. After spending more than 30 hours testing nine cheap gaming laptops since our previous update, we found that the Lenovo Legion Y520 is the best you can get for around $1,000. For those people, a smaller, cheaper gaming laptop-one that weighs less than 6 pounds, has a 15-inch screen, and costs less than $1,000-is the best option. And most people don’t want to lug a 9-pound “laptop” to the café or library. Not everyone has $1,600 (or more) to spend on a high-end gaming laptop.

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