Best Gaming Laptop for 2023

Gaming laptops have traditionally had to compromise on battery life, which typically lasted as little as two 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 hard-core gaming sessions, so a laptop that felt nimble when connected became a slog on battery power, turning your epic battles into 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 power, but now you can find some great gaming laptops with 10-hour battery lives -- albeit not for playing -- to make gaming on the road more feasible.

The fastest graphics processor currently available in a laptop is the Nvidia Geforce RTX 4090, with the usual Max-Q variants. The Max-Q versions run at slower frequencies than their full-size siblings -- that keeps down the noise and heat and allows them to 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. 

We're finally seeing a lot more system implement Nvidia's Advanced Optimus version of Max-Q, which is great. It's smarter, with integrated and discrete graphics sharing (rather than switching) the same pipeline to the display, no reboot necessary. 

The older version of Optimus, that's still used by a lot of laptops, requires you to reboot in order to switch between a high-power-draw dedicated GPU mode and a power-saving mode; the latter only uses the GPU for accelerating, not actually drawing the screen (so every frame has to travel from the GPU's dedicated memory over the system bus to the CPU and then to the screen rather than going directly from the GPU memory to the screen). That means it can't take advantage of adaptive refresh-rate technologies and it can negatively affect frame rates. 

We haven't yet tested models with AMD's current high-power laptop GPUs, the RX 7600M, RX 7600M XT, RX 7700S and RX 7600S, but based on the performance of desktop 7000 series models I don't expect them to hit the highs of Nvidia's best, but they tend to be solid midrange performers. The "S" versions are the lower-power models designed to fit better in the thinnest laptops.

Intel launched its first generation of Arc discrete high-performance GPUs a while back, but we've yet to see any for gaming laptops.

Yes, but not always. In general, sims benefit from faster clock speeds and more cores since those are required for the heavy calculations when worlds get complex. More and more AAA games are also starting to balance loads better between the CPU and GPU where possible as well. And if you bounce back and forth between a game and the rest of Windows, it can help speed that kind of multitasking a bit.

Still, a lot of games, especially first-person shooters, still don't take advantage of more than four cores. Intel jumped to 10nm Alder Lake for its 12th-gen CPUs, which combined performance and power-efficient cores similar to Apple's M1 and M2 chips, and made a huge difference in battery life, as well as to system performance on battery, that has trickled down to gaming laptops.

There's lots to know if you're choosing a new gaming screen. All the major companies 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.

We're also seeing a lot more 120Hz 4K screens in the flagship models in all 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.

The review process for laptops, desktops, tablets and other computer-like devices consists of two parts: performance testing under controlled conditions in the CNET Labs and extensive hands-on use by our expert reviewers. This includes evaluating a device's aesthetics, ergonomics and features. A final review verdict is a combination of both those objective and subjective judgments. 

The list of benchmarking software we use changes over time as the devices we test evolve. The most important core tests we're currently running on every compatible computer include: Primate Labs Geekbench 5, Cinebench R23, PCMark 10 and 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra. 

A more detailed description of each benchmark and how we use it can be found in our How We Test Computers page.