Best gaming laptops for 2021 – CNET [CNET]

September 11, 2021 Thomas Giboney technology

Gaming laptops have evolved to keep up with the needs of even the most intense gamers, who know that having the right equipment can often be as important as skill to raise your stats. A good gaming rig may cost you, but for those serious about their gaming experience — and with a budget to match — it’s frequently worth it to drop some serious cash to build the ideal gaming setup.

There’s more to a decent gaming laptop than raw speed. You can pack it with the best graphics card, the fastest, most colorful display around, a gazillion-core processor, tons of fast solid-state drive storage to hold your games and a rock-solid hard drive for secondary storage, but it can still fall short. Those powerful components may overheat at the worst moments your battery may die or you might experience an instability that impacts your gaming performance. Or maybe you don’t want to always use an external mechanical keyboard with per-key RGB backlighting, but the system’s WASD keys feel like mashed potatoes under your fingers.

No more battery life compromises

The good news is that not all games are bottlenecked by dual cores or a last-generation GTX, so it’s not a given that you’ll need to bust your budget to pay for a new laptop. Budget gaming can be difficult if you’re not shopping carefully, though, and we all know that there’s really no such thing as a “cheap gaming laptop.”

A compromise you’ve traditionally had to make has been battery life, which has typically lasted as little as 2 hours of nonstop gaming. You also couldn’t play most complex games — GPU- or CPU-intensive ones — on battery power. Processors would get throttled back and screens dim during hardcore gaming sessions, so a laptop that felt nimble when connected became a slog on battery power, turning your epic battles into a battles of frustration.

That’s been changing recently, as Intel, AMD and Nvidia have concentrated on improving their power management technologies. No, you still can’t play for 10 hours on battery, but now you can find some great gaming laptops with 10-hour battery lives.

GPU matters

The fastest graphics card currently available in a laptop is the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 with the usual Max-Q variants. The Max-Q versions run at slower frequencies than their full-size siblings — this is to keep the noise and heat down and to help them fit into thinner designs. RTX models also accelerate ray-traced rendering and provide intelligent upscaling (also known as DLSS) where it’s explicitly supported. If your favorite games don’t use it, the lower-end Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti incorporates Turing, the last generation of Nvidia’s technology, without the extra cost or power burden of the RT cores.

asus-rog-flow-x13-and-xg-mobile-dsc00783 — The Asus ROG Flow X13 with its optional sidekick the Mobile XG offers a blended solution for gamers: The small, lightweight laptop has a powerful AMD Ryzen 5900HS CPU and an Nvidia GTX 1650 GPU for lightweight gaming, while the external dock incorporates an RTX 3080 mobile GPU and extra connections.

Lori Grunin/CNET

The problem with the Max-Q, though, is that you have to reboot to switch between a dedicated GPU mode and the original Optimus mode, which only uses the GPU for accelerating, not actually drawing the screen. That means you can’t take advantage of the Max-Q’s ultrafast refresh rates with Optimus. So why not leave it on the GPU mode all the time? Because you’ll frequently get poorer CPU performance and even lesser graphics performance in games that balance CPU and GPU usage rather than going all-out on the GPU.

Read more: Best gaming mouse under $50

Nvidia launched the new generation of its Max-Q architecture, which supports Advanced Optimus, last year. It’s smarter, with the integrated and discrete graphics sharing (rather than switching) the pipeline to the display, so no reboot necessary. But Advanced Optimus needs a major change to system design, so laptops supporting Advanced Optimus still aren’t plentiful.

AMD’s latest laptop GPUs, the Radeon RX 6600M, 6700M and 6800M, don’t quite reach the level of the fastest Nvidia RTX models, but the 6800M has gotten pretty close (in the one system we’ve tested with it so far), with performance on average falling between the RTX 3070 and 3080.

On the distant horizon, Intel’s getting closer to finally launching its first generation of Arc discrete high-performance GPUs — though not until early 2022 — codenamed “Alchemist.”

CPU core competition

AMD’s Ryzen 5000 H-series processors, including its recent Core i9 competitors — the eight-core/16-thread Ryzen 9 5900HS and 5900HX — raise AMD’s CPU performance to a new level. I tested the low-power HS in the Asus ROG Flow X13 and it flies on both multi- and single-core. And the higher power HX in Asus’ ROG Strix 15-inch models holds its own compared to Intel’s 10th-gen i9-10900HK (I haven’t yet tested any of the 11th-gen Tiger Lake-H processors, however).

More cores may help when choosing a CPU, though at the moment many games still don’t use more than four, especially older ones. That’s partly Intel’s rationalization for its continued reliance on its old 14-nanometer architecture for the 10th-gen high-performance (H series) processors. It lets the company boost single-core clock frequencies, compared with gains it would make by moving to a smaller process technology such as Ice Lake, which is designed to support more cores on less power draw.

Screen choices

And then there are the screens. Everyone bumped their flagship 1080p configurations to 360Hz, but for many a gamer, they’re not essential: 240Hz max should be fine for those few times you can get frame rates above 240fps. Even 144Hz will do for many people, but artifacts like tearing, caused by the screen refresh rate becoming out of sync with the frame rate, depend on your games as much as your laptop brand and hardware.

Read: Best 2-in-1 PCs in 2021 for when you need a laptop and tablet in one

We’re also seeing a lot more 120Hz 4K screens in the flagship models in both 17- and 15-inch sizes and a ton of 165Hz and 240Hz QHD (1440p) options. The latter are my favorites, balancing higher resolution — certainly enough on a laptop screen — with gaming friendly refresh rates.

Still with me? Great. If you’re a gaming beast who wants to do a deep dive into what’s out there right now and figure out which is the best gaming laptop for your desired gaming experience, check out the recommendations below. This list is periodically updated.