Tech
We’ve Tested Many of the Best Gaming Laptops, and These Are the 6 Best to Buy
Top 6 Gaming Laptops Compared
Other Gaming Laptops to Consider
Photograph: Luke Larsen
Alienware 16X Aurora for $1,970: Alienware has lost some focus with its gaming laptops recently, but its latest refresh feels like a return to form. The Alienware 16X Aurora (7/10, WIRED Recommends) sits in the middle of the lineup, attempting to offer the right balance of performance, premium features, and price. At its current price, it nails that walk across the tightrope. Though it isn’t flashy, the design is understated yet refined. And while there are cheaper ways to get RTX 5060-level performance, the bright, color-accurate IPS display is a great upgrade, as is the premium touchpad. All in all, the Alienware 16X Aurora ended up being my favorite Alienware gaming laptop in years. It’s too expensive at retail price, so wait for a discount on this one.
MSI Titan 18 HX for $5,200: Power. It’s what PC gamers want most, right? Well, if that’s you, and you don’t have a budget, get the MSI Titan 18 HX (7/10, WIRED Recommends). It sets the definition for “large and in charge.” This machine is blinged out with tons of advanced features like a mechanical keyboard, an invisible haptic-feedback touchpad, and plenty of RGB lighting. The touchpad wasn’t my favorite, but typing and gaming on the mechanical keyboard is an absolute joy. There are a few other 18-inch laptops to consider, like the updated Alienware 18 Area-51 or the Razer Blade 18. But the incredible 4K+ mini-LED display is something you can’t get on another 18-inch laptop. Games look gorgeous on it, and thanks to the RTX 5090, you can play AAA games at that native resolution at decent frame rates. This MSI is a beast of a laptop, so don’t try to take it with you on a work trip. Trust me.
Asus ROG Z13 for $2,300: There’s nothing else quite like the ROG Flow Z13 (7/10, WIRED Recommends). It’s a 2-in-1 laptop, not unlike the Surface Pro, but this one’s intended specifically for gaming. That might sound like a contradiction—or maybe just a bad idea. But amazingly, the ROG Flow Z13 has created a new product category in gaming over the past few years, and continues to exist alone in it. By putting all the components behind the screen instead of under the keyboard, the ROG Flow Z13 directs all that hot air away from your hands. That’s always an issue with gaming laptops, no matter how loud or thick they are. And yet, with the ROG Flow Z13, the keyboard always stays completely cool. This year’s model uses an interesting new CPU, too: the AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 395, which has a massive integrated graphics chip onboard that’s even faster than discrete graphics like the RTX 4060. In my testing, I was quite satisfied with the system’s performance in games, especially given how quiet it stays and how long the battery life is. It’s expensive, but it’s also incredibly unique.
What Makes a Great Gaming Laptop?
Picking the right gaming laptop can be a delicate balance. The raw power you typically find in gaming desktops takes a lot of energy, and when you put that in a laptop, it can drain the battery fast. Similarly, the superfast refresh rates in gaming monitors can lead to even more power drain. If you plan to keep your laptop plugged in most of the time, you can lean toward more powerful hardware. If you want to play on the battery more, balancing power with efficiency should be a priority.
Size is also a factor to consider. When you’re gaming at home, you might want the largest, brightest screen you can find, but when you have to carry that screen around, the bulk and weight can be a (quite literal) drag. If you plan to travel with your laptop, you might want to think about how much heft you’re willing to lug around.
No matter what, you should expect to make some sacrifices that aren’t as common with more typical laptops. It’s not unusual for a gaming laptop to last less than two hours when you start playing games on it. And unless you have a lot of (usually expensive) power under the hood, you might not be able to play some modern AAA games at their highest level the way you would on a desktop without spending a little time fiddling with the game’s graphics settings.
Specs to Look for in a Gaming Laptop
It’s easy to get overwhelmed with specs and numbers when you’re shopping for a gaming laptop, but there are a few key specs you can focus on to get the best bang for your buck. For additional help with all the different specifications on offer, check out our How to Buy a Laptop guide.
- RAM: Aim for a machine with at least 16 GB of RAM. While 8 GB of RAM is still workable for those who play less demanding games or have little desire for fancy graphics, you’ll be hard-pressed to find one on offer these days. The new minimum is 16 GB of RAM, and if you intend to play new AAA games, stepping up to 32 GB of RAM is a really good idea. The speed of your RAM can also be a factor. Currently, DDR5 is the best you’ll find, but you’ll start to see DDR6 replacing it over the next few years.
- CPU: When you want the fastest processor, newer is usually better. Intel is currently on its 14th generation of gaming CPUs, and AMD Ryzen is on the 8000 series. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty, CPU benchmarks can help you get a sense of how powerful a processor is, but the best indicator is real-world testing (which we do on every laptop we feature). Soon, we’ll be getting the latest CPUs from AMD and Intel, which were announced at CES, and should be available over the coming months.
- Discrete GPU: As with the CPU, there are a lot of models out there that can get overwhelming to keep track of. Make sure whatever gaming laptop you buy has a discrete GPU—that means the graphics card is separate from the CPU. These days, Nvidia is the primary option, whether that’s the previous-gen RTX 40-series GPUs or the brand-new 50-series. You’ll be able to find a few gaming laptops with AMD GPUs out there, competing with its Radeon 7000 generation. These will often share similar names to their desktop counterparts, but most are technically running the “Laptop” version of the GPU, such as the RTX 5090 or 5080. Again, real-world testing is the best indicator of performance.
- Storage: Most laptops have solid-state drives nowadays, which are super fast and reduce load times considerably from the days of hard drives. Games can get massive, so we’d recommend at least a 1-TB internal drive, though if you can swing for 2 TB, you’ll have a lot more room for multiple AAA games. Fortunately, many gaming laptops still let you install more internal storage, so you may be able to expand that later for less money.
- Display: Most gaming laptop displays are in a 16:10 aspect ratio and start with a resolution of at least 1920 x 1200 with at least a 120-Hz refresh rate. You want something that matches the performance of the laptop’s GPU and the types of games you play. Competitive multiplayer gamers will want a higher refresh rate, while single-player gamers will benefit more from higher resolutions. There’s even next-gen display technology available, like mini-LED or OLED (even 3D!) screens that enable impressive HDR visuals and improved response times.
Which Laptop Brand Is Best for Gaming Laptops?
All of the major laptop manufacturers have gaming sub-brands these days. Just to name a few, Lenovo has Legion, Asus has ROG, Acer has Predator and Nitro, and Dell has Alienware. HP previously offered the Victus and Omen brands but will now sell under its HyperX sub-brand starting this year. These are a good place to start, especially if you’re looking for something more budget-friendly.
Asus has the most full-featured lineup, however, spanning high-powered juggernauts to gorgeous, slim models. Asus also offers some of the cheapest models with its TUF brand and some hyper-portable options in the ROG Flow line. MSI is another noteworthy brand, with dozens of models under various names denoting price and performance: Titan, Raider, Stealth, and Crosshair.
Beyond these sub-brands, let’s not forget about Razer. The company has earned its reputation for producing the most premium and well-built gaming laptops, often referred to as the MacBook of gaming laptops.
You will, however, find lots of unknown brands if you go shopping on Amazon for gaming laptops. Most are easy to write off based on specs alone, as they rarely even feature a discrete GPU. Avoid these at all costs, no matter how attractive the price is.
How Much Should I Spend on a Gaming Laptop?
For years, I didn’t recommend spending under $1,000 on a gaming laptop. Today, there are a few good options though. As you can see from our picks above (and from our list of the best cheap gaming laptops), there are a few great options under $1,000 thanks to some great discounts. You can find RTX 5050 laptops for cheaper, but be careful, as some serious compromises can be taken on these budget-minded devices.
On the other side, you can spend close to $5,000 on a top-tier model, sporting the latest RTX 5090 and loads of high-end features and specs. It’s also smart to buy a previous-gen gaming laptop with an RTX 40-series GPU onboard if you’re strapped for cash, though I wouldn’t buy anything older than that.
What Size Gaming Laptop Should You Buy?
Gaming laptops primarily come in three screen sizes: 14-inch, 16-inch, and 18-inch. There are also 15.6-inch displays in an old-school 16:9 aspect ratio, such as the Lenovo LOQ 15 listed above. The difference between these three sizes is pretty dramatic, both in terms of overall footprint and portability. Most people should buy a 16-inch gaming laptop, which tends to be the sweet spot. Many 16-inch gaming laptops still offer you the full range of performance, up to the latest CPUs and GPUs (including the RTX 5090), and even come with a wider range of display options, including OLED. Eighteen-inch gaming laptops tend to be gargantuan—not the kind of thing you want to move around much. The larger screen is great if you don’t ever intend to connect it to an external display or leave your home with it.
Meanwhile, 14-inch gaming laptops have become popular over the past few years, and they function best as a hybrid device. They tend to be sleek and minimalist, downplaying the gamer aesthetic for something more professional and buttoned-up. GPU options tend to be more limited at this size, but you can still get some surprisingly solid performance out of these laptops, depending on the configuration. They tend to get better battery life, too.
Is OLED on Gaming Laptops Worth It?
In a word, yes. OLED has a number of benefits for PC gaming. The extreme contrast of OLED allows the display to excel in HDR performance. HDR really brings games to life, brightening up highlights and deepening shadows. Now, it should be mentioned that the current OLED panels being used on gaming laptops aren’t as bright as the best OLED gaming monitors, which can hit over 1,000 nits of peak HDR brightness. But you still get the HDR effect with the brightness on offer on these OLED gaming laptops.
We’re seeing OLED available for both 14-inch and 16-inch gaming laptops, but not on 18-inch laptops just yet. OLED provides aid for more competitive gamers, offering less input lag than on IPS or Mini-LED. It’s totally worth it. Increasingly, it’s becoming more standard on premium gaming laptops, meaning you won’t always need to make the hard choice between a faster GPU and a better screen.
Gaming Laptops to Avoid
Ideally, you should stay away from anything older than RTX 40-series GPUs. Because laptops are not upgradeable in terms of graphics, you’ll want to buy something at least somewhat recent. Even the RTX 40-series GPUs have been out for a while. So, you’re still potentially getting something two years old. You won’t find many RTX 30-series GPUs for much cheaper than 40-series laptops anyway. Here are a few older recommendations that aren’t worth it anymore.
Acer Nitro 5 for $1,098: This is an older machine, and it was a great budget gaming laptop for a while. There are other laptops you can find around this price, like the Acer Nitro V 16 we recommend above. It has an RTX 3060 Laptop GPU, 16 GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 512-GB SSD.
Acer Swift X 14 for $1,300: If portability is your top priority, the Swift X 14 (6/10, WIRED Review) is a nice option with good performance, thanks to its RTX 4070 graphics card and Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU. Unfortunately, it runs very hot, and the fan spins almost all the time.
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Leah Feiger: Let’s invest.
Zoë Schiffer: They have that going for a while.
Leah Feiger: It wasn’t full Google, but it—
Zoë Schiffer: Somewhat there.
Leah Feiger: —had that vibe. To me, someone so on the outside of this in every single way, I know about these layoffs because they’ve been, A) so chaotic, but B) in some ways, needlessly so. Not to say that other tech companies aren’t firing scores of workers all the time. That feels like something we discuss on this podcast frequently, but this is happening with such a large runway and in a way that’s making employees feel so terrible about themselves.
Brian Barrett: Well, because it’s not just the layoffs, right? It’s also, even if you stay there, if you’re not culled from the herd, you are going to have to deal with this world in which you’ve got spyware on your laptops training AI to probably take your job at some point, right?
Zoë Schiffer: Explain that a little bit.
Brian Barrett: Meta announced, and this was more public, that they were going to put software on employee laptops that would monitor their keystrokes and how they move their cursors and basically how they do their job as Meta engineers and use that as training data for their own internal models to try to make their AI models better because they’re running out of other sources.
Zoë Schiffer: And could you opt out of that, Brian?
Brian Barrett: That’s a great question. I’m so glad you asked. You could not opt out.
Zoë Schiffer: I felt you didn’t know the answer to that one.
Brian Barrett: In fact, when an employee asked in a very public forum within Meta, “Hey, could we not do this?” Zoë, the response was?
Zoë Schiffer: Oh, absolutely you’re going to do this and shame on you for asking. And some of the employees who are staying, actually thousands of the employees who are staying, are getting drafted into the AI ranks. We published a piece today that was kind of about the morale inside the company, but also how there’s been this mad dash to use up perks and stipends that employees have. But one of the things that’s said at the end was that remaining employees are being asked to join AI teams. So whatever your job was previously, they’re internally getting drafted. You’re getting drafted into the AI ranks, now your job is going to look quite different.
Brian Barrett: That’s like 7,000 people.
Zoë Schiffer: Yes.
Leah Feiger: I’ve actually heard people use the word raptured.
Zoë Schiffer: Oh, my gosh.
Leah Feiger: Isn’t that—
Zoë Schiffer: And I wish we had that in the story.
Leah Feiger: I’m so sorry, but raptured into other teams. All of a sudden one day they’ve just disappeared. After this layoff, has Zuckerberg and co proposed a sort of coherent leadership plan or proposal? What happens after this?
Atlantic hurricane season is almost upon us, and the early signs indicate it might be less active than usual. But that’s no reason to delete your weather app and ignore the forecast.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting eight to 14 named tropical systems, of which three to six will become hurricanes and one to three will be Category 3 or higher.
“What’s driving this forecast is largely an El Niño event,” said NOAA administrator Neil Jacobs.
Characterized by a tongue of hot water stretching across the Pacific, El Niño is likely to emerge this summer. That stretch of warm ocean rearranges weather patterns around the world. In the case of the tropical Atlantic, El Niño stirs up winds that make it hard for hurricanes to spin up. Those that do can sometimes be torn apart by what’s going on in the upper atmosphere. (The opposite is true in the Pacific, and NOAA is predicting a very active season in that ocean basin.)
During the three past super El Niños, accumulated cyclone energy—a metric that factors in storms’ strength and longevity—was well below normal.
That said, El Niño, even an extremely strong one, is only one of many factors that impact hurricane season. Hot local ocean temperatures can help storms form and gain strength, and the Atlantic is currently warmer than normal.
At the same time, Sahara dust can gum up the atmosphere and inhibit storms from forming. It’s also notoriously hard to predict when plumes of it will kick up. That’s what happened last year, when a below-average number of named storms formed despite an active forecast. Despite the lower-than-expected activity, last year still spawned Hurricane Melissa, one of the strongest storms to ever make landfall in the Atlantic basin.
All of which is to say that the seasonal forecast is a handy guide for what to expect, and it’s great for federal and state agencies to preposition supplies and resources. But it’s what happens with individual storms that ultimately matters.
“Even though we’re expecting a below average season in the Atlantic, it’s important to understand it only takes one,” Jacobs said, noting that even in quiet years, Category 5 storms have still made landfall.
The Trump administration has slashed staffing at NOAA and reduced the collection of some data, such as weather balloons, that can impact forecasts. Jacobs touted the value of new observations, including aerial drones that will be deployed operationally for the first time.
NOAA has also ramped up the use of artificial intelligence weather models trained on historical data. During the 2025 hurricane season, the agency tested an experimental hurricane model developed with Google DeepMind. Late last year, it also rolled out a suite of AI weather models to use in operational forecasting, in addition to traditional weather models that use equations to forecast the weather.
The agency says that the AI version of its flagship model provides better prediction of the tracks of tropical cyclones—the generic name for hurricanes—though it lags traditional weather models in predicting their intensity.
A virtual private network (VPN) favoured by cyber criminals to mask data exfiltration, fraud ransomware attacks and other criminality has been dismantled in Operation Saffron, a Franco-Dutch led action supported by Europol and other agencies, including the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), and private sector partner Bitdefender.
The First VPN service was heavily used among Russian-speaking threat actors, and according to Europol, was used in “almost every” major cyber investigation it has undertaken in the past few years. Besides obscuring malicious traffic from law enforcement surveillance, First VPN’s operators are also known to have offered services such as anonymised payments and hidden infrastructure.
“For years, cyber criminals saw this VPN service as a gateway to anonymity. They believed it would keep them beyond the reach of law enforcement. This operation proves them wrong. Taking it offline removes a critical layer of protection that criminals depended on to operate, communicate and evade law enforcement,” said Edvardas Šileris, head of the European Cybercrime Centre at Europol.
A spokesperson for Bitdefender added: “We are extremely pleased with the successful takedown of First VPN, and congratulate global law enforcement, and all those involved.
“Operation Saffron exemplifies the power of collaboration between the public and private security sector in dismantling illegal online activities, in this case, a VPN service designed to conceal attacks. It also serves a message to criminals who believe the dark web covers their actions and guarantees their anonymity. If they become the target of an international effort, they can’t hide.”
Operation Saffron marks the first time Bitdefender Labs’ virtual Draco Team unit has worked on a counter-VPN action, having previously been involved in a number of other operations including stings on the Hansa dark web marketplace, 2024’s Operation Endgame targeting botnets, and actions against ransomware gangs including GandCrab and its successor REvil.
Multi-year operation
The takedown operation itself – which took place on 19 and 20 May – saw First VPN’s administrator arrested and interviewed, and their home in Ukraine searched, 33 servers dismantled, and wider infrastructure disrupted. Multiple domain names have been shut down and seized, including 1vpns.com, 1vpns.net, 1vpns.org, and some associated Onion domains.
These actions marked the culmination of a four-and-a-half year investigation dating back to December 2021. During the course of this work, investigators were able to gain access to the First VPN service, obtain a copy its user database, and identify the VPN connections used specifically by cyber criminals.
This trove of intelligence has both exposed individual users linked to cyber criminality, and generated operational leads connected to past cyber attacks and other digital offences.
Indeed, Europol’s coordinating Operational Taskforce (OTF) has already disseminated over 80 intelligence packages worldwide and identified 506 known First VPN users. The EU agency said it has already been able to support 21 other investigations thanks to this work.
Industry reaction
Responding to the takedown, John Watters, CEO of iCounter – a threat intelligence platform, said: “This case demonstrates that cyber crime is ultimately an ecosystem problem, not just a malware problem. The infrastructure layer that supports ransomware and fraud operations has become highly commercialised, with threat actors relying on shared services that promise anonymity, resiliency, and protection from law enforcement scrutiny.
“When investigators successfully penetrate those ecosystems, they gain an opportunity to map relationships, operational dependencies, and repeat offender activity across multiple criminal campaigns simultaneously. The operationalisation of that intelligence is critical because it allows defenders and governments to move beyond reactive incident response and toward proactive disruption of adversary infrastructure.
Watters added: “These services are often some of the limited ways that law enforcement can impact threat actors who are in countries outside their reach. We should expect continued pressure on the enabling services that underpin cybercrime economies globally.”
“Targeting not only individual criminals and groups but also their infrastructure is becoming one of the most vital fronts in the international battle against cyber crime,” said CybaVerse head of penetration testing, Michael Jepson.
“Services like First VPN, alongside similar criminal-friendly VPNs and hosting providers, give threat actors the fundamental scaffolding to launch attacks. These services are often difficult to target because they resist legal complaints and court orders, and typically operate from permissive jurisdictions that rarely cooperate with foreign law enforcement.
“Pursuing individual criminals and groups becomes far harder when their activity is obfuscated and protected by these services,” added Jepson, “[so] shutting down these illicit hosts and VPNs is effective because it disrupts entire networks, and creates a knock-on effect where further criminal groups are disrupted as threat actors have to migrate their operations and reorient in the face of potential exposure.”
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