Gaming

Best Gaming Laptops under $1,000

The holiday season is the best time to pick up a laptop be it for work or gaming. Here, we have compiled a list of the best gaming laptops for all budgets:

Best Gaming Laptop under $600

The Dell G3579-5467BLK-PUS is our pick for the best gaming laptop under $600. Keep in mind that this unit is on sale right now: it doesn’t always sell for $549. The G3579 packs a tremendous amount of value. What are the core specs? We’re looking at the quad-core, eight-thread Intel Core-i5 8300H, paired with a GTX 1050 Ti, with 8GB of DDR4 RAM and a 1TB hybrid SSHD.

The Core i5-8300H is a quad-core eight-thread processor based on Zen+. It delivers performance that’s roughly equivalent to the Kaby Lake 7700HQ. Not bad at all for a laptop processor. While the GTX 1050 Ti is an older Pascal offering, it packs a considerable punch in the budget segment. As a matter of fact, it delivers roughly equal performance to the GTX 880M, the highest-end mobile GPU from the pre-Maxwell era. The GTX 1050 Ti is a good clip faster than the PS4’s GPU. This means that it has no trouble delivering a solid gaming experience at 1080p, so long as you manage settings wisely. In less intensive eSports titles, it can deliver 60 FPS experiences.

You get a 1080p, anti-glare IPS display and dual MaxxAudio Pro speakers. Design-wise, the G3579 is understated: nothing about it says “gaming laptop” apart from it being a bit chunky. However, at a sale price of $529, it offers phenomenal value.

Best Gaming Laptop under Rs. $700

Next up, we have the Asus TUF FX505GT. At $698, it’s a bit pricier than the G3579. But is it worth it for gaming? Absolutely yes. The 505DT features Intel’s Core i5-9300H. This is a quad-core eight-thread Coffee Lake part with a 4.1 GHz max turbo. Higher base and boost clocks mean better performance than the 8300H. But the real game-changer is on the GPU front: you get the GTX 1650, Nvidia’s entry-level Turing offering.

While it doesn’t feature ray-tracing, GTX 1650 delivers rasterized performance that’s in the ballpark of the GTX 970. This makes it substantially faster than the PS4 Pro’s GPU. While the 4 GB of VRAM might necessitate dropping texture resolution, you won’t have much trouble hitting 1080p/60 with reasonable settings.

In terms of storage and memory, you get a 512 GB SSD and 8GB of DDR4 RAM. The 505GT features a 1080p 60 Hz IPS panel. Design-wise this is a fairly plain laptop. At nearly 5 lbs, it’s a bit hefty, but that’s to be expected with performance-grade internals. If you have $200 to spare, this laptop will deliver 50 percent or higher framerates than the Dell.

Best Gaming Laptop under $900

Our pick for the best laptop under $900, the HP Pavilion Gaming 15 dk0030nr, offers phenomenal value. It is the first system in this list that’s genuinely capable of delivering 1080p/60 Ultra across the board. You’ll need to buy it straight from HP to get it at $889. Other outlets are selling it for as much as $200 more, in the price range of several other 1660 Ti-equipped laptops. So what sets the Pavilion Gaming 15 apart?

We’re going to repeat this again, but the top-end 16-series: GTX 1660 Ti. That’s right. This is the cheapest laptop, by a fairly large margin, to feature Nvidia’s most power Turing GTX card. Delivering performance on par with the GTX 1070, the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is more than capable of powering through AAA games on the laptop’s 1080p IPS. A hexa-core 12-thread Core i7-9750H rounds things out on the performance front. With a max turbo of 4.5 GHz, this Coffee Lake takes the fight to desktop Ryzen 5 models like the 3600. CPU bottlenecks won’t keep you from reaching 60 FPS or beyond in the vast majority of games.

In terms of RAM and memory, you’re getting 8 GB of dual-channel 2666 MHz DDR4 and a 256 GB NVMe SSD. Storage is going to be a bit of an issue, but you can always snag a larger SSD down the line and stick it in.

Design-wise, HP’s gone for a distinct “gamer” aesthetic here. The display’s bottom bezel is set at an angle to the lower part of the system. The back features chick, chamfered edges and the keyboard backlight is green. We can’t say we’re huge fans, but, as mentioned, this is the cheapest GTX 1660 Ti laptop by a large margin. If you’re looking for a premium 1080p experience on the go, this is the best option.

Best Gaming Laptop under $1000

The Asus TUF FX505DV, essentially a souped-up variant of the 505GT, is our pick for the best laptop under $1000. At a $959 Newegg sale price, this model is just $70 dollars more than the HP Pavilion Gaming 15. For the extra money, you get a far better GPU, the GeForce RTX 2060. The RTX 2060 is 10-15 percent faster than the GTX 1660 Ti across the board. But, just as important, it supports RTX hardware-accelerated ray-tracing. The RTX 2060 is just about powerful enough to hand in playable framerates with RTX and DLSS enabled at 1080p.

It’s not the ideal way to get into ray-tracing, but it’s a minor miracle that the 2060 shows up at all in a sub-$1000 laptop. The ASUS TUF FX505DV does make compromises to get there, though. The biggest offender is the inclusion of the Ryzen 5 3550H. This processor features 4 Zen+ cores and 8 threads. It offers performance more or less comparable to the Core i5-9300H.

The quad-core CPU might hold the RTX 2060 back in some CPU-bound titles. However, this combination is good enough for 1080p/60 FPS in the vast majority of modern AAA titles. In games like Borderlands 3 where you might run into GPU bottlenecks with the GTX 1660 Ti, the RTX 2060 will carry the day. What else does the FX505DV offer? In terms of memory and storage, you get 16 GB of 2400 MHz dual-channel RAM and a 512 GB NVMe SSD. As far as the display goes, you get a 1080p 120 Hz IPS panel. This is, again, an incredible feature at this price-point. The RTX 2060 is powerful enough to actually hand in 120 Hz experiences, especially in older titles and eSports games like Overwatch.

Conclusion

If there’s one thing our holiday laptop deal-trawling exercise has proven, it’s that the Asus FX505DV, despite being the costliest option on this list, offers the best value by a long-shot. While it’s $400 more than the Dell G3579, our cheapest pick, this wouldn’t even cover the sticker price of the RTX 2060 and the tray price of the Ryzen 5 3550. Of course, it’ll go back to a saner price after the sale ends, but for the time being, this is effectively our top laptop pick period. Anything that’s meaningfully better will cost north of $2000.

Arjun

Penguin-published author, and journalist. Loves PC hardware but has terrible hand-eye coordination. Most likely to be found playing Total War or watching weird Russian sitcoms.
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