Best Gaming Laptop 2021

The state of gaming this year is unlike anything we’ve seen before. With PC manufacturers cranking out systems that are lighter, thinner, and have better battery life than previous generations, plus they’re moving away from flashy, gaudy designs that we’ve come to associate with gaming gear, instead of producing systems that are more suitable for use in places like work. In terms of specs and power, all of these machines are using the same processor, Intel’s eighth generation Core i7 six-core chip, and similar graphics cards.

Best Gaming Laptop

Finding the best gaming laptop out there is not easy these days. We put our time and effort into finding the best gaming laptop 2021 based on their performance and user reviews so you don’t have to.

Best Gaming Laptop 2021 Comparison Table

Two years ago, laptops with this much power would weigh more than eight pounds, have an awful design, and had a singular purpose, but now they’re under five pounds, as thin as a MacBook Pro, and can last for hours on a charge. These are the closest systems we’ve seen to straddling the line between gaming performance and productivity, and the Razer Blade is the most regular-looking of the gaming laptops in this group.

Razer Blade

Razer Blade has a unibody aluminum design and up to a 144 Hz refresh rate on a full HD display. If you plan on playing games on this computer, we would suggest a high refresh rate. It’s a no-brainer, but if you’re a creative and you want a 4K touchscreen option, Razer offers that as well, and you can use the GPU for that instead. Regardless of which display you choose, the Razer Blade has thin bezels that are suitable for viewing at all angles, and it also keeps the webcam in the right place.

The new Razer Blade is fully capable of playing popular PC games at their highest settings; League of Legends, Rainbow Six Siege, Fortnite, Counter-Strike, and yes, even Destiny 2. The drawback is that it’s expensive. As configured, this unit has a GTX 1070 and a 512 GB solid-state drive for $2600. However, our main issue with the Razer Blade is that it just gets too hot, under heavy strain. The top row of the keyboard, the palm rests, and underneath the laptop just become unbearable to touch. You can manually increase or decrease fan speed and noise using the Razer Synapse app, but that’s all at the benefit or deficit of the graphics card. Honestly, all that fiddling around for a laptop that’s over $2000 is just unacceptable. Also, the keyboard and keycaps are tiny.
Despite its shortcomings, Razer still has one of the best gaming laptops out there. You can still get around 5 to 6 hours of battery life on a single charge while browsing the web or watching a video. It’s not great by Ultrabook standards, but for a gaming laptop of this performance, it’s acceptable.

MSI GS65 Stealth Thin

The other new gaming laptop that we really like is MSI’s GS65 Stealth Thin. It’s the thinnest and lightest of the laptops in this group, most similar to a 15-inch MacBook Pro. It also has a six-core Core i7, a GTX 1070 with Max-Q design, a downclocked version of the original card for thermals, and better port selection than the Blade. There’s also a SteelSeries RGB-backlit keyboard with wide, shallow keys that we personally found the most comfortable of the laptops we’ve tested in this category.

The MSI does a great job of thermals, shifting hot air away from the keyboard and the palms rest. On top of that, the GS65 is a few hundred dollars less than the similarly equipped Razer Blade, while not giving up anything in terms of performance or capability. Aesthetically, the MSI takes an even more mature approach to gaming laptop design with no obnoxious light up logos. Unfortunately, the build quality isn’t that good, with flex in the keyboard, touchpad, and even the lid.

Other Gaming Laptops

The ASUS Zephyrus M, Digital Storm Equinox, and the Gigabyte Aero 15X are all capable of playing games at high or ultra settings, also have 144 Hz, full HD displays, and six-core processors, but of the three, we’d only recommend the ASUS, which has the best cooling of the systems here. When you lift the lid, a mechanism opens the bottom plate. ASUS calls this Active Aerodynamic System, complete with red lighting if it’s plugged in.
The Zephyrus M can drive a full mobile GTX 1070 instead of the downclocked Max-Q versions in the Blade and the MSI. The MSI and the Razer are our favorite laptops here because they’re thin and light, they have solid performance, and honestly, they’re the better looking of the bunch. Still, it’s baffling in 2021 that laptops over $2000 don’t have fingerprint-based login or Windows Hello support via facial recognition.

Gaming Laptop Buyer’s Guide:

When it comes to the art of making a laptop, manufacturers go through that struggle where they are trying to find that perfect spot between price, performance, and portability. It basically picks 2 of 3. If you want ultra light portability and really good performance, it exists there are some really thin 1080 Max-Q laptops out there but they’re really expensive. So, you got to decide pretty early on in your process of how much money you want to spend and where you want to spend that money.

Cheaper laptops tend to be a little bit thicker and heavier and they usually have more plastic materials, which isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just not as premium feeling or premium looking. But when it comes to the thickness of a laptop, sometimes thicker laptops can have an advantage, because when you have a big laptop to work with, you have bigger heat pipes, you have bigger fans just everything can be a little bit bigger and those things tend to do a better job at removing heat from a system. So, let’s take a look at an example.

The Alienware 17 is a relatively thick 17-inch gaming laptop and it’s quite a bit thicker than the Razer Blade Pro. Now, when this thing first launched this thing had a GTX 1080 in it. It’s quite a hot GPU and one of the issues this thing had was keeping up with the thermal output. Here’s the thing, when this thing comes out of the factory it’s tuned just right. Everything is running fine so the temperatures are acceptable. But the moment it has any kind of dust buildup inside it, or if you want to play with this thing on your blanket or like on your lap and you are covering up the vents on the bottom, the thermals rise, and it just doesn’t do as well.

The GTX 1080 on the Alienware, still produces a lot of heat but this laptop is thick and has just a lot more thermal headroom. This laptop comes out of the factory running fine as well, but because there’s more room in there, there’s just more tolerance for the dust to build up and stuff like that. So, a device like this because it’s thicker, it isn’t as elegant-looking, but it’ll get you further along when it comes to dust buildup. You definitely need to take care of a Razer Blade Pro or basically any thin and light gaming laptop.

• Build Quality

So, basically when it comes to how well gaming laptops are made, last year most laptops are made quite well. There’s more emphasis from brands to build things that are thinner and lighter, because that’s just what people seem to want right now, but there is still a really good market for bigger laptops, the more durable they tend to last longer and quite frankly, thin and light gaming laptops aren’t for everyone, you definitely need to take better care of them.

• Ports & Slots

Talking about ports, we just want to mention a couple things: Thunderbolt 3 support is something that’s cool on paper, especially if you’re into the whole idea of external GPUs, but in reality, they are really expensive to set up. So, it’s not something that we think you should really gun for like if the device that you are looking at doesn’t have Thunderbolt 3 support, we don’t think it should make or break the deal. The other thing is, if you’re purchasing a device, make sure that the exhaust of the fans isn’t on the mouse hand. We’ve used some laptops that the fan exhaust literally right beside your mouse hand and your hands just getting baked while you play and it’s no good, so avoid that but otherwise, ports are a pretty easy decision.

• CPUs

Now, let’s discuss the CPUs. The Intel U processors have just been refreshed. So, the 8th gen U processors are those Kaby Lake R chips, those are 15 watt CPUs and despite what companies are trying to tell you.

Geekbench scores

If you’re really looking for a dedicated gaming laptop, don’t get a U processor, get an H processor. So, the 8th generation H processors are just about to come out and these are 45 watt CPUs that are traditionally quad-core CPUs, but these new Coffee Lake ones are 6 cores and with the new Coffee Lake architecture because of faster clock speeds and the two extra cores, you’re going to get some better performance.

Now things like multi-core applications are going to be significantly better but, well-optimized games should notice some nice boost in performance as well.

• Graphics Card

Talking about the graphics card, Nvidia GTX 10 series GPUs were amazing for laptops. They basically changed the entire industry. This whole thing about gaming laptops was basically a joke 3 years ago. Gaming laptops were just, they were stupid you would pay huge amounts of money and not really get the performance that you would need to be able to play the current titles. Nowadays, you can spend like 8 – 900 bucks on an entry-level gaming laptop and depends on the game, but you can float at that 60 frames per second target on ultra graphics for a lot of games.

It’s pretty crazy, the games mentioned below are triple A titles from Blizzard, Activision, EA, basically the most graphically intensive games are able to run at really good frame rates on an entry level gaming laptop. That’s awesome.

Now, as for what’s next, it’s Nvidia Volta that should probably launch later this year. So, we got some time but ask yourself. Do you really think you’re going to need that extra GPU performance? Like, look at that chart above, these are the games that you are able to play at 60 frames per second or more with a $900 gaming laptop so yes Volta’s gonna be better obviously, but we don’t know if we’ll really need that extra performance because we feel like we’ve already hit that sweet spot where inexpensive hardware can play the best titles.

• Screen

The screen is one of the most important decisions when it comes to making a laptop decision because when you’ve decided on a GPU and a CPU combination, it doesn’t matter which brand you go with, performance is gonna be relatively similar but the screens differ a lot. So, our first piece of advice is don’t get a 4K screen unless you really need it for content creation or something because when it comes to gaming, you’re gonna get better value and just get a better gaming experience if you spend that money on a higher quality 1080p screen. A 120-hertz screen is so much better than a 60-hertz screen for gaming. You’ll need to be able to push out those 120 frames per second to really appreciate it, but when you do, the gaming experience is just so much smoother. You can react faster, things just look better on screen, it’s night and day. Unfortunately, it’s one of those things I can’t show on this video because you’re watching this at 24 frames per second. If you see these things in person you’ll love them.

The other thing is don’t be afraid of a high-quality TN panel. Traditionally TN panels are freaking terrible, they’re bad for everything let alone gaming, but the new ones are really good like Acer, MSI, they are using panels on their laptops, that just looks gorgeous. We would consider those high-quality TN panels significantly better than most IPS panels on gaming laptops. The direction of the whole industry, we think is moving towards high refresh rate screens, 120 Hertz panels look so much better.

Taking the Razer Blade Pro into consideration, it was launched originally with the GTX 1080 and a 4K 60 Hertz screen. So, the games looked really pretty, really color accurate, but they were only capped at 60 Hertz, you could only see 60 frames per second. However, the new variant has a GTX 1060 and 120 Hertz screen and we much prefer playing games on this thing than the old one. It’s just a gorgeous 120 frames per second screen. It’s so much nicer to look at, so much more enjoyable to play games on. So, if you’re looking for screens and your budget can allow for it, check out 120 Hertz screens, they’re gonna be the hot stuff for this year.

If you do buy a cheaper laptop, a lot of them have the ability to replace the screens it’s not easy and it’s probably not covered under warranty, in fact, it’s definitely not a warranty covered operation, but it can be done you can buy some really inexpensive screens for like 100 bucks that are 120 Hertz and look pretty good. So, I’ll leave a link should I do it? Do it at your own discretion I will leave a link.

• Customer Support

The last thing is customer support and this is something that we think gets overlooked by a lot of people. The whole industry, in our opinion, does not have good customer support. If you look at every single brand, everyone has like horror stories of Customer support that they had with basically every single brand, except for Apple. They have like these million dollar laptops that cost a lot of money but when you go to the store there’s a really good chance that if you have busted a device in the first year, you are going to walk out of the Apple store with it repaired or replaced. You don’t get that option with basically every other gaming laptop company.

Our honest opinion is that the big companies like Dell, HP, Lenovo, any company that has a lot of big business accounts and stuff like that they have great customer support available just for their business customers and they kind of extend that to the consumer level. If you’re looking for good customer support, check out Dell, HP, Lenovo, Alienware, they all have that next day support thing where they try to send someone to your door to try to fix it or repair and we’ve had mixed experience of that some good some bad but at least that option is available. Smaller companies, like razer they don’t have that kind of stuff. You have to send it back to the factory to get it fixed. So, if you’re looking for a better customer support go for the bigger companies.

Let us know what your favorite gaming laptop is in the comments below or if you didn’t have a favorite at all. Keep visiting for latest updates and news on gaming laptops.