Best cheap gaming laptop of 2026: My top budget picks

For gamers on a budget, the trick to finding the right gaming laptop is to have enough performance to play 3D games without sacrificing too much in other areas like the display and overall build quality while avoiding older models on sale with obsolete or soon-to-be obsolete parts. Here’s our expert advice on what to consider to get a gaming laptop for your money.

price

For most people, the search for an affordable gaming laptop starts with price. The good news is that you can find a perfectly serviceable gaming laptop that has modern components capable of playing today’s games for around $1,500. Sometimes even less if you find a model for sale. Dell, HP, Lenovo, and other manufacturers are constantly rotating discounts, so you can get a great deal if you time it right.

If your budget allows you to spend more than $1,500, you’ll find models with more powerful components, brighter and faster displays, as well as other bonuses like per-key RGB lighting and thinner designs.

Operating system

MacBooks running Apple’s MacOS operating system are popular for use at home, work, and school, but Microsoft Windows is the perfect choice for gaming laptops, especially budget gaming laptops. You can play some games on high-end MacBook Pros, but they’re expensive compared to cheap Windows gaming laptops.

If you’re on a tight budget, you might consider a Chromebook. ChromeOS is a different experience from Windows; It’s more streamlined and easier to use. It’s limited because everything is basically run through the Chrome browser, so it’s not possible to install Windows PC games directly on a Chromebook. However, there are some Chromebooks for gamers It is primarily designed for use with cloud gaming services such as Xbox Game Pass.

a screen

Most gaming laptops feature a 15-inch or 16-inch display, although you’ll see some smaller 14-inch models as well as a few 17-inch models and even 18 inch giants. Newer 16-inch models with longer 16:10 aspect ratios are starting to replace 15.6-inchers with a more traditional 16:9 widescreen ratio, and we generally prefer the larger 16-inch models. You’ll probably do most of your gaming at 1920 x 1080 pixels, which is a 16:9 ratio, but the greater vertical space available with a 16:10 screen makes the laptop more useful outside of gaming when scrolling through web pages and long documents. Overall, a larger size provides a more immersive gaming experience.

Another important display specification for gamers is the refresh rate, or the number of times the screen updates its image per second. Most gaming laptops, even cheap ones, have displays with variable refresh rates that can sync up with the frames per second of a game to prevent tearing (where parts of different displays appear to be mixed together) and stuttering (where the screen refreshes at noticeably irregular intervals).

All the major companies have bumped their flagship 1080p configurations to 360Hz, but for many gamers, it’s not essential: the 240Hz max should be fine for those few times you can get frame rates above 240fps. On cheaper gaming laptops, you’ll generally see refresh rates of 120Hz, 144Hz, and 165Hz, which should be enough if you have a low-end GPU that won’t push frame rates past 165fps.

Even if you don’t plan to play games at resolutions higher than 1080p, we suggest getting the highest resolution you can afford. Because on a larger 15- or 16-inch laptop screen, text and image edges can look blurry on 1080p or 1920 x 1200 pixels on 16:10 laptops. A Quad HD (QHD) resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels (2560 x 1600 on a 16:10 display) will result in sharper text and images, and you can always choose to play games at a resolution lower than the maximum.

Processor

The processor, also known as the central processing unit (CPU), is the brain of your laptop. Intel and AMD are the two main CPU manufacturers for Windows laptops, with Qualcomm as a new third option with their respective companies ARM-based Snapdragon. Both Intel and AMD offer an amazing range of mobile processors. Making matters more complicated, both manufacturers have chips designed for different styles of laptops, such as power-saving chips for ultraportables or faster processors for gaming laptops. Their naming conventions will let you know which type is used. You can go to Intel or AMD Explanation sites until you get the performance you want. In general, the faster the processor and the more cores it has, the better the performance.

Battery life has less to do with the number of cores and more to do with the CPU architecture, Arm vs. x86. Apple’s Arm-based MacBooks and the first Arm-based MacBooks Copilot Plus PCs We’ve tested better battery life than laptops based on x86 processors from Intel and AMD.

Graphics

The graphics processor does all the work of driving the display and creating what’s displayed, as well as accelerating a lot of graphics-related (and increasingly AI-related) operations. For Windows laptops, there are two types of graphics processing units: integrated (iGPU) or discrete (dGPU). As the names suggest, an iGPU is part of the CPU package, while a dGPU is a separate chip with dedicated memory (VRAM) that communicates with it directly, making it faster than sharing memory with the CPU. All gaming laptops will have a dGPU from Nvidia or AMD. Nvidia is the more popular of the two. For budget gaming laptops, you’ll see many models with the entry-level RTX 5050 or entry-level RTX 5060 GPU.

memory

For memory, we highly recommend 16GB of RAM, with 8GB being the absolute minimum. RAM is where the operating system stores all the data for currently running applications, and it can fill up quickly. After that, it starts switching between RAM and SSD, which is slower. In addition, many laptops now have memory soldered to the motherboard. Most manufacturers disclose this, but if the RAM type is LPDDR, assume it is soldered and cannot be upgraded.

Some computer makers solder the memory and leave an internal slot empty to add a stick of RAM. You may need to contact your laptop manufacturer or find the full laptop specifications online to confirm. Check user experiences on the web, as the slot may be difficult to access, may require non-standard or hard-to-obtain memory, or other risks, including voiding your warranty.

storage

You’ll still find cheaper hard drives in budget laptops and larger hard drives in gaming laptops, but faster solid-state drives have replaced hard drives in laptops. They can make a huge difference in performance. For a gaming laptop, we don’t recommend using an SSD with less than 512GB unless you like to uninstall games every time you want to launch a new one.