3 best cheap gaming laptops for students – get gaming as well as studying

There are no two ways around it – the best gaming laptops are super expensive. If you want the sort of performance that can shine on an external monitor at high resolutions, it can be hard to avoid looking at machines that cost thousands (regardless of your currency).

As millions of students around the world head to university or school, whether for the first time or going back after a summer break, though, we know there's a big audience out there who want to save their cash and make astute purchases. So, if you're on the lookout for a cheap (or at least cheaper) gaming laptop for your dorm room, student house or lecture theatre, check out these three options that I think merit a proper look.

T3's Top 3

Best for performance?

Lenovo Legion 5 (Gen 10)

Lenovo's superb laptop isn't exactly cheap – but it's just about as affordable as you can get if you want an Nvidia GeForce RTX 50-series card. This one packs the 5060, the standard card in the lineup, but that crucially means you still get access to newer features like frame-generation and more.

These are total game-changers for laptop gaming, unlocking big boosts to performance with little to no visual cost. That makes this a brilliant option in terms of future-proofing, despite a very fair price, and you can also make a build with lower specs to bring the price down.

That said, the state of the market right now means this still isn't the cheapest option – I'm prioritising quality over sheer pricing.

Best cheap laptop

HP Omen 16 Slim

HP's Omen 16 has been a brilliant budget buy for a good few years now, but this "Slim" version is a much newer idea. It's actually barely slimmer than the standard version, but is the default budget option in the lineup now. The starting point is an RTX 5050 (which isn't much of a step down at all, in truth), and that ensures you'll get some great value for around the £1,000 or $1,000 mark.

This will still play games on great settings, especially if you're not connecting to an external monitor, and while it's hardly the most portable laptop on the market, it's very well-made and durable. That said, don't expect to get much battery life from it – that's simply not its priority.

Best left-field option

Legion Go S SteamOS

Okay, it's not a gaming laptop – but if you want bang for your buck and need to keep the bulkiness to a minimum, I really think most students or canny buyers would do well to look at an affordable portable. The Legion Go S (SteamOS) is my favourite, and its price has held steady, so you're still looking at a brilliant deal compared to most laptops.

The only real limitation it has is that it runs on SteamOS, which uses Linux as its base – that means there will be some non-Steam games that can't run on the machine. Still, the vast majority of PC gaming now does funnel through Steam, giving you a huge amount to explore, and you can even dock it to use it as a genuine mini PC. This is what I'd buy if I was going back to school, frankly.

Verdict

Overall, all three of the options we've laid out make sense depending on your exact budget, and all of them are far more affordable than the machines on our list of the best gaming laptops overall. That said, I do think that the best choice for most people will be a Legion Go S, even with its relatively old central hardware.

The display is great, but really, it's the flexibility that makes it sing. Sure, it won't work great as a productivity machine to study on in the library – but if you're looking for something to game on, it's a special bit of kit that has aged beautifully.

That said, if you do need your choice to be a laptop, with keyboard, trackpad and all, then either the Legion 5 or the Omen 16 Slim should stand you in good stead and enable high-quality gaming sessions between classes.