Andy Sansom
Gaming laptops are for those who want absolutely peak performance when playing the most graphically intense games, but who also want to be able to take their machine on the go some of the time. They're a step above the best laptops that most people will use for work, or the best lightweight laptops that might be ideal for students.
The biggest AAA games of 2025 (and, frankly, even some titles from the not-so-distant past) often require a choice between performance and fidelity modes, even on the likes of the PS5 Pro and Xbox Series X. With some of the best gaming laptops, though, you won't have to compromise. Exactly how far up the scale of graphical prowess (and, indeed, price) you wish to go will depend on various factors.
Some gaming laptops will feature brash, flamboyant designs that scream 'gamer', while others are a bit more discreet. Whatever your style, we've got you covered with this guide to the machines worthy of your time that will get your favourite games running and looking better than ever.
T3's Top Picks
The best gaming laptop overall
Asus has a gaming laptop that defies belief here – it's slim and could pass for a MacBook Pro, but also has unbelievable power to offer up. It basically has no flaws, other than a steep price tag, one it merits.
The best premium gaming laptop
Razer's thin and light gaming laptops have become synonymous with class, and the latest version of its 16-inch option is brilliant. It's thinner than ever, and just as powerful as Asus' competitor.
The best value gaming laptop
Medion isn't the biggest name in the laptop market, which goes a long way to explaining why its laptop comes in at great value. It's not as chunky as it looks, and has power to spare, at a good price.
Max is the Tech section's staff writer at T3, and he tested almost every laptop on this list – including a period when he had multiple of them side-by-side to compare. That makes him perfectly placed to order them in a ranking for you.
Update 12 Jun 2025: Completely refreshed this guide with the slate of gaming laptops reviewed with 2025 GPUs, making for a totally new suite of recommendations.
The best gaming laptops we recommend in 2025
Best overall
No laptop I've tested in the past year has made quite as good an impression as the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14's 2025 revision. It's a stunning bit of kit – practically as slim as a MacBook Pro, with a design that's similarly downbeat and refined. It has one slash of reflective metal across its back, but otherwise is extremely stealthy.
Despite that, though, it hides some real power in the form of an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, a card more than powerful enough to crunch through modern releases. You'll be able to enjoy them on a luscious OLED display, too. While other laptops exceed its 120Hz refresh rate, you shouldn't feel the loss too much, thanks to stunning image quality at 3K resolution.
Best of all, battery life when unplugged is reliable for productivity. Start gaming and it won't last long, but for regular use it's actually close to a non-gaming laptop, which makes this an ideal companion for actual life.
Read more: Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2025) review
Best premium
Razer has managed to carve out a genuinely impressive niche for itself in the gaming laptop market – it started as a famous name for mice and keyboards, but now makes some of the most desirable laptops going. The Blade 16 got a redesign in 2025 to underline that pedigree.
It's now thinner than ever, jaw-droppingly so when you consider that it still hides a gorgeous 16-inch OLED panel that can push to 240Hz. Load up a recently-released game and it'll flex its muscles, too, with a 5070 Ti on board to ensure that performance is excellent.
The only real downside here is price – Razer knows that it can charge a lot for a laptop that everyone wants, and if you want to upgrade some of its components, the extra charges can get fairly crazy. The fully kitted-out top-spec version is prohibitively expensive, but you can get a brilliant laptop for a price that's more reasonable, too – but still undeniably premium in an already premium market.
Read more: Razer Blade 16 (2025) review
Best value
Look, you might have seen a pretty frightening price up above this paragraph for a laptop labelled as the best value on the market – but the reality is, cheaping out on a gaming laptop isn't a great idea. They don't tend to age that well, so you want the best you can get at the moment you're buying.
Medion has created a 16-inch laptop that has about as impressive a specs list as you could want, right down to the RTX 5090 GPU powering its graphics, but it's also slapped a price tag that feels completely fair on that machine. When you compare it to the competition, it gets even more approachable.
Step down to a standard 5070 or 5070 Ti and you'll be looking at genuine value for what you're getting, in my view, with a 300Hz mini LED display that looks brilliant in all conditions and a design that actually shocked me with how reasonably portable it was. There's no huge overhanging rear end, and everything worked ideally – this is a great buy from a smaller name in the market.
Read more: Medion Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate
Best big-screen
There's a big market out there for, well, big laptops – not everyone wants something they can slip into a small backpack. If you'd rather make the most of your money by getting as big a display as possible, particularly if you don't intend to connect to an external display, an 18-inch laptop could be a great buy.
MSI's latest 18-inch Stealth machine is a great example from the genre. It has that huge display, for when you need it, but nonetheless doesn't feel too hulkingly massive. It does make it more of a challenge to pack if you're moving around, but for many people it'll be a desktop replacement anyway.
Impressively, despite that extra screen real estate the price MSI's asking isn't too bad at all, and the all-important inclusion of an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti means you'll be cruising through the most recent game releases without any trouble. Brace for some fan noise, of course, but this is a great machine regardless.
Read more: MSI Stealth 18 HX AI review
Best affordable OLED
You might have noticed, while reading through this list, that upgrading to an OLED display can often crank the price of your laptop up significantly, especially at bigger screen sizes.
If you want an OLED gaming laptop that manages to thread a decent needle on price, though, Acer have a good one in the form of the clunkily-named Predator Helios Neo 16S AI. It's a great 16-inch machine with the prerequisite Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, along with a really capable Intel chip to power it all.
The real star is a lovely 165Hz OLED display, though, which I found super impressive when paired with new games – with all the rich colours and deep blacks that you'd expect from the panel. Don't get me wrong, though; this is still a pricey machine – it just manages to offer a panel of specs to go with its OLED that feels pretty fair for the price.
Read more: Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI
Best 2-in-1
If you want something that's truly unlike almost anything else on the market, it's worth checking out the Asus ROG Flow Z13's 2025 refresh, which massively beefs up the power of its graphical processing.
This two-in-one tablet and laptop is much like the productivity options that have flooded the market in recent years, but its powerful processor has hugely boosted integrated graphics to flex with. This means you can genuinely game comfortably even in recent releases – albeit at nowhere near the fidelity of any other machine on this list.
It's a niche option, then, because its price is still very premium, but if you want a machine that can basically do it all (but without necessarily perfecting any one element), this could be it. Tablet, work laptop, gaming machine, all rolled into one.
Read more: Asus ROG Flow Z13 (2025) review
How to choose the best gaming laptop for you
Look at your gaming library: What type of games do you like to play? Will your favourite titles benefit from a high-end performance boost, or would you be better off saving your money? If you're primarily a Minecraft or League of Legends player, it's probably not worth the outlay. Compare that with AAA titles, particularly shooters, that will seem massively better when running on full settings and at an ultra-high frame rate. If you fancy yourself a competitive gamer, a refresh rate of 165Hz or more is pretty much essential.
Consider your budget: These laptops don't come cheap, it's fair to say, several times the price of a current-gen console. Prioritise what you want and how much you're willing to pay. If you're going to spend over £3000 on a laptop, make sure you love it first.
Do you intend to use an external monitor? If you're thinking about gaming on the go, then using the laptop's own screen is pretty much your only option, so plump for something with a crisp resolution and high refresh rate. If, however, you've got one of the best gaming monitors and intend to be largely static, then you are probably ok to prioritise other aspects of your gaming laptop.
What are you going to use it for? Is this going to be a dedicated gaming-only machine, or are you planning on taking this laptop to work (or your home office)? This will likely inform what you are looking for. If you're looking to work and play on the same machine, you'll probably have to steer clear of some of the more ostentatious designs and prioritise battery life and keyboard experience.
FAQs
These are some of the questions that plague people buy gaming laptops, so we've done our best to give you our steer on what to do.
Can I avoid RGB lighting?
It used to be the case that any gaming laptop automatically involved garish RGB lighting – but that's changed in recent years. It's far more likely now that a high-end gaming laptop will have some lighting that can be turned off easily.
Almost all of the gaming laptops likely to catch T3's attention are of a quality that involves a lot of user control. Most come with pre-installed software from the manufacturer that will let you control every element of your lighting setup. Included in that suite of controls will be the option to turn things off entirely, mercifully.
Can I game on battery power?
When you've tested gaming laptops as consistently as I have, it doesn't take long to establish that the dream of portable gaming they sell isn't so simple. In reality, almost all of them use software to throttle their power when they're not plugged in.
This isn't a conspiracy – the laptop GPUs that most of them use simply need too much power for the battery to be enough. This means that, while you can game in a more flexible way, you'll need a power point to plug into if you're going to get the great performance that you've bought the machine for.
Make sure you have this straight in your head before committing to a purchase – it would be a really disappointing moment after unboxing your laptop otherwise.
How we tested these gaming laptops
Playing games might be fun, but at T3 we consider reviewing gaming laptops to be serious business. We live, work, and play with these machines, writing detailed reviews and explaining our judgment (and you can check our How We Test page for more information on our testing standards).
We review each laptop by first judging its design. This includes (but is not limited to) the aesthetic, build quality, durability and practicality of the machine. From there, we consider the display, meaning more than just its specs. Does it feel smooth to use? How does it cope in direct sunlight? That second one's not easy to test in the UK at times, but we get it done.
Of course, if someone has to play games for the good of humanity, we're happy to do it. We play a whole host of titles from indies to AAA and note not just the performance but also the user experience. Does the design of the keyboard, for example, help or hurt the gaming experience?
While living with the machine, we can get a grip on the actual battery life (not just manufacturer claims) and any special features that we think are worth knowing about, like Thunderbolt 4 connectivity. Only after spending days and even weeks with these laptops will we feel comfortable awarding them a score, with a 5-star rating reserved for only the best products.
Reviewer panel
Richard is one of the most experienced freelance laptop reviewers in the industry, with countless product reviews and hardware tests under his belt. He's reviewed heaps of laptops for T3 over the years, and knows every detail about each.