Our various gaming laptop guides (as organised by price bracket and brand of gaming laptop in the dropdown menu at the top of this page) discuss our top picks in the context of these criteria, so this is a good place to look if you’re considering buying a new gaming laptop. However this guide will serve as a useful introductory primer before reading these.

Gaming laptop deals are live! Get huge savings on gaming laptops on the Lenovo Store, Best Buy or HP in 2024, as well as Amazon of course.

What to look for in a gaming laptop : GPU & CPU

As you might expect from the name, graphics cards/GPUs are the main thing you want to think about when looking for a new gaming laptop. Processors/CPUs are an important determinant of gaming performance, but if given the option between a better GPU or CPU, one should always prioritise the GPU.

For a machine to be considered a gaming laptop, it really requires a dedicated graphics card (either an Nvidia GeForce or AMD Radeon in the vast majority of cases), not just the onboard / integrated graphics (iGPU) that many laptops come with, which is built onto the CPU (Intel Iris Xe being one example). iGPUs are only suitable for running very non-demanding games.

There are several things to note with these components, some of them are particularly important when looking at laptops:

Gaming laptop components are weaker than desktop: The physical constraints imposed by the smaller laptop chassis and cooling solutions mean that CPUs and GPUs in gaming laptops that have the same name as their desktop counterparts are always less powerful. This means that if you’re looking for the equivalent performance in a gaming laptop, you should always aim for the SKU above as a rough rule of thumb (e.g. an RTX 3080 laptop to match an RTX 3070 desktop), though even this is not guarantee of exactly the same performance.
AMD Ryzen vs Intel CPUs: AMD Ryzen 6000 series laptop CPUs, and it looks like the new Ryzen 7000 series laptop CPUs tend to have superior battery life and performance when on battery power, however Intel 12th gen laptop CPUs and Intel 13th gen laptop CPUs have the edge when it comes to actual performance, particularly in single-core performance, which is most important in gaming.
AMD Radeon vs Nvidia GeForce GPUs: The title for most powerful gaming laptop graphics card continues to be dominated by Nvidia, from last year’s RTX 3080 Ti laptop graphic cards, to this year’s RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 laptop GPUs. However at the lower, middle, and upper-mid-range the AMD Radeon GPUs can have the edge, or at least offer the same performance but for cheaper. When it comes to Ray-Tracing, Nvidia’s GPUs have the superior support, but if you’re not after a very powerful machine, this feature probably isn’t worth enabling anyway.
TGP (Total Graphics Power): Measured in Watts (W), this can mean a big difference in performance between laptop graphics cards that have the same name, and might at first appear to be the same quality component. You may have to check the manufacturer’s website to find this information, or better yet read one of our in-depth reviews.
Does the laptop have a MUX Switch?: This is a feature you can sometimes find in the onboard software that can reduce performance bottlenecking, giving you a sizable FPS boost in your games. Many new gaming laptops now come with this feature.

What to look for in a gaming laptop : refresh rate

The baseline refresh rate of a standard non-gaming laptop is 60Hz, but this isn’t really sufficient for most gaming purposes. 60Hz effectively caps you to a maximum of 60FPS in terms of the image you actually see.

For slow-paced titles like the The Sims 4, Crusader Kings 3, or some other strategy game then 60Hz is sufficient, but if you’re playing a first-person shooter, the smoothness of the gameplay will be noticeably worse and it will impact your reaction times. Even on single player RPGs like The Witcher 3, the smoother experience of higher refresh rates is noticeably better.

Really you want to look for a gaming laptop with at least a 100Hz maximum refresh rate, and this is the threshold for what constitutes what we’d call a ‘gaming laptop’. Most gaming laptops come with 120Hz, 144Hz, or 165Hz refresh rate displays which will be sufficient for the majority of users.

Above 144Hz you get diminishing returns as to what difference the human eye/brain actually notices, though if you’re serious about squeezing the maximum amount of effective frames form a particularly powerful gaming laptop (if you’re into competitive online shooters for instance) then 240Hz or 300Hz gaming laptops are available.

READ NOW: What is a monitor refresh rate?

What to look for in a gaming laptop : response time

Response item (measured in ms i.e. milliseconds) is the time it takes for a pixel on a screen to change from one color to another. A low response time laptop display (particularly when paired with a fast refresh rate) can lead to visible ghosting on the screen. The ideal value you’re looking for is whatever 1 second divided by the refresh rate of the laptop’s screen is equal to.

For example, on a 240Hz display: 1 second / 240 = 0.00416666666 = 4.16ms (rounded down)
This means that a response time of 4.16ms is needed to completely eliminate ghosting on a 240Hz screen, though getting within a 1ms of this is usually enough for most people not to be able to notice any difference, and even several ms slower will be fine for most people.

Although getting the very highest response time is only really something that those who play fast-paced online shooters at a competitive level need to worry about, if it’s too low (more than a few ms higher than the ideal) the ghosting effect can be distracting whilst trying to enjoy your game, particularly if it’s an otherwise nice looking, graphically impressive title.

The real response time of a gaming laptop can be quite hard to find for a number of reasons: firstly, it’s often not mentioned by online retailers in the specifications; secondly, the response time information on a manufacturer’s website usually isn’t particularly useful – this is because response time can be measured and quoted in a different number of ways and brands usually go with the most favourable option.

In all of our gaming reviews (and those from a lot of other respected reviewers) we go by the average grey-to-grey response time.

READ NOW: What is response time?

What to look for in a gaming laptop : fans & cooling

It’s all very well and good having a powerful graphics card and processor in your gaming laptop, but if the cooling system is inadequate to make the most out of them, then you could find your machine underperforming relative to other brands with the same core components.

Past a certain max temperature, thermal throttling takes place, where the CPU/GPU automatically wind down their frequencies to stop thermal damage occurring to them. This means reduced in-game FPS performance if the laptop gets too hot. Additionally, over time the effectiveness of the laptop will diminish if it is frequently exposed to overly high temperatures.

There’s no easy tip for what cooling system/fan to look for when buying a gaming laptop, as it’s all relative to the power of the components and how well the whole thing is engineered. The best thing to do is to read an in-depth review on any model you may want to buy from a trusted gaming laptop reviewer that does thermal testing (yes that includes us), and see what they think of it relative to the competition.

READ NOW: What is the average gaming laptop temperature?

What to look for in a gaming laptop : other features

Whilst we’ve pretty much covered the main features you need to know about gaming laptops specifically, there are various other characteristics that are important to bear in mind when you’re shopping for a laptop of any kind:

Battery life: You’ll rarely run a game on battery mode unless it’s particularly non-demanding as the performance drop will be huge and it will eat up your battery extremely quickly on top. That being said, a good battery life outside of gaming is useful if you’re planning on using your laptop for other things.
Build quality: More budget laptops tend to have worse build quality. The main area to pay attention to on laptops is the hinge area, which can be a weak point.
Speakers: Audio output from the vast majority of gaming laptop speakers will not be good – manufacturers assume gamers will likely be using their own headphones/headset, so speaker quality usually near the bottom on the list of priorities. Bear this in mind if you like to watch media / listen to music / game using the onboard speakers of your laptop.
Portability: Gaming laptops are often heavier and thicker than their non-gaming counterparts, to make room for their more powerful components. Slimline gaming laptops exist, but they either have to sacrifice performance a bit, or cost extra (e.g. the Alienware X17).

What to look for in a gaming laptop : Final Word

We hope this guide as to what to look for in a gaming laptop has helped make you a bit more informed. Do be sure to also check out our various other gaming laptop guides, articles, and in-depth gaming laptop reviews.

What to look for in a gaming laptop FAQs

What is the most important spec for a gaming laptop?

The number one most important spec for a gaming laptop is the graphics card: make sure it has a dedicated graphics card/GPU rather than an integrated GPU, as these are rarely powerful enough to play games on.

How do I know if my laptop is good for gaming?

The easiest way to tell if your laptop is good for gaming is by finding the recommended specifications of the system requirements of the games you want to play, and seeing how the components (in particular the GPU and CPU) match up.

Be aware that laptop components are less powerful than desktop components, even if they have a similar name, so generally you’ll want to aim to get specifications one step/SKU above the recommended specs to ensure good FPS.