Over on the Baidu forums (as spotted by Wccftech), two pictures were posted, one of which showing what was claimed to be the AMD Radeon 8050S integrated GPU but the CPU's OPN actually suggests it is the 8060S-equipped AI Max+ 395. This is more than likely just a prelaunch software or database issue. This device managed to achieve a GPU score of 10,106 and a CPU score of 5,571 points in 3DMark Time Spy.

For clarity, that GPU score places what is currently assumed to be the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 around 2,000 points in the GPU category ahead of the average score of laptop RTX 4050 scores on 3DMark's website, and just a few hundred points behind laptop RTX 4060 scores. 3DMark is a pretty good benchmark for understanding graphical power though it's important to note it's not the be-all and end-all of gaming performance. A wider suite of games might give a better idea, but nevertheless this is a good starting point to figure out where AMD's top APU lands.

Ryzen's APU goes without a dedicated GPU, like those measured laptops above, which means if the score holds firm in actual testing, we might be able to expect RTX 4060 laptop performance out of this chip when it lands in gaming laptops, and at least one tablet from Asus.

We were hoping for a little more from the big leap in graphics cores to make the larger APU worth it over more power-savvy numbers for handhelds, like the Ryzen AI 9 HX 390. AMD previously suggested the top-end chip would perform similarly to an RTX 4070 gaming laptop (well, tablet) but these early figures put it closer to an RTX 4060 laptop. Discrete performance from an integrated GPU is still impressive but not quite what we were expecting.

It reportedly took AMD four goes to actually get the Strix Halo APU right and that's because it's more bespoke than one might think on first look. Strix Halo uses its own Zen 5-based CPU CCDs and it uses a new way to interconnect them, as the methods to get the Ryzen 9 9950X up and running saw limitations in power efficiency.

This power efficiency could allow the chip to become less power-hungry, which is a natural boon for the battery life of gaming laptops. That being said, the configurable wattage of this chip goes all the way up to 120 W and any change in the power of a given machine could make for large fluctuations in performance.

In an X post from the official Nvidia GeForce account, Nvidia says: "GeForce RTX 50 Series Laptop pre-orders start Feb 25 from OEMs. 👀 Stay tuned for more details!" And Nvidia's 50-series laptops webpage confirms that these laptops will be "available starting March 2025," so it shouldn't be long until those pre-orders arrive, if you're lucky enough to grab one.

"👀" indeed. While we can't know for certain until we test them out ourselves, this next generation of laptops is expected to offer quite a lot for gamers, primarily because of DLSS 4's Multi Frame Generation. Based on what we've seen of the desktop RTX 5080 and RTX 5090, RTX 50-series GPUs might not offer massive leaps in pure raster performance, but they more than make up for this with AI-aided frame generation.

Of course, how you feel about this will depend on whether you think of them as 'fake frames' or real ones—but hey, I'll take an extra 100 frames over zero, fake or not.

This is simplifying things, of course, because there's also the question of latency, which will be more pronounced in the case of less powerful laptop GPUs than in the desktop ones (the RTX 5070 Ti mobile, for instance, will feature a GB205 GPU, the same as will be in the desktop RTX 5070). That's because if you start with lower input frame rates you end up with more latency from subsequent generated frames.

Still, these higher-end chips should still be powerful, even if a little less powerful than their desktop counterparts, so we shouldn't be talking atrocious frame rates before Multi Frame Generation kicks in.

And it is the upper end of the 50-series GPU lineup we're expecting to kick off with: RTX 5090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5070 Ti. These were some of the first RTX 50-series gaming laptops we saw at retailers. RTX 5070 laptops, on the other hand, are expected to launch later, in April. This follows Nvidia's usual GPU release cadence—higher-end first, lower-end later—and it matches what we're seeing on the desktop graphics card front.

These laptops should all come packaged with Intel Core Ultra 200H-series (Arrow Lake) or AMD Ryzen AI 300 (Strix Point) processors, too, which will firmly plant us in the current generation.

Although we can't be certain whether the current retailer listing prices will stick, and a lot of the currently listed RTX 50-series laptops are mega expensive, at least some of them seem reasonable. Take the ROG Strix G16 with RTX 5070 Ti for $1,900 at Best Buy, for instance, or a 16-inch MSI laptop with RTX 5070 Ti for $1,599 at Newegg. Though of course, even if these do remain as affordable, whether they'll remain in stock for more than a nanosecond is another question entirely.

Plenty to hesitantly look forward to, then. With more Nvidia desktop GPUs set to launch soon and AMD ones just around the corner, too, it'll be interesting to see which garners the most attention.

Asus has just revealed prices for a bunch of its new RTX 50-series laptops at its own store and Best Buy (via Wccftech), and if these initial listings bear out in reality, decent high-end mobile gaming might not cost an arm and a leg this generation. Just an arm, perhaps—we're not talking miracles, here.

I'm talking primarily about the ROG Strix G16 with an RTX 5070 Ti mobile for $1,900. This is, dare I say it, a pretty reasonable price for a laptop with a GB205 GPU, the same as will be in the RTX 5070 desktop, albeit with a handful fewer CUDA cores. This new G16 is $400 cheaper than an RTX 4070 version of the G16 2024 (or $100 cheaper including the current discount).

To put this into perspective, the RTX 5070 Ti mobile will have 5,888 CUDA cores, versus the RTX 4070 mobile's 4,608—that's almost a 30% increase. Which of course doesn't include architectural improvements and new AI wizardry.

The comparison isn't one-to-one, though, as the RTX 5070 Ti version of the laptop has a worse screen and just 16 GB of RAM. But at the very least this price makes me hesitantly hopeful for affordable RTX 50-series gaming laptops.

You'll have to forgive this hesitancy, and I'm sure many of you share it. The Nvidia RTX 50-series graphics cards we've got our hands on so far—the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090—haven't been bad performers by any stretch, but they haven't exactly been the paragon of generational improvements once you remove DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation from the mix. That makes high price tags a little hard to swallow.

The other Asus ROG laptops seem relatively in-line with the previous-gen ones, expensive as they are. The ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025), for instance, is listed at $3,400 and has an RTX 5080 mobile inside, and you can pick up a ROG Zephyrus G16 with RTX 4080 mobile for $3,297 at Newegg right now. Although, saying that, you can get one with an RTX 4090 mobile in for $3,300 at Best Buy—but the 4090 is pretty nerfed in laptops due to power and thermal restrictions.

Nothing to get particularly excited over at the high-end, then, but most gamers will be looking around the RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti level for their next gaming laptop, and on this front things are looking somewhat hopeful. Especially when you throw in that 4x frame generation the 50-series can offer.

With that on the playing field, we're surely talking seriously top-end performance for under $2,000. Again, assuming these prices stick. And assuming there are any in stock. "Coming soon" doesn't seem to mean much, lately.

In a blog post last week, Intel bigged up the idea of modularity on the PC, both for desktops and laptops, though it's the latter that's arguably the most interesting.

Intel argues that a lack of modularity increases waste, drives up costs and makes it harder for us poor old end users to repair our computers. "In the increasingly digital world, e-waste is a growing problem. Every year, over 60+ Million tons of e-waste is generated with less than 25% collected, " Intel says, adding that, "with low recovery and repair rates, consumer activists and environmental groups worldwide have been actively lobbying for the right-to-repair."

The solution according to Intel is a new modular approach that supports upgrades, customisations and repairs. If it all sound familiar, that's because Framework's laptop adhere to very much the same philosophy. You can buy them today and they've been on sale since 2021.

Indeed, Framework welcomes Intel's new platform, telling us, "Intel regularly publishes reference designs for use by notebook OEMs, including past designs that have had multi-board and modular architectures. What's great this time is the acknowledgement that it's not just for manufacturing optimization, but something that enables consumers to use their products for longer too."

So, Intel properly putting its weight behind the idea would be a serious game changer. Along with making things better once you've bought a system, Intel says the approach could make PCs cheaper to buy in the first place.

By building PCs and laptops in particular from a relatively limited number of modular internal components, they can be made more cheaply, engineered more quickly and offered at a lower cost.

Intel is proposing a new internal modular design for laptops combining a core mainboard with additional IO modules. These boards would be built to a standardized design to ensure compatibility and future repairability and upgradability.

The idea is that if a wide range of laptops all use these boards, then they'll be cheaper to make as the engineering and development will be easier. Upgrades and repairs will obviously benefit, too. Maybe you wouldn't even need to go to your laptop vendor for a new mainboard.

It should be said that none of this directly addresses the holy grail of laptop upgrades, namely the GPU. That, presumably, would be integrated into the mainboard (Intel makes no mention of GPUs for the modular laptop architecture), and so the whole mainboard with CPU and GPU would probably need to be replaced.

That would represent progress of sorts over laptops with no upgrade path at all. But it doesn't exactly sound cheap.

For the desktop, Intel envisages a module for the CPU, a little like the CPU cartridges of yesteryear, that presumably makes a CPU replacement less scary than messing with a fully exposed socket and an array of fragile pins. Intel has tried to get CPU modules going for years now, such as the Compute Element in previous years' NUCs.

There's also GPU module that slides on rails, plus hot-swappable M.2 modules. It does look more user friendly than a standard ATX PC, but also looks more expensive and perhaps less flexible.

Currently, for instance, the ATX standard can accommodate graphics cards across quite a range of shapes and sizes. This Intel modular platform looks a great deal more constrained. Likewise, the CPU module looks a lot more complex and expensive than a bare CPU.

Anyway, the laptop part of Intel's modular PC push is pretty exciting. Intel says in very vague terms that it hopes to "transform the way PCs are designed." But at this stage it has nothing specific to say about any partners it may be working with and if there are major brands with plans to adopt the architecture.

We're hopeful but not exactly holding our breath. Watch this space.

Having spent some time handling the new model, that looks to have changed. Not the size and weight part, however—to any noticeable degree, at least. 18-inch mega-spec laptops continue to be hefty slices of hardware, so don't go thinking that the new Strix Scar 18 is light enough to carry around with you all day—unless you're built like Schwarzenegger, of course.

And internally it's still got a mighty array of components, this time refreshed for the new generation. That means an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX 24-core CPU and up to an RTX 5090 GPU—with a 175 W max TGP.

Phew. I'll put it on record now that I'm prepared to eat my hat if this thing isn't stonkingly loud at full whack. Just like the old model, although to be fair to it, it was still much quieter than the MSI Titan 18 HX A14V.

Anyway, the insides may have had a refresh, but it's the outer shell that really impressed me when I saw it for myself.

The Strix Scar 18 now feels sleek, and that makes all the difference. The keyboard sits flat to the top of the inner deck, with no dent in the chassis to accommodate it. The finish looks and feels somewhat satin, and seems remarkably resistant to fingerprints—a bug bear of mine on almost all gaming laptops.

Gone is the gaudy underside front light bar, replaced with an all-round RGB strip that looks much more nightclub than county fair. The outer lid now features an AniMe Vision (yep, that's correct) display making use of 810 LEDs to play animations on the outside. Why you'd want to is a bit beyond me, but it's quite the effect in person.

Overall, this laptop now looks and feels special, although I suppose given that Asus has this beast down for a $3,300 MSRP, it darn well better be.

Still, as our Jacob Ridley pointed out, it's even got a tool-less upgrade system that makes a whole lot of sense, too. It looks like Asus has really spent some time giving the Strix Scar 18 a thorough going over, and I can't wait to test one for myself.

Big, bruising laptops might not be the most practical of machines, but if you ask me, this one's now got a desirability factor that simply cannot be ignored.

At this year's CES, one of the biggest tech conferences in the world, tech company GDP has brought along a curious laptop with two OLED screens, powered by Ryzen's AI CPU and it all feels a bit much to me.

The PC Gamer team got eyes on the device but, if you aren't lucky enough to be in overcrowded rooms in Las Vegas checking out tech with the world's brightest geeks, it is live right now on the GPD website.

Interestingly, instead of going with the traditional dual monitor route of having one on the left and one on the right, the GPD Duo puts one on top of the other.

GPD aren't the first to do this, of course, with the Asus Zenbook Duo and Lenovo Yoga Book 9i doing the same but both of those machines have detachable keyboards, so you can place one screen flat on a surface.

GPD, on the other hand, has locked a keyboard to the two screens with a chassis, which means you have to bring the entire thing as a single unit with you wherever you go. The version of this machine with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 CPU, 32 GB LPDDR5X RAM, and 1 TB of SSD storage will cost you a whopping $2,010.95.

This is the cheapest model right now, with the most expensive coming in at $2,820.95 with 64 GB of RAM and 8 TB of SSD storage.

We have tested this CPU and it's a good 'un, performing similarly to the Intel Core i9 14900HX (seen in the most recent Razer Blade 16) in Cinebench and getting an average of 42 fps in Horizon Zero Dawn at the highest preset. That said, how this specific model performs will rely on a few factors, and the 60 W TDP combined with an 80 Wh battery might not only cost you performance but battery life.

Those dual screens aren't necessarily for gaming, of course, as a laptop like this will be primarily aimed at engineers, coders, and those who work with high-intensity loads on their laptops.

However, the page does suggest plugging in an eGFX for "powerful performance comparable to gaming laptops". This is a bit redundant, as putting in better tech will make the machine run better but the included Oculink is a nice addition, just in case you fancy gaming on this thing. Those two screens are going to cost you performance in lots of ways and at just 60 Hz, they are going to look more impressive in pictures than in motion.

I'd have to get hands-on to say much more but the double screens, connected to the base of the machines, with just a stand holding them up, feel a tad cumbersome to me and they don't look any less so in pictures. It has both Asus and Lenovo to compete with here and I'm a little more taken to the competition's form factor.

Seeing that newer Ryzen chip is certainly nice and it has a great IO, with HDMI, Oculink, Ethernet, two USB As, a speaker port, an earphone port, an SD card slot, USB4, two Type-C, and even a fingerprint reader.

After a successful IndieGoGo campaign, this machine is finally launching, and if you buy one from the site now, you get a protective case thrown in.

Nvidia announced the mobile RTX 50-series at the same time as its desktop Blackwell cards, which means we have a sweep of new mobile GPUs within the gaming laptops in the booths here at CES 2025. Everything from the RTX 5090 down to the RTX 5070—though these mobile chips don't align core-for-core with their desktop counterparts.

For the Zephyrus lineup, we're seen the G16 once again saddled with the biggest GPU of the lot, the RTX 5090. In our experience with the RTX 4090 in the G16, that's probably not the model to go for, as it's going to be restricted by the diminutive chassis. There will be more sensible options available, at least.

The G14 is the more sensible of the two with 'only' an RTX 4080. That could be a pretty powerful pairing alongside AMD's excellent HX 370 chip, though we'll have to see if the RTX 5080 pushes the Zephyrus cooling over the edge or not in testing.

Other than the change in processors, there's not much else to report. Both laptops feature an ROG Nebula display: the G16 a 2.5K, 240 Hz display and the G14 a 3K, 120 Hz display. They also have the same chassis design, same trackpad, same keyboard—you get the idea.

With last year's model marking a major shift in the Zephyrus design, I wasn't expecting a major change here. Asus stuck with the same basic design for the Zephyrus for a couple generations prior to the 2024/2025 design, and it's a good design to boot. We've reviewed both Zephyrus models from 2024, even liking the G16 enough to cover it twice in various configurations (one, two), and much of what we liked about those laptops is true for the newer one.

My only regret is that I wasn't able to stuff the G14 in my bag at CES 2025 and get to testing it right here at the show.

With a year full of anticipated RPGs ahead, I'm wondering how Valve's handheld will fare playing something more demanding like Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth or Avowed. Well, Nvidia will be offering a big screen experience right there on your little screen later this year, as just announced at this year's CES, a native GeForce Now app is on its way to the Steam Deck (via The Verge).

According to the official blog post, game streaming via Geforce Now will deliver an experience with "all the bells and whistles of Nvidia technologies, including ray tracing and NVIDIA DLSS," with an Ultimate-tier membership promising, "all the same benefits as GeForce RTX 4080 GPU owners." If you're after that big screen experience on a bigger screen though, Nvidia says, "the native GeForce Now app will offer up to 4K resolution and 60 frames per second with high dynamic range" should you hook your Steam Deck up to an HDR monitor (if you're looking for recommendations, we've got several).

Technically, cloud gaming via GeForce Now has already been available on Steam Decks since at least May last year, but this required a special script that somewhat streamlined an otherwise sidelong process. This much-asked-for, dedicated app definitely makes things much easier, and it will be available on Steam Decks later this year.

But it won't just be Valve's handheld gaming PC finally enjoying a native GeForce Now experience. The cloud gaming service will also be coming to a slew of VR and mixed-reality headsets, including the Meta Quest 3 and 3S, all Pico headsets, and "Apple Vision Pro spatial computers." Nvidia explains that subscribers who own these devices will be able to access GeForce Now by "opening the browser to play.geforcenow.com when the newest app update, version 2.0.70, starts rolling out later this month"—considerably sooner than Steam Deck players are set to get it.

Despite spending most of my days in the claustrophobic confines of wearing both glasses and headphones, I personally don't understand the appeal of mixed-reality headsets. However, those that do get it will be able to enjoy a "gaming theater" experience for gamepad-compatible releases. To be clear though, support for any virtual reality games has not been confirmed.

There are also a few more caveats when it comes to GeForce Now itself. For the uninformed, GeForce Now doesn't offer its own library of games to sample—it's only ever streaming titles you already own. Still, the service offers cloud-based support for more than 2000 games with this latest announcement adding upcoming titles Avowed and DOOM: The Dark Ages at launch to that roster.

Furthermore, if you've got deep enough pockets to splash out on the $20-a-month Ultimate membership (plus the internet connection to match), you're still capped at a maximum of 100 hours of game streaming. This tier of membership also restricts you to 8-hour play sessions—which is perhaps slightly more understandable on the grounds of needing a 'touch grass' refresh alone.

Personally, I think I'll manage with the office Steam Deck as is for now—next on my 'to play' list is The Thaumaturge, so I'm content to continue on my merry-not-that-demanding-way. But with an underpowered rig at home and plenty of colleagues that would quite like it if I gave the Steam Deck back one of these days, perhaps it wouldn't hurt to poke my head in on the ad-supported Free tier of GeForce Now—even if it is for only an hour per play session.

For many of today's most popular gaming laptops, manufacturers have shrunk and soldered so much to save space that we've lost the ability to upgrade our machines. Not this Asus ROG Strix Scar 18, though. It's been built with upgradeability in mind.

The Scar 18 has received a redesign in 2025. It's curvier, has RGB down-lighting around its circumference, a Mini-LED Nebula HDR display, and will come packed with a new Intel HX Series mobile CPU and Nvidia RTX 50-series GPU.

But what's most interesting about this design is when you flip it over. There are no screws visible from the underside of this laptop. Instead, it has a single sliding latch. This unlocks the rear cover, which can then be slid off and removed—no tools required.

Underneath the cover sit two diagonally arranged NVMe slots and a pair of SO-DIMM packages. All of which can be swapped and changed. That's maybe not that amazing, but Asus has got rid of the frustratingly tiny screws and opted for small latches on each of the NVMe slots—called Q-latch—much like it's done with its motherboards in recent years.

That means the laptop can be upgraded without even a screwdriver, which is pretty special. The battery is also easily accessible. Though to get down any further than these components requires removing a few screws, but it's less likely you'll need to get down there except for repairs.

However, I've just spent some time with the new Razer Blade 16 at CES 2025, and I couldn't help but be impressed. Razer has long been known for making sleek, desirable gaming machines—but in recent years, we've found them to be a little on the chonky side compared to the competition.

However, the 2025 Blade 16 is anything but. It's 30% smaller by volume than the previous Blade, and a fair bit slimmer overall too. That's thanks to a small underside bump which allows room for airflow over hot components but doesn't feel like a tacked-on addition to an otherwise svelte machine.

It's integrated into the bottom of the deck which means that the laptop feels deceptively thin overall while still hopefully giving a hefty GPU enough room to breathe. The result looks a little clunky in photos, but in person, it's much less noticeable.

Overall the Blade 16 is a trimmed down, crisp-edged, ultra-premium looking and feeling machine, and substantially better proportioned and sleeker than the previous model. I span one around in my hands, and thought hard about whether it passes the "desirability test." Is it an object I want, something I'd lay down my own cash for? In short, yes. Very much so.

And that's before we get to the hardware inside. In a move that must feel like one in the eye for Intel—given its pretty disastrous 2024—Razer has decided to equip the Blade lineup with AMD's Strix Point mobile CPUs, with the top model featuring the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. That's a 12-core 24-thread monster, and thanks to the Radeon 890M iGPU onboard, the top Blade should be capable of some decent gaming performance away from the wall socket, too.

GPUs? Well, "next-gen Nvidia" models are all I've been told, so that's pretty exciting in and of itself. Which GPUs in particular is still unknown, but combined with those speedy AMD chips and a decent dose of DDR5, I'm expecting great things from the performance if it can keep those components cool.

Speaking of which, the Blade makes use of a new thermal interface gel, ultra-thin .05 mm exhaust fans, and an improved thermal surface area coverage of 57% compared to the previous model. Razer hopes all this tech will make this machine just as cool to handle as it looks, although cool is a relative term when it comes to gaming laptops.

Not a shrieking, throttling, roaring mess is really the goal here, something that the G16 manages to pull off rather well. For what it's worth, I never got a chance to hear the Blade 16 pushed to its maximum in my short time with the new machines, so the jury's still out there.

Regardless, when it comes to sound it seems the Razer may be well-equipped to make itself heard over those fans—even if they do turn out to be a little loud. It features an upgraded six speaker design with upward and downward firing units, delivering what Razer says is "booming audio". I didn't get a chance to hear them in person, but I'd wager that "booming" is perhaps a little hyperbolic.

Still, most laptop speakers are awful, so anything with a bit more bass and mid-range than the mean would be appreciated.

Given I'm typing this article on a Razer Blade 15 Advanced (which is currently surrounded by fast food containers in my Vegas hotel room, glamourous soul that I am), one of my biggest takeaways from the new Blade 16 is that the keyboard's better than any previous Razer laptop keeb I've used. Much, much better, in fact. That's thanks to a 1.5 mm key travel, 50% more than the previous model.

I'd have to give it a few days worth of type testing to really see if it can cut the mustard, but it felt clicky, positive and satisfying in all the right ways. Could this be the best laptop keyboard of the new crop of machines? We'll have to wait and see, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't a competitor, at least.

The screen is the same 240 Hz OLED panel as the outgoing model. Good. That was a stunner of a display, and it still looks just as good in person as it did the day it was released.

And then we come to pricing. Razer still hasn't told us what the new Blades will cost, but I was told that they would be "aggressively priced." That's probably in reaction the the G16 often cropping up for surprisingly little money for such a premium-feeling machine, although I have to say I'll believe it when I see it.

Razer laptops have always carried a price premium, and as good as they often are, it's usually a drawback. What does "aggressively priced" mean then, in Razer terms? We'll have to wait to find out.

Still, I came away thinking to myself that, based on these brief impressions at least, if I was in the market for a high-end gaming laptop right now, the Razer would have shot to the top of my list. It seems thoughtful, well-judged, and ready for action—Razer's chance to swing for the fences with the new crop of mobile gaming machines.

We'll be testing one for ourselves when they become available (Q1 2025 is all I'm told for now), but if it can keep relatively cool and calm while delivering the numbers we expect, I think the new Blade 16 might just be the G16 competition we were waiting for. A big if, for sure, but first impressions were very good indeed.

Here's a short horror story for you: you're minding your own business, living your best PC Gamer life, when a thought full of foreboding strikes you: "Uh, have the fans always made that noise?" Maybe you, apparently made of sterner stuff than I, even take a wee peek at your GPU temp only to notice it's markedly higher than the last time you checked, many moons ago. There's nothing for it, this requires further investigation.

Maybe you grab your screwdriver and pop that sucker open, or you simply turn your desktop tower around, and that's when you see it. "Oh my good gourd," you may cry, "What is that?" You've uncovered less a snuggled huddle of dust bunnies, and more a killer rabbit that's taken up residence among your fan blades.

To avoid similar situations in the future, HP has collaborated with Intel to co-engineer their Fan Cleaner technology. In the simplest of terms, this means that, rather than the Omen Max 16's fans only spinning one way forever, every four hours the fans change direction. HP argues this makes it harder for dust to settle, and therefore delays the throttling effects a more typical buildup of dirt would have on your airflow.

Usually fans only exhaust one way for good reason; making a fan omnidirectional adds another layer of hardware complexity, and potentially introduces fresh points of failure. HP haven't yet shared how they've navigated these challenges, or indeed much of what makes this fan tick.

This is far from the only upgrade to Omen Max 16's thermal architecture though, with HP also introducing a hybrid material cryo compound. Applied to both the Omen Max 16's CPU and GPU, this combination of liquid metal and grease should not only dissipate heat but also prevent it from leaking out and causing damage over time.

Perhaps that will mean a slightly less overly toasty lap in theory, but we'll have to wait and see how much of a difference it actually makes in practice.

Still, those aforementioned hardware updates are pretty cool, though they're far from the only reason HP referred to the Omen Max 16 as a 'beast' during its CES 2025 pre-brief presentation.

Speaking of that all-important CPU, the Omen Max 16 will offer a choice between two AMD chips—the Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 or Ryzen AI 7 350 (which has already impressed us in the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 gaming laptop)—and two Intel chips—either the Core Ultra 9 275HX or Core Ultra 7 255HX.

The GPU remains slightly harder to pin down, with the official spec sheet giving little away beyond holding space to the tune of, "Nvidia GeForce Next-Gen Laptop GPU." That said, we likely won't have to wait too long for more details on this point; as Andy wrote, it would be more surprising if Nvidia doesn't unveil its RTX 50-series of graphics cards at CES 2025.

It remains to be seen how hot Nvidia's next generation of graphics cards will run, and just how much of HP's focus on thermal architecture is due to a power-hungry card at the heart of what it's billing as its most powerful gaming laptop yet. Whatever the case, the future is unlikely to end up feeling as crisp as a winter morn'.

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang started with an announcement the next-generation Nvidia desktop GPUs, before moving on to the mobile version of the RTX 5070, showing off a laptop with an RTX 5070 inside that he says will be available for $1,299, starting when the new GPUs become available in March.

Huang brought a thin laptop onstage and held it up next to an RTX 50-series desktop card, saying "we're going to shrink it, and put it in [the laptop]. Does that make any sense?"

No Jen-Hsun, not really. But according to Huang, thanks to the power of Tensor cores and pixel generation, the energy efficiency is "off the charts", and as a result you get "RTX 4090 performance" in a slim and light RTX 5070-equipped machine for a relatively small sum. Hmm.

It wasn't the only laptop GPU that got its time in the sun, either. Laptops featuring the RTX 5090 will start at $2,899, the RTX 5070 Ti at $2,199, and the RTX 5070 at $1,299.

The mobile version of the RTX 5090 boasts 10,496 CUDA Cores, and 24GB of GDDR7 memory, while the RTX 5080 laptop GPU has 7,680 CUDA cores, 16GB of GDDR7, and promises twice the performance of the GeForce RTX 4080 laptop GPU.

The RTX 5070 family, meanwhile, will be split into two, with the regular RTX 5070 featuring 4,608 CUDA cores and 8GB of GDDR7 memory. It's more powerful sibling, the RTX 5070 Ti, will have 5,888 CUDA cores, and 12GB of GDDR7.

So there we have it, a whole raft of laptop GPUs announced at virtually the same time as the desktop cards. It seems that DLSS 4 will play a heavy role in making that RTX 4090-like performance from an RTX 5070-sporting laptop feasible, but hey-ho. At least we can all stop speculating about the naming schemes and whether we'll see laptop GPUs at all at this point.

Dell becomes the default brand, in the sense that it's designed for "play, school and work", thereby replacing the not-exactly-catchy Inspiron brand of laptops and consumer desktop computers past.

Above that sits the Dell Pro line, "designed for professional-grade productivity", and right at the tippy top is Dell Pro Max, featuring machines designed for maximum performance. But if you're wondering what happened to Alienware, have no fear—it still sits to the side of Dell's regular lineup of machines, as it's a subsidiary brand with enviable name recognition in the PC gaming hardware space.

Makes sense to keep it around then, doesn't it? As for the rest, Dell says that its new unified brand strategy is all about simplifying the buying process for regular folk, with a supposed 74% of consumers walking away from technology purchases simply because they felt overwhelmed by the choices on offer.

The new branding will apply to laptops, consumer PCs, displays, accessories and services, in the hope that it will stop buyer's eyes from crossing when it comes to deciding which tier to buy.

Speaking of laptops, Dell's been keen (like every other manufacturer) to tout its AI PC credentials, with laptops featuring Intel Core Ultra Series 2 processors alongside offerings from AMD and Qualcomm.

The new Dell Plus lineup of 14 to 16-inch laptops will be available from February starting at $999, while Dell Pro 13, 14, and 16-inch models featuring Lunar Lake processor options start rolling out from today. Dell Pro Max laptops look like they'll take a little longer to arrive, as their release date is still to be confirmed.

If all this Pro and Pro Max branding sounds familiar to you, that's no surprise. It's rather close to Apple's nomenclature, as the iPhone has been available for a while now with Pro and Pro Max variants, not to mention the stalwart MacBook Pro and M4 Pro chips manufactured by the Cupertino-based electronics giant.

Still, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Apple may be many things, but its relatively straightforward branding system does make it easier to tell at a glance which product tier you're looking at without translating a bunch of codenames, model designations, and bizarre word salad.

Anything that stops me from receiving phone calls from less tech-oriented acquaintances as to which product is which is fine by me. Now if only monitor manufacturers could come up with clearer model designations, that'd really start my year off with a bang. The Acer Nitro XV271U M3bmiiprx versus the Acer Nitro EDA323QU S3bmiiphx, anyone?

Besides Jacob's further demystifying of AMD's next-gen APU, revealing all of the secrets we learned during CES 2025, here's the story that'll really still the air in your lungs: you'll be able to wield the power of the AMD Ryzen AI Max APU yourself in the 2025 version of the ROG Flow Z13 tablet. Talk about an absolute monster.

Stay your hand, knave—let's talk specs. First up, the ROG Flow Z13 (2025) has no dedicated GPU to speak of because that will be handled by the AMD Ryzen AI Max integrated graphics. That's why they call it an 'accelerated processing unit' because, in a manner of speaking, it's dual-wielding those two processing loads.

With up to 16 Zen 5 cores and 40 RDNA 3.5 Compute Units (CUs), AMD's Ryzen AI Max offers some serious power, even if it is an integrated chiplet. But as Nick wrote last year, while one Geekbench synthetic compute test score of 67,004 is definitely head-turning, we cannot know for certain how the APU will handle games until we actually get our mitts on it.

As for the ROG Flow Z13 (2025) more specifically, there's plenty more on the spec sheet to dive into besides its beastly heart. For instance, the 13.4-inch touch screen will offer 1600p resolution at 180Hz—like a gorgon, that'll be difficult to tear your eyes away from. With Corning Gorilla Glass 5 too, here's hoping the screen withstands scratches and drops far better than petrified stone.

I know it's a bit old hat to talk about how tiny powerful bits of kit are these days, but don't begrudge me this simple pleasure. So, speaking of how it feels in the hands, this 2025 release of the ROG Flow Z13 features a totally new chassis, measuring about half an inch thick. That remains a head-turning form factor, even if I can't yet speak to how heavy this thing will be.

In all, it's a smaller form factor than its predecessor by close to 15%, but I'm pretty chuffed to see that this tablet is still rocking a full-sized HDMI port. That's alongside two more Type-C ports, and it's also been confirmed this tablet will require 200 W charging.

Still, we'll have to wait and see what that battery life is like in practice—though if our time with the similarly Strix Point-powered OneXFly F1 Pro handheld is anything to go by, it may be a far from heroic performance.

Asus was also keen to highlight that the touchscreen remains cooler than its predecessors by around 1.3 °C in part thanks to a design that affords 70% more airflow.

I can at least hope for fingertips that are slightly less uncomfortably toasty, though until I get the chance to paw at the touchscreen myself, we'll have to wait and see if we're dealing with a genuine legend. At the very least, I'm hoping this revised 2025 release offers something a little more compelling than its years-old predecessor.

It's that time of year again. No, not the holiday season, we're over that, but the time when CES 2025 approaches. The Consumer Electronics Show will officially start on January 7 in sunny Las Vegas, Nevada, and this year's event is already full of hope and promise, and most especially for PC gamers.

After all, with Nvidia's Jensen Huang delivering the keynote (and hopefully announcing some next-generation RTX 50-series Nvidia GPUs) and every tech company worth knowing ramping up the potential announcement dates, it's looking like CES 2025 will be jam-packed full of delicious hardware, much of it of the gaming variety.

I'll be packing my holiday bags and gambling money (just kidding) and heading off to this year's show with several other members of the PC Gamer hardware team to provide on-the-ground coverage. Las Vegas here we come.

But before then, I've put together a run down of everything we're expecting to see, along with a few possibilities that are of the more hopeful variety. Who says we're cynics, ey?

Okay, you don't all have to put your hands up at once.

Nvidia 50-series graphics cards

At this point, I'd eat my metaphorical hat if we didn't see at least some of Nvidia's next-generation RTX 50-series graphics card lineup announced at CES. That's probably no surprise to those of you keeping up with your newsfeeds in recent months, as the leaks have been coming in thick and fast for what's likely to be the biggest GPU release in many moons.

No one was more surprised than us when CES 2025 became the hot tip for a launch location, as it's traditionally thought of as a more laptop-focussed show. Still, the most recent rumours suggest that we'll be seeing the RTX 5090, RTX 5080, and the RTX 5070 revealed all at once. This would be another break in recent tradition from Nvidia, as it's been the two top-tier cards that debuted before the mid-range offerings of the past couple of generations.

Recent leaks suggest that the RTX 5090 will be an absolute monster of a card, with kopite7kimi claiming it'll have 32 GB of GDDR7 memory across a 512-bit bus, a peak power demand of 600 W, and 21,760 CUDA cores. For those keeping count, that'd be 33% more cores than the RTX 4090, a GPU that's still considered overpowered to this day. That tracks with an even more recent RTX 50-series specs leak, this time apparently from Zotac—and this one even lists a potential core count for the RTX 5070 Ti.

So could we be looking at four desktop GPUs launched at once? We've even heard rumours that mobile GPUs could be on the table, too, although at this point the speculative roar is so loud, it's difficult to sort fact from fiction. Regardless, it looks like Nvidia GPUs are marching on the horizon, so expect to see new Blackwell-based graphics cards galore come the start of the show—with potentially some AI sorcery in the form of "Neural Rendering".

What's that then? We'll be honest—we won't really know unless it's formally announced, as technically DLSS, Frame Generation, and Ray Reconstruction could all be referred to as Neural Rendering. So it could simply be a repackage of all those existing features. But Nvidia is about as deep in the AI toolbox as it could possibly be, so I wouldn't rule out some high-faluting, all-AI-all-the-time rendering technique we haven't seen yet. At least, in a way that actually works for gaming, rather than a tech demo.

Exciting stuff though, isn't it?

AMD RDNA 4 next-generation GPUs

It's not just Nvidia GPU announcements we're expecting to see at CES 2025, as AMD's RDNA 4 graphics cards have long been tipped to make an appearance. We reported back in September that the next-generation AMD cards were expected to launch in January, although those of you looking for a potential RTX 5090 or RTX 5080 competitor will likely be disappointed.

That's because AMD's Jack Huyhn has gone on record saying that the high-end market isn't the priority. This tracks with more recent reports that what's rumoured to be the top-end card, the RX 8800 XT, will instead deliver raster performance similar to the RTX 4080 Super, and 45% faster ray tracing performance than the current top-end AMD card, the RX 7900 XTX.

And you know what? I'm kinda down with that. After all, we're expecting Nvidia's top-end offerings to be mightily expensive, so if AMD can launch a card that matches the RTX 4080 Super for raw grunt and fix the woeful ray tracing performance of the previous generation, I reckon it might be a bit of a winner—providing it's launched at the right price.

That's a big if, of course. Further down the lineup, there have been rumblings of a non-XT variant of what might become AMD's new top-end card (of this generation, at least), and potentially an RX 8700 and RX 8600 as well.

So don't cry too deeply into your cereal, AMD fans. There are more potential developments to get excited about in the team red enclosure as well, in the form of FSR 4. The scuttlebutt suggests that the upcoming version of AMD's DLSS upscaling competitor will be AI-based, which also hints that the new cards will have some sort of NPU/Tensor core equivalent to handle the load. And if we see the new cards revealed as expected? Then FSR 4 will likely follow.

As my own testing shows, FSR 3.1 is still behind the curve when compared to the latest version of DLSS—so an AI-enhanced version is something to get excited about for those of us hoping for performant-yet-affordable RDNA 4 GPUs in our future. Fingers crossed, at the very least.

Gaming laptops galore

Well, here's a return to tradition: CES is usually about laptop releases, and this year they've got some shiny new chips to nestle inside. We've already had a play with AMD's Strix Point Ryzen AI 300-series CPUs and Intel's Core Ultra 200-series mobile CPUs, and we've been thoroughly impressed. So we're expecting to see every major gaming laptop manufacturer under the sun release new models at CES 2025, many of them taking advantage of the shiniest silicon available today.

That means Razer, Asus, Alienware—basically, think of a gaming laptop manufacturer, and I'd be surprised if they didn't have a new model or two to reveal at this year's show with either AMD or Intel's most recent efforts

Of course, there'll be Qualcomm Snapdragon X laptops too, although I'll be keeping a special eye out for anything making use of AMD's Strix Halo APU. It's looking like it might be a very performant chip in early leaks, so I reckon we'll see the odd ultra-thin, ultra-light machine touting its gaming capabilities.

So January's looking like a superb time to start thinking about your next gaming laptop. With existing efforts like the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 and the Razer Blade 14 taking the form to sleeker, svelter, and more desirable heights, I reckon 2025 might be the year we see gaming laptops blossom wholesale into the ultra-desirable machines we imagine in our heads.

The cantankerous chassis designs of old are starting to fall behind us now, so I'm expecting slim, portable, and luxurious to be the order of the day.

And I haven't even got onto the displays yet. OLEDs in gaming laptops are a proper thing now, and I'd wager we'll see plenty more models released with screens capable of inky dark black levels and gorgeous colour reproduction. Probably the odd Mini LED unit too, just to shake things up a bit.

Oh, and higher refresh rates. It can't just be me who's noticed most gaming laptop displays creeping towards the 240 Hz mark and beyond, and I can't see that slowing down anytime soon. Speaking of which…

Ultra-high refresh gaming monitors, OLEDs, and more

CES has also traditionally been about monitor releases. Or rather, TVs and monitors, as it's technically the Consumer Electronics Show, so expect plenty of screens designed to sit in your front room as well as on your desktop from many of the major manufacturers.

Expect gaming monitors of all sizes, shapes, and feature sets to dominate your newsfeeds over the course of the show, many of them aiming to reach new heights of refresh rate nirvana. Esports is a major driving factor for many monitor manufacturers these days, so I'm expecting to have to elbow my way through internet megastars (the names of which I do not know) in order to get to whatever hot new monitor of the moment they've come to promote.

I'll be gentle, I promise. Still, speedy screens make for great gaming monitors for the rest of us (to a certain extent), and it's in person where that refresh rate becomes less of a number on the box and more of a lovely thing to behold. So I'll be sure to pump myself up with caffeine and plonk myself down in front of as many of them as I can, along with our other team members. The conversation will be fast-paced and nerdy. Of this, you can be sure.

Again, OLED gaming monitors everywhere is the expectation—and perhaps even some more affordable models, if we've been really, really good. Plus, there are usually some laptops with fold-out screens to admire, before we all agree that it looks a bit flimsy and move ourselves on to the next booth. Anyway, monitors, lovely screens, expect lots.

Handheld gaming PCs

Remember what I said about new chips? Well, now that Lunar Lake and Strix Point are officially a thing, we've all been very excited at PC Gamer towers to usher in the next generation of gaming handhelds. The APUs in the older devices are starting to look a bit long in the tooth, so high-powered handheld gaming PCs are something we're hoping will be the order of the day.

Personally, I'm going to be keeping an eye on Lenovo, as leaks regarding the Lenovo Legion Go S have been so frequent this year, I feel like I've seen it already. Providing it does actually exist (wouldn't it be a turn-up for the books if it didn't?) and makes an appearance (who knows?), it'll likely find itself sitting in amongst some tough competition, given that the handheld market seems to be growing at a phenomenal rate.

The original MSI Claw didn't exactly set our hearts aflutter earlier this year, but the MSI Claw 8 AI+ is touting some remarkably high benchmark numbers, courtesy of testing performed by, err, MSI. We'll be sure to get our hands on one of those if we see one, although obviously we won't be able to benchmark it ourselves at the booth if MSI has one to show off. I mean, probably. Still, it's an interesting thing and seems much worthier of consideration than the old, Meteor Lake-based model.

Then there's the Adata handheld prototype my beloved hardware overlord Dave got his hands on at Computex this year. A bizarre machine for sure, but we loved the creativity on display. Will it make a reappearance, potentially with some tweaks? Time will tell. Still, I'm hoping to have a play around with some handhelds that dazzle, so keep an eye out for our coverage as we scythe our way through the show floor, hunting down all the latest portable PCs.

Motherboard chipsets

How's this for confusing—thanks to some leaks, we're expecting to see motherboards using new chipsets from both Intel and AMD, and they're said to be called the B860 and, err, the B850. Yep, two entirely different new chipsets, from two different and highly competitive companies, separated by a single-digit change.

So for clarification, the B860 is expected to be Intel's latest Arrow Lake-S chipset. If the leaks are to be believed, it'll sit below the current Z890 chipset in the lineup with support for 45 total high-speed I/O lanes and up to 12 USB 2 ports, and six USB 3.2 ports. It's currently believed to be locked for chip overclocks, although RAM overclocking is said to be supported. Keen eyes have already spotted listings for Asus motherboards using the new chipset, supposedly arriving at CES 2025.

On the AMD side of things, we have what's expected to be the B850 chipset for Zen 5 CPUs. Videocardz already has photos of what a reader claims is the Gigabyte B850M Aorus Elite WiFi6e Ice (another catchy motherboard name to add to the list), and it's said to offer PCIe 5 support for NVMe drives, and optionally graphics. The leaked board photos show four DDR5 DIMM slots, connections for 24+8 pin power connectors, and a whole lot of board elements hidden underneath some shiny white covers.

Not the most thrilling CES expectation, I guess, but that's what we have to go on for now. Expect to watch me become confused by chipset naming schemes at this year's show, and in fact, probably at future ones as well.

HDMI 2.2

Now we're talking: cable and connection standards! The current HDMI 2.1 specification supports 4K resolution at 120 Hz uncompressed, and up to 10K 100 Hz with Display Stream Compression (DSC). That's all dependent on what cable and monitor (or TV) you use, of course, but rumours suggest that we'll see the announcement of HDMI 2.2 at CES 2025, which will support…

Actually, we have no idea. Just the potential announcement, that's what's been leaked at this point. Of course, if we do get a new HDMI connection standard then it's likely to be capable of far exceeding the 42 Gbps maximum data rate of current HDMI 2.1 connections. But by how much, we really can't say at this point.

Still, when it comes to gaming monitors we're currently looking at a 240 Hz limit at 4K using the current top HDMI standard, so this may simply be sowing the seeds for 8K ultra-high refresh rate displays to come. Not that modern GPUs can really make use of that sort of headroom at the moment, but hey, faster hardware is coming, and that means faster connections and cables will eventually be needed to accommodate it.

I wouldn't expect to see an HDMI 2.2 port on new graphics cards from any of the major players for a while yet, but you never know, do you?

AI everywhere, again

Last year's show was all about AI. Guess what this one might be about? Yes, the AI boom is still far from bust, so it's once again time to put on our anti-hogwash hats and delve into all the AI offerings to see if any of them are worth talking about.

I kid, I kid, AI has its uses. I mean, we struggled to find them at last year's event, but in 2025 we'll be once again stalking the halls to see if we can find AI products that make sense. Of course, Nvidia will likely be talking up all sorts of AI shenanigans, and I've already covered the potential AI integration we're expecting to see in FSR 4 if it arrives. Perhaps we'll get another chance to play with Nvidia ACE, the AI-NPC tech that left our Jacob stunned in 2024?

And who can forget my legendary post-show article from last year, summing up three AI features we thought we might use, and three we definitely wouldn't? Even me apparently, because I've just rediscovered it. Still, AI will be all over Las Vegas this year as well I'm sure, so here's hoping I end up writing an AI product redemption piece now the tech has hopefully matured. See, I told you we weren't cynical. Just bitter, and that's a different thing entirely.

I've looked at a lot of new PC gaming tech this year. Looking at my Steam Replay listing, far more than I've consistently played new games, that's for sure. From the RTX 40-series refresh in January, to the first proper modular gaming laptop, weird handhelds, ace gaming CPUs, and funky laptops, I've dabbled in every facet of the industry.

Which is why I'm still doing this twenty years after I took my first faltering steps as a PC technology journalist; there's always some new toy to play with.

But when it actually came to sitting down and thinking about what's been my pick of all the gear I've had my hands on this year, what's been the thing that either surprised or pleased me the most, well, that's been tougher than I really expected. Somewhat strangely, what I've landed on is not the thing which I've scored the highest, and yet it's the thing I've had the most lingering affection for.

The Asus TUF A14 continues my trend of getting all excited about wee 14-inch gaming laptops, but it also leans into my frugal nature, too, being part of the Taiwanese giant's more affordable brand. It's a 14-inch gaming laptop I was expecting to be fine but mostly unexciting. Sure, the AMD Strix Point spec is grand—the same as in our overall pick as the current best gaming laptop—but the TUF lappies have long been the frumpy cousins to the supermodel stylings of the ROG Zephyrus machines.

We've been giddy over the gorgeous ROG Zephyrus G14 and Zephyrus G16 designs launched at CES way back at the start of this year, and I wasn't expecting to see the same design notes being present when I pulled the TUF A14 out of its unassuming box and protective sleeving.

But it's a delightfully slim little laptop, and one that is far more restrained than I've ever seen from the traditionally very 'gamer' TUF range of laptops. That, admittedly, is still evident when you flip open the lid and are greeted by the angular Asus font on the keyboard. That's something I still find pretty damned ugly, but is really the only nod to that more aggressive styling we've become used to from standard Asus gear. Though that is obviously changing.

This is very much a proper gaming laptop—it has a 100 W RTX 4060 inside that slimline chassis after all—but one that also isn't going to look out of place in a seminar, workshop, or team meeting. There is naught but a faded 'TUF' logo in one corner of the lid and that's it for outward adornments.

The super slim bezel of the 1600p screen makes the display a joy, too, and at 165 Hz it's plenty fast enough for any gaming enterprise. The RTX 4060 might be a tough match for that full resolution, however, but with the tight pixel pitch of a high-res 14-inch panel, knocking games back down to 1200p or flipping the upscaling switcheroo, you're not going to experience the slight blurring you can get on larger screens.

For me, it's going to be a tough call on which laptop I take with me on my travels to CES in January, because the Ryzen AI HX 370 is a great, efficient chip in its own right—and capable of decent gaming performance away from the plug, which the RTX 4060 kinda isn't. But the other contender is the first Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite machine I've ever used in anger, the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge.

That's something else which has impressed me this year, especially having spent six months using it as my work lappy. I've not experienced any real compatibility issues and haven't modified what I do because it's not an x86 machine. It's coped with everything but a severely tab-heavy Chrome load, at which point it falls to its knees and cries 'uncle!'

I've also loved the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, but really it's more iterative than innovative considering AMD's 3D V-cache passim, so I would struggle to give that my pick of the year. Especially as I would have given the CPU nod to the Ryzen 7 7800X3D on my last go around the fiery orb.

But still, it's this lovely little slab of affordable, unassuming gaming tech that has my heart in 2024.

I am, however, hoping that I get to give the 2025 edition of this award to one fantastic graphics card from the slew of new GPUs set to land in our desktops from Nvidia, Intel, and AMD throughout the new year. C'mon, graphics peops, wow me. I'm done with mostly iterative, just a bit better, just a bit more expensive graphics silicon. I want something really new and exciting.

If you want to find out who won the PC Gamer Hardware Awards, we'll be publishing the winners on New Year's Day.

One of the clichés you learn to avoid as a writer is starting a piece with "when I was younger." However, I am nothing if not contrarian, so without further ado—when I was younger, gaming laptops were rubbish.

From tank-like chassis designs, to scratchy plastics, to keyboards that felt like typing on bubble wrap, there was something majorly wrong with almost all of them. The long-held advice was: if you're looking for a gaming machine, don't buy a laptop. Proper gaming PCs were for play, mobile machines were for work, and buying a gaming laptop was an easy way to waste your money.

Over the years, that perception has changed. Certainly, it's been possible to buy a properly powerful gaming laptop for a while now for a reasonable price, and we at PC Gamer spend our days hunting down the best gaming laptop deals for that very reason.

Portability, too, has come a long way. Slim, svelte machines that can slip into your backpack without issue while still allowing some gaming on your next flight are now much more commonplace, and the world is better for it.

But 2024 felt like a sea change moment for me. Despite recent advances, I started the year still of the opinion that, while gaming laptops were much better than they once were, they were still a step or two away from being the ultra-flexible, futuristic machines we all desire in our heads.

And then I got my hands on the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16. I still remember the moment I pulled it from its box, and literally laughed out loud. It's absurdly thin, with a milled aluminium chassis that's part MacBook (boo, hiss), part sci-fi (yay). The glittering slashed rear lid design is pin-sharp in person, the form factor discreet. You could easily bring this to a meeting and never raise an eyebrow, except for perhaps from some uninformed soul wondering whether they missed the latest Apple announcement.

Except my review model had a mobile RTX 4090 inside it. And that, if you ever get the chance to hold a G16, is absurd. I remember flipping it around in my hands. Where exactly had it gone? How on earth is it going to keep it cool?

Well, the short answer is, it doesn't. The G16 is yet another laptop where shoving Nvidia's top-spec mobile GPU into the frame is a bad idea. And yet, it was better than I thought it would be when it came to performance. Yes, that GPU is heavily thermally throttled, and yes, the fans spin up a treat, but it was better. Not good enough to justify buying one with this particular graphics chip onboard, but still mightily impressive in a laptop this sleek and desirable.

As a result of this mismatched GPU and chassis combo, I had to take a sizable amount off the score in my review of the G16. Thanks to the presence of the RTX 4090, it was too expensive, and it simply didn't make sense to buy the particular model I had in my hands.

Gosh it was nice, though. So I was very pleased to see that my dear colleague Jacob, in his review of a Strix Point and RTX 4070-equipped version, fell in love with it as much as I did. This was very similar to my review unit, with the mega-GPU caveat removed. And what a fantastic laptop it is.

Jacob also reviewed its smaller sibling, the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, and gushed about its virtues to all who would listen. Both the G16 and the G14 have OLED screens, nice keyboards, excellent speakers, good battery life, and that cant-put-your-finger-on-it feeling of premium. Not only that, but we've been finding them on discount all year, making both of these laptops even better value than they are at MSRP.

It's not just Asus that's been having a year of it, either. The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 9 impressed our Katie immensely, thanks to its fantastic speed, impressive Thermal Mode, and thick-yet-understated chassis.

This is a mean machine, and while not as portable as the Zephyrus models, certainly makes a case for itself as a grown up, powerful gaming laptop for those of us that don't spend all of our waking lives bathing in RGB.

Want another? How about the Razer Blade 14, a perfectly portable little machine with an all-metal chassis, a great trackpad, and a long battery life. It's not massively different to the Razer Blade models before it, but looks and feels like a refinement of a formula long iterated on in the Razer labs. Gaming laptops are getting better, it seems, and all of a sudden the portable gaming machine future starts to look very bright indeed.

Of course, there are exceptions. The MSI Titan 18 HX A14V feels like it comes from a different era entirely, and the Asus Strix Scar 18 is still a bit of a dinosaur despite having some redeeming features. But overall? 2024 to me felt like the year gaming laptops started to ditch their cantankerous roots, and began blossoming into something altogether more refined.

Which makes me very excited for 2025. When it comes to components, we've only just started seeing the latest Strix Point and Lunar Lake laptops hitting the market, and we've been impressed in our early testing with what the new mobile CPUs can provide. CES 2025 is usually the venue for major laptop releases, and I can't wait to get my hands on the latest models when I fly out to Vegas at the start of next year.

And as for GPUs? Well, who knows at this point. While we're expecting to see a range of new Nvidia graphics cards releasing next year, how long it'll be before mobile versions appear in new machines is anyone's guess. Although, given that CES has always been about laptops, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a mobile GPU launch or two thrown in the mix. Regardless, whatever the new mobile chips end up being, I imagine they'll still pump out heat in a way that gives manufacturers headaches.

But with everything else about gaming laptops seemingly improving, I'm very curious to see what the next generation looks like when manufacturers start churning out new models with the latest components. 2024 may be the year when gaming laptops grew up, but as for what they might look like in 2025? I think we should all be very excited to find out.

A gaming laptop must be the complete package. The screen, GPU, CPU, memory, cooling, keyboard, and trackpad are all important. So, when we're talking about the best gaming laptop in any given year, it has to be a device that offers an extraordinary package, done extraordinarily well.

We're not short of options for this prestigious award in 2024. New designs were plentiful despite the lack of any new mobile GPUs this year. In their place, new CPU generations from Intel and AMD, Lunar Lake and Strix Point, gave manufacturers abundant opportunities to redesign their machines. Many took advantage of low-power parts to make slimmer, more portable gaming laptops.

It's these sorts of slimline gaming laptops that have largely won a nomination for entry into our hallowed hall of fame. The Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 is one such thin machine that impressed us not only for its all-aluminium (aluminum, whatever) shell, but its fantastic speaker system, trackpad, and gorgeous screen. Then there's the Asus TUF A14, which brings AMD's superb Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 to bear in a more affordable compact chassis.

Then, the odd one out, the Gigabyte G6X. It's nowhere near as sleek, nor as slim, as the two others, but it's good on a budget. When a manufacturer makes an effort to keep costs down and improve the user experience, we take note. That's exactly what Gigabyte has done here, and without cutting any important specifications, like memory or storage size.

So, here are the nominees. We'll announce the winner on New Year's Eve.

Best gaming laptop 2024: the nominees

The winner of the PC Gamer Hardware Award for the best gaming laptop will be announced on New Year's Eve. It's all to play for, and any one of these three is completely deserving of the crown.

The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra costs more than three thousand units whether you're pricing it in dollars, pounds, or euros. Its pricing is up there with the MacBook Pro and Predator Helios 18, and as distasteful as it is to talk about money when I could be rhapsodising about frame rates the simple fact is that if frames are all you care about then skip over to the latest from MSI, Asus, or any of the other usual suspects where you'll find things more to your taste.

The Galaxy Book4 Ultra isn't really a gaming laptop at all, it just kinda looks like one. Albeit a skinny one. The combination of the Core Ultra 9 (Meteor Lake, 16 total cores) and GeForce RTX 4070 certainly make it useful in that area, and the 16-inch, 3K, 120 Hz, AMOLED touchscreen is a lovely thing to look at, but it comes with RTX Studio drivers installed (and there's a sticker to that effect just below the keyboard) pointing to an intended usage in the creative arts instead.

Swapping over to the Game Ready drivers is a matter of a few clicks in the GeForce Experience software, or the newer Nvidia App, however, after which it becomes broadly comparable to any other RTX 4070-toting laptop.

There's a small amount of confusion over how much power the GPU pulls, however—the box states 70W, while a software check shows it going a little higher than that at 80W. Whichever is true, this is half (or thereabouts) what you're getting from a machine like the Razer Blade 14 or MSI Vector 17 HX which run their RTX 4070 chips at 140W, and the test results back this up.

Take the Time Spy Extreme benchmark, in which the Galaxy Book's GPU scores 3,426 points. Sounds good, until you look at the Lenovo Legion LOQ 15APH8, which has an RTX 4050 running at 95W and scores 4,105. It also only costs $1,100.

The Razer Blade 14 manages 5,634; the MSI Vector 17 HX scores a shattering 6,102 and costs $2,299. What about a proper game? In Cyberpunk 2077 the Galaxy Book struggled to get a playable frame rate using Ultra Ray-Tracing settings (yes I know you can turn settings down but this is PC Gamer) producing 24 fps at 1080p, 10 fps slower than the RTX 4060 in the Legion Pro 5i 16 Gen 9. This happens time and again in the tests, with cheaper laptops leaving the pricey Samsung behind.

So what sets the Galaxy Book apart, and justifies the price tag? Well, you do get 32 GB of speedy LPDDR5X, and a 2 TB SSD that posts a higher average bandwidth than many other laptops. It's possible to down-spec the machine too, to save a little cash, but what you get for your money is an extremely nicely built laptop.

It's from the slim, sleek and executive machined-aluminium school of design, which means that the Samsung logo on the lid is rainbow-reflective, like someone built it out of an oily puddle on a sunny day, and the keyboard has a solid white backlight rather than unicorn vomit RGB. The pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports, alongside a full-size HDMI 2.1, USB Type-A, headset socket, and MicroSD card slot leave it as well equipped for the world outside gaming as they do for hooking up an external 4K screen and screaming into a microphone.

It's sturdy, the hinge is smooth, and there's no hint of flex even if you hold it by the corner and try to use the trackpad, something which can fox some less well-made laptops. It switches on automatically when you open the lid, which is faintly annoying when you just want to check whether there's a sliding cover over the webcam (there isn't, but it does at least have a 1080p sensor) yet very handy and efficient-feeling when you need to actually use the Book.

You get a fingerprint reader to login with too, which always feels like a more sci-fi method of authentication than face recognition. One day we'll retina-scan ourselves (or the excavated eyeball of the scientist we just chloroformed) using the webcam, but until then this will suffice.

The combination of the low-power cores in the Core Ultra and the lower wattage rating of the GPU allow the Book 4 Ultra to eke out a remarkable battery life. Under test conditions (shut in a cupboard where I can't see it flickering) the laptop managed almost 13 hours of life in a test that keeps its screen on (at 50% brightness) while running a loop of video and office applications. This test isn't troubling that GeForce chip too much, and in a simulated gaming benchmark that allows it to stretch its legs a bit more it kept going for 2 hrs 13 minutes.

This is a less excellent result, even in an age of gaming laptops that can barely hold enough charge to keep them alive between power sockets. The Book 4 Ultra isn't a particularly thick machine, with less space to hide battery cells than chunkier models, so perhaps relies on component efficiency rather than a large battery for its extended lifespan. The moral of this story is that, if you're gaming, you need to plug it in.

There are also a few Samsung-specific features, such as the ability to hook up with a Galaxy smartphone in a more intimate way than the standard Windows Phone Link, such as using it as a wireless video camera for meetings. These have absolutely no bearing on its gaming abilities, but are nice quality-of-life enhancements nonetheless, even if the constant nagging to create and sign into a Samsung account makes you fire up the Settings app to uninstall it all.

And that just about wraps up the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra. It's expensive, it's not amazing for games despite what the specs might tell you (though it's no slouch) and did I mention it's expensive? But it's an extremely easy machine to live with, and if you're envious of MacBooks' sleek design, sharp screens and long battery life, this is about as close as you're going to get without giving up Windows.

And just like that, Black Friday is gone. But certainly not forgotten as I'm willing to wager that the vast majority of the best Black Friday gaming laptop deals are still in action as we roll through the weekend and on into Cyber Monday. So, I'm still beavering away updating this page with some of the very best gaming laptops money can buy.

I've updated this page for the last time now, but we'll be continuing to curate the 👉best Cyber Monday gaming laptop deals right here👈, so come on over and check out what's occurring.

At PC Gamer, we spend our year pushing gaming laptops to the limit in testing, which means we've got a good bead on what's actually a decent price for a given machine, and are able to spot the trends as they emerge. Some laptop deals appear better than they really are but we're using our many years of experience to help you avoid that nonsense.

The most important spec for a gaming laptop is the choice of GPU, with CPU a secondary (still important) concern. You'll find mostly RTX 40-series laptops available today, most commonly the RTX 4060 or RTX 4070. There are higher-end models available in the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090, though we don't often recommend Nvidia's very top mobile chip as it's usually not great value for money.

It's also worth keeping an eye on the memory and storage included with a gaming laptop. Generally, we prefer laptops to come with at least 16 GB of dual-channel memory and a 1 TB SSD, but sometimes a really good deal on something with less cannot be ignored.

Black Friday gaming laptop deals — Quick links

• Amazon: All the Amazon Black Friday gaming laptop deals
• Newegg: Every Newegg Black Friday gaming laptop deal
• Best Buy: The full Best Buy Black Friday gaming laptop list
• Asus: Asus RTX 4070 17-inch gaming laptop for $1,300
• Alienware: m16 R2 RTX 4070 gaming laptop for $1,300
• MSI: 14-inch RTX 4070 laptop for $1,180 @ Amazon
• Gigabyte: RTX 4070 Aorus 16 laptop for $1,580 @ Best Buy
• Walmart: Asus TUF F15 15.6 inch RTX 4060 gaming laptop for $999
• Target: Manufacturer refurbs from Acer from $750
• Razer: $100s saved on RTX 40-series Razer Blade gaming laptops, with a free X-ray skin!
• Dell: G15 and G16 gaming laptops from $650
  
  

• RTX 4050 - HP Victus 15 | $651 @ Walmart
• RTX 4060 - Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 | $1,000 @ Amazon
• RTX 4070 - HP Victus 16 | $930 @ Best Buy
• RTX 4080 - MSI Vector 16 HX | $1,849 @ B&H Photo

Best laptop GPU

Black Friday gaming laptop deals under $1000

• RTX 4050 - HP Victus 15 | $651 @ Walmart
• RTX 4060 - Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 | $1,000 @ Amazon
• RTX 4070 - HP Victus 16 | $930 @ Best Buy
• RTX 4080 - MSI Vector 16 HX | $1,849 @ B&H Photo

$1,000–$1,500

$1,500+

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Black Friday gaming handheld deals

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Black Friday gaming laptop deals — UK

• Amazon: MSI RTX 4080 laptop for £1,699
• Laptops Direct: RTX 4060 gaming laptops from £750
• Overclockers: Asus RTX 4060 laptop for £900
• Razer UK: £100s off RTX 40-series Blade laptops
• Scan: Asus TUF Gaming RTX 4070 laptop for £1,100
• PC Specialist: Configurable RTX 40-series laptops
• Cyberpower: £100s off gaming laptops
• Currys: £1,199 RTX 4070 MSI machine
• Handheld gaming PC: ROG Ally for £399 at Amazon
  
  

• RTX 4060: Gigabyte G5 | £811 @ Amazon
• RTX 4070: Asus TUF F15 | £950 @ Amazon
• RTX 4080: MSI Vector 17 I £1,699 @ Amazon
  
  

Our magic Black Friday price bots are searching the web, constantly tracking down the best gaming laptop deals.

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Live

Hey, Jacob here, reporting for duty. I'm spending a chunk of my time this week looking out for gaming laptop and handheld gaming PC deals, from now until Black Friday and beyond.

Well, until Cyber Monday anyways. After that I'm getting a big board of cheese and crackers and putting my feet up... but we have year-long deal hubs to keep you covered once that happens.

This diminutive Asus gaming laptop is part of the company's more affordable TUF range of machines, but the new-look chassis is taking a lot of its design cues from the super premium Zephyrus line.

It's also sporting AMD's top-of-the-line new mobile processors of the Strix Point family, too. As such, the Asus TUF A14 is one of the best 14-inch gaming laptops around right now.

And with a decent discount bringing the RTX 4060 version down to $1,349 at Walmart it's really cutting through the price premium of these small form factor laptops.

Right here is the cheapest RTX 4080-powered gaming laptop we can find right now. The MSI Vector. It's a 16-inch device with a fairly standard form factor for a gaming laptop—it's not going to win any awards for sleek style. However, that's a 175 W 4080 under the hood, and the CPU might be one generation old but it's still a modern architecture and good enough.

I'd prefer a 1440p or 1600p panel for this sort of cash, but at least you'll stand a chance of hitting that 144 Hz refresh rate frequently. And since this is so much cheaper than the other RTX 4080 machine I've highlighted in the guide above, it's worth thinking about anyways. For competitive gamers that prefer speed to resolution, it might be a good fit.

A gaming laptop with ample storage is good, but you want a spare NVMe slot for easy upgrades

You can't upgrade a gaming laptop like a gaming desktop, but usually you can at least swap out the NVMe SSD and memory.

I say usually (and italicise it for good measure) because some laptops have soldered memory and single NVMe slot. I.e. the latest Asus Zephyrus G14. You can still swap out the SSD already in that laptop pretty easily, but you would need to find some way to clone it if you want to upgrade your storage.

Altogether, it's just way more of a hassle than if you had a spare slot to begin with. So, if you can find a picture of the innards of any gaming laptop you're considering, that's good to check.

Here are a handful of pictures from inside a few current generation laptops (we make sure to always take a snap of the slots so you don't have to get inside your own laptop to check):

Here's a fresh deal for ya: I've spotted this MSI Vector machine over at B&H for $1,849. Now that's over $100 more than the cheapest RTX 4080 we've spotted so far, also an MSI Vector, though I much prefer the spec on this device.

With a 1600p/240 Hz screen, it's a much better fit for that RTX 4080 mobile GPU than the 1200p/144 Hz screen on the cheaper unit.

Combine the screen with the newer, and better, 14900HX chip and double the RAM to 32 GB, you start to see why this machine is well worth that extra 100 or so bucks.

OLED or Mini-LED? We're on a Razer's edge

Sorry for the Razer-based pun—the deals season does strange things to a person. Anyways, my editor and I are trying to decide between these here two seemingly near-identical Razer Blade 16 gaming laptops.

Both come with an RTX 4080, a Core i9 14900Hz, and a price tag of near-enough $3,000. These Blade laptops don't come cheap, and arguably other companies offer similarly fetch models for less. But some people only want Razer and you can't blame them once you've used one yourself. They're really lovely. As they should be for the money.

The price isn't what we're disagreeing about, it's which one is the better deal.

On the one hand, my pick: the Mercury White option.

This comes with 2 TB of storage and a dual-mode Mini-LED screen. That means the screen can be set to either 2400p or 1200p, and the refresh rate will adjust accordingly between 120 Hz and 240 Hz. It's not a perfect system of switching on these devices but it's a neat feature if you're looking to game and work on this single device.

Plus, the one time we really rate Mini-LED screens is on gaming laptops. They're compact enough where the lighting zones actually work as intended, whereas on larger gaming monitors we're team OLED all the way.

Now for Dave's pick: the Black OLED option.

This laptop stuffs the dual-mode option for a flatly 2560 x 1600 OLED screen. That's a pretty neat trade-off, I won't lie, as 2560 x 1600 is my favourite resolution for a 16-inch laptop with a decent GPU—you can score reasonably high frame rates in game but can still surf a spreadsheet.

Now here comes the kicker: this black Blade comes with just 1 TB of SSD capacity installed. That's a bit slim pickings for a laptop that costs as much as some cars. I have often thought Razer was being pretty stingey when it came to storage on its most premium of premium laptops, and 1 TB is going to fill up very fast if you're using this device for gaming and video editing, which is pretty likely considering its spec.

Now, you can upgrade the storage in the Blade 16, as per my previous blog post on this page. You can actually see underneath the hood on the Blade 16 we reviewed earlier in the year. The issue is this laptop comes with stacked NVMe slots, meaning you have to use only single-sided NVMe SSDs. That can be done, but involves shopping around a bit to find something suitable for the right price.

The WD Blue SN5000 is a single-side drive available in large capacities, though it's not the quickest around.

Here's a pretty wicked RTX 4070 laptop for $1,180.

The Slim comes with a Ryzen 7 7735HS, which is an eight-core processor and plenty powerful for a gaming laptop. It also includes the Radeon 680M integrated GPU, which has 12 CUs for reasonably decent performance. I say reasonably, as it'll be nothing close to the performance of the RTX 4070 inside this machine, but for indie games on the move, it's a good battery saver.

The RTX 4070 runs at a 140 W TGP, which means it should be able to perform as expected for its core count and not be overly limited by power constraints.

So far, so good. There's no letting up with the screen, either. It is a 16:10, 2560 x 1600 number, with a 350 nit peak brightness all from an IPS panel. It's also FreeSync Premium rated to keep screen tear away.

Does there have to be a catch? Well, yes, unfortunately there is. It might not be a dealbreaker, but it does sting a little. This laptop only comes with a single stick of DDR5 RAM. Just one lonely 16 GB stick. With one fewer channel, the system cannot utilise the RAM to its fullest, which may or may not have an impact on performance. Generally, we'd expect some sort of performance hit for a single stick, though it really depends on the application.

You could add in another stick down the line, though it's best to grab a kit for maximum compatibility and replacing the lot. You can probably get away with just buying another matching 16 GB stick, however.

So, hey, it's a bit frustrating on an otherwise solid laptop for the money.

Do you need an 'AI PC'?

No.

That was easy, wasn't it?

What makes a PC an 'AI PC' is an NPU. This is a specialised block on a chip that's dedicated to accelerating AI workloads. Intel's latest Lunar Lake chips, AMD's Ryzen AI series, and Qualcomm's Snapdragon Elite series all come with NPUs baked into the silicon, thus qualifying laptops with them as 'AI PCs'.

However, there really isn't much to do with an NPU that's of direct benefit to PC gamers right now. They're mostly used to accelerate local AI operations, and a lot of AI operations are still done in the cloud. You might get some local image processing or image generation from an NPU, and Copilot Plus PCs require it, but that doesn't mean the NPU is actually all that useful just yet.

That's because graphics cards are also mighty AI processing machines—that's why Nvidia is selling them by the truckload right now. So any PC, or laptop, with a decent GPU inside it actually already has some impressive AI-chomping ability. This will soon be recognised by Microsoft as Copilot Plus worthy, too.

So, whether the NPU has some uses or not, I wouldn't go out of your way to buy a gaming laptop with one just yet. As a PC gamer, I've struggled to really get much out of any laptops I've tested with an NPU.

There are other RTX 4060 machines on sale in the crush of Black Friday gaming laptop deals, and we've found three for under $800. But only one of them is truly worth your money. The Dell G15, for $800 at Dell itself is a classic Black Friday deal; we're always seeing them on offer around sales events, but that doesn't make this one any less appealing.

The RTX 4060 GPUs in the other machines are running at far lower power levels than the 140 W chip inside the Dell. That's the full wattage, and will have a big impact on the relative gaming performance against the 45 W and 75 W GPUs of the MSI and Acer machines our Andy has scouted this week.

This is a perfect example of what you really need to dig into when shopping for a new gaming laptop. The same graphics chip can have vastly different power levels that will impact both the heat they generate (manufacturers will use lower wattages to fit chips into thinner chassis), so it pays to check into the specs sheet to see what rating a given GPU is given.

What better way to ring in Black Friday proper than a deal on our pick for the best gaming laptop.

The ROG Zephyrus G16 is currently discounted down to $1,600 at Best Buy, including Intel's top Meteor Lake Core Ultra 9 185H chip and an all-important RTX 4070.

With an OLED screen and a wonderfully sleek chassis, this machine massively impressed both Andy and I in testing. I had the Ryzen AI HX 370 model, Andy the 14th Gen Intel. This isn't just favouritism on my part, but the AMD model is the best choice of those two. While we haven't tested the Core Ultra model of the Zephyrus ourselves, we have tested the Core Ultra chips. It should perform really well in a sleek chassis such as this, and will keep up with the RTX 4070.

The performance of this laptop is a little lower for its sleek chassis. I found that to be a fair trade-off in my testing for how lovely it is to actually use day-to-day, both between gaming and work.

The main downside with this deal is that it's on a model with only 16 GB of RAM. That's soldered LPDDR5 which means you can't upgrade down the line. That sorta sucks, I'd much prefer 32 GB or at least room to upgrade it myseelf, so something to consider before you buy.

There's also the fact you can buy an RTX 4070 for much less, though the Zephyrus does feel like a different class of laptop to many chunkier gaming machines out there—that will appeal to some more than others.

Steam Deck price drop!

The Steam Deck is just $337 over on Steam, and you won't beat that for a handheld gaming PC right now. That's for the 512 GB model, too. The 64 GB version is even cheaper at $296.65, though I would recommend going for the bigger capacity.

The Deck is less powerful than some other Windows-based designs but you don't feel it's lacking power when you're playing Vampire Survivors, Balatro, Hades or any other handheld-friendly title. That's partially because the resolution is just 1280 x 800, whereas those other ones are 1080p.

The Steam Deck's best feature has to be SteamOS. This Linux-powered interface is absolutely awesome, and we're still waiting for it to launch officially on other devices.

This is a US deal, and there's no such luck on a price reduction in the UK.

Check out our Steam Deck review for more.

The spec of this HP gaming laptop is about the same as every other somewhat affordable RTX 4060 gaming laptop. EXCEPT it has a 1 TB SSD. That alone puts it ahead of the rest of the gaming laptops under $1,000.

Soldered vs SO-DIMM—what's the deal?

If you've read through all of the deals on this page and you're not already familiar with the two most common types of memory on a gaming laptop, you might be wondering what we mean with phrases like 'soldered' and 'SO-DIMM'.

Let's start with SO-DIMM memory. This is the most common type of system memory (RAM) you'll find on a modern gaming laptop. These are removeable sticks of RAM, much like those on a standard gaming PC, though slightly squished to be more ameniable to the compact laptop form factor. SO-DIMM tends to be DDR5 memory now, which means speeds upwards of 5,000 MT/s are pretty standard these days.

Soldered memory is what we'd call any type of memory that's, well, soldered to the motherboard. Usually LPDDR5X in modern systems. It's not removeable in the traditional sense as it's attached to the motherboard directly, and doesn't come on any sort of separate stick (though with a heatgun, anything is removeable).

Soldered memory is used to save space—a laptop chassis can usually be thinner without SO-DIMMs and SO-DIMM slots.

So, which is best?

Good question, but I think I'm going to take the easy way out and say it depends on what machine you're buying. If you're grabbing a thin-and-light with 32 GB or more of RAM from the get-go, such as an ROG Zephyrus G16 (our best gaming laptop pick) you might be sorted for speedy memory and never feel the need to change it for the duration of that laptop's life. Though if you have less than 16 GB, you'll want the option to upgrade down the line. Even 16 GB might be nice to swap-out later on, though be honest with yourself if that's something you'd be keen to do.

This is the absolute cheapest RTX 4060 gaming laptop I've found, and it's actually a pretty impressive one. The Lenovo LOQ machines were a bit of an oddity when they first launched; they were meant to be the more affordable alternative to the company's Legion laptops... except they weren't actually cheaper.

Odd.

Anyways, it's Black Friday now, and everything's on sale it seems, and suddenly the LOQ is good value. Actually, I'd go as far as to say it's great value. There isn't another $700 gaming laptop that I've seen which would be as good a machine as this.

The build quality is excellent, the GPU has a TGP of 105 W—which isn't the highest, but certainly not the lowest, looking at you Mr. 45 W MSI—and the AMD Zen 3+ CPU will do a job, too. It feels like a smartly specced, well-built gaming laptop, that is a bit of a bargain.

My only notes are that the screen on the LOQ I tested wasn't brilliant and this 144 Hz IPS does seem a mite dim at 300 nits, and one other slight concern is that the 16 GB of DDR5-4800 memory isn't listed as to whether it comes in two sticks or one. That's important, because of late Lenovo has been using a single stick to cheap out on 16 GB configs, and that instantly halves the available memory bandwidth.

Oh, and that 512 GB SSD is a bit miserly, but that's not a tough, or expensive upgrade down the road.

Ah, there it is. I was wondering when this one would show it's chonky little face. The Asus TUF F15 pops up a lot around these times, showing up all the other RTX 4070 gaming laptops by hugely undercutting them and offering itself up with a huge discount.

This is a lot of laptop for under a grand, and you can find the Asus TUF F15 for $1,000 at Best Buy.

Morning! Black Friday may be over, but I'm still going to be picking my way around the various retailers to figure out which laptops are still live and which have vanished from the shelves never to be seen again. Okay, that might be a little over dramatic, but there will likely be some that have either gone out of stock or have lost their tempting little discounts.

And I'm going to be here making sure I'm still bringing you the best gaming laptop deals around.

There are quite a few deals still hanging on, but some have gone out of stock, and others have increased in price. Perhaps that's in preparation of new pricing come Cyber Monday, but there is at least one exception. This powerful RTX 4080 MSI Vector 16 HX has dropped $200 overnight and is now $1,799 at B&H Photo.

There is another RTX 4080 machine from MSI that's $50 cheaper, but this one has the top-end Intel CPU, twice the DDR5 ram allotment, and a 2560 x 1600 display capable of a 240 Hz refresh rate.

It's a far better machine than the $50 price delta might suggest.

On a recent earnings call (via Motley Fool), Nvidia's chief financial officer Colette Kress said that in Q3 the company "began shipping new GeForce RTX AI PC with up to 321 AI TOPS from Asus and MSI with Microsoft's Copilot+ capabilities anticipated in Q4. These machines harness the power of RTX ray tracing and AI technologies to supercharge gaming, photo, and video editing, image generation, and coding."

Note the key phrase: "with Microsoft's Copilot+ capabilities anticipated in Q4".

Microsoft's official documentation states the minimum system requirements for a Copilot+ PC include "a compatible processor or System on a Chip (SoC)" which "currently includes the Snapdragon X Plus and the Snapdragon X Elite."

No mention of GPUs, though, because the Copilot+ stamp has thus far been reserved for NPUs, these being AI-specific proccessing tiles forming part of one cohesive processor alongside CPU and GPU tiles. Typically, these NPUs offer about 50 AI TOPS.

We've known for a while that some Copilot+ PCs are going to feature RTX GPUs, but Nvidia seems to be suggesting that some such Copilot+ RTX systems will be with us by year's end.

We should note that 321 AI TOPS is exactly what the RTX 4070 mobile can offer. So, it sounds like Nvidia's saying there could be official Copilot+ RTX 4070 (and possibly lower) laptops from Asus and MSI very soon.

We all know that GPUs are capable of the kinds of processing needed for AI. The Tensor cores in Nvidia GPUs are basically just that: AI acceleration cores.

And while these kinds of cores form the backbone of datacentre AI GPUs—sorry, AI accelerators—there are enough of them in your average Nvidia gaming GPU to undertake some AI processing, especially the kinds of basic consumer-grade AI processing of Microsoft Copilot apps and features.

But while that's all true, and although it's intimated it will do so in future, Microsoft has until now avoided awarding a Copilot+ badge to machines with only a GPU, and no NPU. All that's left is for Microsoft to officially acknowledge GPUs in its Copilot+ branding, which it looks like it might soon do.

This would help explain the existence of Nvidia's new "AI PC" social media channel, too. Although we're also hopeful all this Nvidia AI PC talk might ultimately mean an all-Nvidia Arm-based processor with RTX 4070 mobile performance to boot.

Which, if we're correct about all this Copilot+ stuff, would make such an all-Nvidia processor Copilot+ stamp-worthy, too. It's certainly looking like a brave new world out there.

That's the thing with gaming laptops: you can't upgrade them all that much once. While it's possible to swap out the SSD and even often the RAM, unless you bought a modular Framework you're stuck with the screen, processor, GPU, trackpad, webcam, and more. Some of which you could upgrade with a discrete product—just plug in a gaming keyboard or webcam—but if you still want a portable PC, it's what's inside that counts.

So it's important to choose wisely. That means heading to the checkout with a firm idea of what you're after, some helpful tips from your local hardware journo (i.e. a glance at our best gaming laptop guide), and a pocket full of change.

There are heaps of deals on gaming laptops regularly—we're actually approaching the best time of the year to buy a gaming laptop and you can see our recommendations for early deals in our Black Friday gaming laptops deals page. But we only recommend products we think are actually any good, which means sifting through piles of crap. I've been doing this for over half a decade now and these are the things I look out for when choosing a gaming laptop, which will hopefully help you make an informed decision yourself—even if it's buying one that we've not recommended ourselves.

1. A 16-inch gaming laptop is almost always ideal
2. Check for a spare NVMe SSD slot
3. Spend your money on the better GPU
4. Make sure you're not missing out on memory
5. Do the laptop's specs make sense together?

14-inch or 16-inch

1. A 16-inch gaming laptop is almost always ideal

In the modern era of laptops there are two dominant form factors: 14-inch and 16-inch. Those two inches make a big difference, but before we get to that I should note that 18-inch laptops, such as the MSI Titan 18 HX A14V, make less sense for your average laptop user. That's not to say they don't serve a niche, but that niche is effectively acting as a replacement for a desktop PC tower or pulling maximum performance for more creative endeavours—you probably won't want to whip an 18-inch laptop out onto a tray table during a long-haul flight, for example.

No, if you're after an all-rounder for work, school, travel, and leisure then you'll want to go with a 16-inch laptop most of the time. Some are pretty compact, such as the ROG Zephyrus G16, while other budget models are quite a bit thicker. Generally, though, you won't struggle to fit a 16-inch laptop into a standard laptop-friendly backpack, and they tend to offer a good blend of performance and battery life.

The 16-inch screen size is also a good balance of being large enough to actually benefit from higher resolutions, such as 1440p, and being able to make out exact details; but not too big to be convenient. On the flipside, if you go for a smaller 14-inch gaming laptop, it might be a little too cramped for the best visibility in games.

One game I play a lot of is Hunt: Showdown. The game has a handful of maps all based in various locations in the American South, but they all share a common graphical style. No reflection on where these maps are based, but they're the site of a horrific haunted invasion and as such are filled with dirt and mud, they're run-down, a little hazy, filled with bogs, bog-dwellers, and broken buildings. The reason I bring this up is it's a good test of a gaming laptop's screen size: it's tough on a full 32-inch monitor to make out an enemy player, a hunter, wearing brown and black hiding in the bushes. It's tougher still to do that on a 14-inch gaming laptop. Even the leap to a 16-inch screen helps a lot here, and that's something to consider if you're considering a 14-inch design.

But the 14-inch form factor has many other benefits. Combined with a sleek chassis, you can score yourself a truly portable device that can slip into a backpack without much of a thought to its size or weight. That's excellent for travel. You might have to deal with a slimmer battery life or more cramped controls, but a 14-inch gaming laptop can still offer many of the same features and functionality as its larger siblings. Just note, performance can be a little lower, on account of the restricted thermal solution.

Optional NVMe

2. Check for a spare NVMe SSD slot

One thing I always look for when either reviewing a new model of gaming laptop or scouting for a good deal is check whether there's a spare NVMe SSD slot available. This isn't just needless future proofing—a spare NVMe SSD slot means you can both upgrade your storage with another SSD or transfer your existing storage to a bigger drive with ease.

This is especially important as most gaming laptops only come with 1 TB of storage, or possibly less, and that will be gobbled up very quickly by any of today's biggest games. It's a bugbear of mine with so-called 'premium' gaming laptops that spare no expense… except the SSD capacity.

It's a more common issue than you'd think. Even the Zephyrus G14 and Blade 14 usually come with no more than 1 TB and no spare NVMe slot.

Let's hope manufacturers get the memo and start shipping more 2 TB SSDs as standard in 2025. For now, just make sure you have access to a spare slot and you can upgrade your storage with one of the best SSDs for gaming with just a few simple steps.

Generally, gaming laptops come with a a handful of cross-head or Torx screws holding on the underside cover. These can be easily removed with a good electronics screwdriver set. You might need to use some sort of plastic prying device to get under the edge of this cover, but it should come away relatively easily without too much force. I've only reviewed a handful of laptops where this felt like a hassle—if in doubt, don't force it. Once removed, look for a spare NVMe slot, as per the image above.

GPU rich, CPU poor

3. Spend your money on the better GPU

When searching the web for laptop deals, I often find gaming laptops with budget GPUs inside them. However, they're usually not on sale for the sort of discount you might expect relative to their performance. I'll usually spot models with an RTX 4050 or RTX 3050/3060 for around the same price as those with an RTX 4060 or better. That's obviously a bad deal, but there's more to it than that.

Sometimes you'll end up with a better model of CPU in exchange for a lower-end GPU. That's fine for people that are only relying on the GPU for acceleration, encoding/decoding, or the odd spot of gaming; and who otherwise would use a more powerful CPU to its fullest. But for most PC gamers, it's better to buy a more powerful GPU and accepting the slower CPU—your frame rates will thank you.

Sure, the CPU is a part of the processing equation and matters for frame rates, but often it won't matter anywhere near as much as the GPU.

Remember memory

4. Make sure you're not missing out on memory

Single-channel memory winds me up. This is when a manufacturer uses a single stick of RAM inside a single SO-DIMM slot and leaves the second SO-DIMM slot empty. It doesn't sound that bad, but that's performance left on the table for a very small monetary saving, and one which it doesn't appear to me is passed along to the consumer that often.

What you want is two SO-DIMM slots occupied, as this means all the channels available on a CPU are being utilised at once for higher bandwidth. Higher bandwidth equals more performance. When you only use one stick, the bandwidth is fairly needlessly halved. It depends on what you're doing at the time as to how much performance you might lose: in some memory-intensive workloads it could be double digit performance loss, in others, even often games, it might not be anywhere near as much. Though when dual-channel kits are so ubiquitous and similarly priced to just a single stick, why settle for anything less?

My advice then is to always check the full specs of any laptop you're thinking of buy and check to see if it either specifically says "dual channel" in the memory specifications, or instead denotes it as, for example, a 16 GB (2x 8 GB) setup.

Clever combo

5. Do the laptop's specs make sense together?

This is as much about a screen's resolution as it is your choice of GPU. If you have an RTX 3050 inside your machine, you probably don't need a 1440p screen with a refresh rate above 144 Hz. You won't see much of a benefit in any sort of moderately demanding game. I'd even go as far to say you can probably spend the same money you were going to spend on that 'premium' RTX 3050 gaming laptop on a more sensibly balanced machine with a better GPU and a smarter screen choice. That's depending on the deals at hand, but it's not as unrealistic as it sounds.

I'd recommend sticking to 1080p with an RTX 4060 laptop or below. For an RTX 4070 or above, you can dive into 1440p, unless you want to push high frame rates for competitive gaming. In which case, 1080p is likely still the pick for you.

For gaming laptops alone, I'd generally recommend steering clear of 4K, as even the best RTX 4090 laptop is using a power-limited GPU akin to a desktop RTX 4080. While that's still plenty powerful, 4K gaming is a tougher ask of a laptop than it is a desktop, and you won't be able to extract your screen's top performance without a large dose of DLSS. Even then, 4K does feel a little wasted on a gaming laptop with a compact display, whereas it makes much more sense for a content creation device.

It's worth mentioning that it's common to find gaming laptops with irregular resolutions. I'm talking about 2560 x 1600, mostly. That's a result of pushing the vertical resolution higher on a 2560 x 1440 screen to accommodate the 16:10 aspect ratio. Some of our favourite laptops have this resolution today, such as the Zephyrus G16 2024, though it does pair that with a 240 Hz refresh rate, which can get a little too much for its components in a thermally-constrained chassis.

A 2560 x 1600 resolution with a 165 Hz refresh rate is a golden combo.

You can always drop down to 16:9 from 16:10 for a little performance boost in a given game, and still enjoy the same clear picture quality. However, if you drop a 4K laptop down to 1080p or 1440p, and it's not a dual-mode screen like the one found on the Razer Blade 16, the picture can get pretty fuzzy. That's why it pays to pick the best resolution before you buy.

Bonus: downsides

Bonus: Gaming laptop or gaming PC—be aware of the downsides

Noise, heat, longevity—these are three very important factors to consider when deciding between a gaming laptop and a gaming PC. The benefits of a gaming laptop are clear, but when it comes to these three things, you will find a gaming PC easily outflanks even the best gaming laptop around.

A gaming laptop might not always be empirically louder than a comparative gaming PC, but it's almost certainly more noticeable to the user. You're closer to the fans, and those fans are working harder. A gaming PC, on the other hand, will usually have a higher quantity of larger fans. These can run slower and therefore will operate at lower noise levels. Combined with the fact you'll have a gaming PC under a desk, or at least not directly under your nose, it can be a much quieter experience. This also helps the gaming PC cool off quicker than a comparable laptop.

As mentioned earlier, you're largely stuck with your choice of components in a gaming laptop when you buy it. Maybe you can upgrade the RAM or SSD, but the CPU and GPU are soldered in place. Compared to an easily repaired or replaced gaming PC, you might find a broken part kills your laptop prematurely, and you're reliant on a warranty claim with the manufacturer or an expensive repair elsewhere.

This might sound like I'm trying to dissuade you from buying a gaming laptop. I'm not. They can be extremely convenient and flexible in a way that a gaming PC could never. They can cover a multitude of use cases—not just gaming but school or office work, too. Though it's good to be sure of your reasons to buy a gaming laptop over a more traditional gaming PC before you head to the checkout. Otherwise, if you are planning to keep your machine mostly tethered to your desk, you can usually score a better deal and a more easily upgraded or repaired on a traditional gaming PC.

Of course, there has to be a caveat, right? Something must be holding this beast back. It took a bit of testing, but aside from a base price tag to rival most RTX 4090-powered gaming laptops today, I think I've spotted it: gaming battery life. Seriously, what's a laptop without portability?

If you can lift its hulking aluminium mass out of the box, you'll find that the Legion Pro 7i chassis is not just thicc but beautifully understated. Matte black with a silver Lenovo tag on the back, and Legion indented in larger letters on the opposite corner. The lid is soft close, and unlike the RedMagic Titan 16 Pro there's no over-the-top design elements giving away its gamer-ness. The back and sides have a distinct speckled look—like classy glitter—though you won't see it unless you get your nose right up in the vents.

None of it is offensive to the eye and, while some might be averse to the RGB that lights up the front edge and keyboard, you can always turn it off when your co-workers are looking.

There's a USB Type-A port placed on either side of the Pro 7i, as well as one of the USB Type-C ports, but all the other ports are located on the back—something that helps keep it looking clean on the desk, and it means wires don't get in the way of your mouse. Aside from the side ports, there's another USB Type- A on the back alongside a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 Thunderbolt 4 port, which doubles as DisplayPort 1.4. The other USB Type-C is another DisplayPort 1.4 which also comes with an impressive 140 W Power Delivery. A good selection of ports, then.

After four years of testing gaming laptops, you start to get a feel for them. If the sheer weight of the thing hadn't given it away, turning the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i on made it clear I was in the thick of premium gaming laptop territory. And boy, does this thing go.

One thing I did note after the initial setup are the popups. There's some bloatware installed, including Tobii and McAfee. Tobii runs in the background from startup and uses up over 150 MB of memory, which isn't ideal, so you might want to do some uninstalling when you first get hold of the Legion Pro 7i. That said, Lenovo's own included Arena software does a great job at keeping all my game libraries in one place, and Vantage is great for system monitoring and one-click overclocking.

Aside from that, just clicking around in everyday use I've been impressed how speedy the Legion Pro 7i is. It's totally unphased by the masses of tabs I have open in Chrome. That's down to the 32 GB of dual-channel DDR5-5600 RAM Lenovo has packed under the hood. Two sticks of 16 GB memory means greater bandwidth, something that a lot of gaming laptops overlook. Lenovo has done no such thing with the Legion Pro 7i, and the attention to supporting components extends to storage, too. It's just frustrating that in the cheaper 16 GB config that means just a single stick of memory, rather than a pair of 8 GB sticks, which halves the potential bandwidth on offer.

But the configuration I'm looking at includes two 1 TB NVMe SSDs. Not just your average proprietary storage either—these are SK-Hynix PCIE Gen 4x4 drives, and they're acing every storage benchmark I throw at them. We're talking excellent bandwidth and some of the lowest storage access times I've seen in similar laptops.

Blaring out of the bottom are two 2 Watt Harman speakers which I tested with a bit of Sleepnet. They're a bit tinny, but they handle deep, bassy synth really well and don't crackle when I whack them up to full volume. There's some lows missing, but they happily make the table shake.

When we get down to the core components, the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i is rocking a fantastic combo of Nvidia's RTX 4080 and an Intel Core i9 14900HX. That makes it a star in the CPU heavy benchmarks, meaning the Pro 7i absolutely owns when it comes to rendering.

Out of the box I was getting about average frame per second scores for something of its weight class, but there's no discernible stuttering to note and the fans don't whirr up and blow my ears off throughout, so it's a pleasant gaming experience all round.

Turn on Thermal Mode and that 175 W GPU realises its full potential with an extra 10–20 frames per second, even stretching to another 30 fps in some instances. Though it does push the components to their limit. When that 175 W RTX 4080 GPU goes full blast the cooling array is able to still maintain a decent GPU temperature, but the CPU tops out at about 100°C—hot enough to boil water—and you can bet it gobbles up the battery charge.

Which brings me to my main concern. Unplugged under a heavy gaming load the Legion Pro 7i only manages to eek out 40 minutes. That's one of the worst gaming battery life scores of this generation, and it even falls flat against most of the RTX 4090 powered gaming laptops we've tested this year.

The thing to remember is that this is a gaming laptop with an MSRP of $3,220/£3,060 in a sea of sub-$3,000/£3,000 machines of almost the same spec. For that price, you shouldn't have to compromise. Yes, you're getting a current generation Intel CPU backing this one up, but unless you're working as a game developer or in the film industry, this particular config is a little overkill for most gamers.

Of course there are configuration options, and it's already heavily discounted and, if previous Lenovo Legion machines are anything to go by, I would expect to see that becoming effectively its standard price. With white LEDs only it's £30 cheaper (though that's only an option in the UK). You also stand to save $200/£170 if you decide against the second SSD and opt for 16 GB of single-channel RAM. What I'm getting at here is that this is one configurable machine, and definitely more so in the UK.

The Legion Pro 7i is a lovely machine, but in this configuration you could spend far less cash to nab the similarly specced and super svelte, OLED-topped ROG Zephyrus G16—currently our favourite gaming laptop. And while it doesn't quite hit the same $3,600 premium of the newest Razer Blade 16 with the same CPU in it, our favorite 17-inch, RTX 4090-powered gaming laptop, the Gigabyte Aorus 17X AZG, comes in at the same price.

That said, the Pro 7i is often found with a huge discount on the Lenovo site, and is likely to be for some time. If you can forgo the extra memory and storage, it's well worth a look.

That's not all gaming laptops, however. Some fall into the "desktop replacement" category, and these are built to serve a different purpose. For these mighty machines, the idea is that you could move your PC around with you, but most of the time it'll be chained to a desk, and as such the designers prioritise high-powered components, big screens, and little else.

They're a bit of a dying breed, as these days it's perfectly possible to have a supremely powerful laptop that's still capable of being shoved in your bag and taken on the train, perhaps with a little bit of back strain as a result.

No-one seems to have told MSI. Because, in the year of our lord 2024, it's still pumping out new versions of its Titan line. We reviewed one of the previous models, the MSI Titan GT77 HX, and gave it a score of 53%—thanks to its incredibly loud fans, ugly chassis, and ludicrous price, among other things. Now, the MSI Titan 18 HX A14V is here. So, have things improved?

Price wise? Not really. The GT77 HX could be found for $5,300, and this new model retails for the same, although at the time of writing it is reduced down to a much more reasonable $4,800/£4,800—which is surely a bargain if you ask me.

Just kidding, that's still a ridiculous amount to pay for a gaming laptop. Still, you're getting quite literally the most highly-specced laptop money can buy right now when it comes to internal components, and that seems to be the whole reason for this machine's existence.

So, for the CPU, it's the 24-core Intel Core i9 14900HX, paired with a truly monstrous 128 GB of DDR5-5600. Yep, I did a double-take, too. Who needs 128 GB of RAM in a gaming laptop? Almost nobody, but again, need is not the point. It's here, and you're paying for it.

It'll therefore come as no surprise that the GPU is the 175 W version of the mobile RTX 4090, a model we've continually criticised for being virtually pointless in laptop configurations thanks to the exceptional amounts of heat it produces. That means you're usually paying for performance you can't actually use, thanks to its tendency to overwhelm even the largest of mobile cooling solutions.

On first glances at the sizable chassis here, however, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the Titan 18 HX had at least half a chance. It's covered in truly gigantic vents big enough to wedge a finger in, and the deck feels like a slab of granite thanks to the thickness created as a result. I say slab of granite, but I only wish it felt as resistant to damage.

The weight is here, but the build quality is decidedly not. Flipping the laptop over (with some considerable effort, given that it weighs nearly eight pounds) reveals some incredibly hollow-sounding plastic protrusions on the underside, presumably to keep all those scalding hot components away from your legs.

They work, as it happens (and we'll get on to heat later, believe me), but the plastic feels tinny and worryingly breakable.

First impressions disappoint elsewhere, too. The base upon which you rest your wrists is decent enough (although incredibly fingerprint prone), but it contains a totally flush RGB trackpad, no edge whatsoever, and the lighting effect is horrible. It looks washed out, and feels worse.

The click underneath has the same sort of tactile feedback and noise as pushing down on plastic food packaging, with a tacky ping that makes you feel like you're constantly breaking it, rather than clicking down on something substantial.

I could go on, and in fact I will. The whole theme here appears to be red, black and grey—apart from some venting inserts on the rear, which are baby blue. They look like they were grabbed from an entirely different machine, and had me staring at them with a look of genuine confusion for some time.

Most egregious of all when it comes to fit and finish, however, is the lid. Contained within is a 2400p 120 Hz Mini-LED screen, a fragile and rather good-looking panel that you'll want to keep safe from harm's way. No such worries when it comes to the outside of the lid—it feels sufficiently protective. But in an open position, it… tell you what, there's no point explaining this, let me just show you instead.

I'm sorry MSI, I really am, but that's completely unacceptable even in a budget laptop, never mind one at this price. I took this machine into the office with me once (just to prove that it could be done) and I spent the entire time fretting that the worryingly creaky chassis was going to result in a dead panel once I'd arrived.

It survived, for the record, although my back barely made it. As a desktop replacement model, you could argue that this was an unfair test, but I wanted to see what it would be like to buy one of these laptops and use it as a laptop—and the answer is, you simply wouldn't.

I know what you're thinking at this point—sure the chassis might be rubbish, but this is a machine designed to dominate the benchmarks. So here's the part where the Titan really comes into its own.

Sort of. Sometimes. In certain benchmarks. Perhaps. Looking at the 1080p real-world gaming figures, the Titan 18 HX manages to pull ahead of its elder sibling quite significantly in most cases, although there are outlier results. In Cyberpunk 2077 it's a frame slower, and I had some issues with the Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition benchmark tool.

Lows were, well, very low, and the frame timing was all over the place. The Titan performed smoothly everywhere else, so I'll write that off as an issue I couldn't track down despite multiple driver and game reinstalls.

At 1440p, the Titan 18 HX lags behind the Titan GT77 HX in Cyberpunk by a single frame once more. Other than that, however, it's much the same story. Speedier than the competition on average, sometimes significantly—and in F1 22's case, by a considerable margin.

In both the 1080p and 1440p tests, the Titan boosted itself to hypercar-levels of performance in this particular game, throwing all our previous RTX 4090-wielding laptops into the barriers.

At 4K, however, the wheels well and truly come off. While the Titan 18 HX keeps its F1 22 lead by a solitary average frame, in every other game it finds itself outmatched by the competition.

So what's going on here then? Well, at 4K you really are leaning on that mobile RTX 4090 quite heavily, and those of you that have read our RTX 4090 laptop reviews before will know where I'm going next.

At "extreme" performance settings (what else would you keep a laptop like this set to while plugged in?), the fans ramp up to hilariously loud levels—but they still can't stop that GPU from throttling back to save itself from melting a hole through the middle of the Earth.

It's the same story in the rendering benchmarks. At best, it slightly edges ahead of its rivals in the odd test, at worst, it lags behind the older model. These components simply do not wish to run flat out in a laptop chassis, even one this large—and that Core i9 CPU kicks the cooling system into high-gear panic in no time at all.

Speaking of fan noise, I know this is something that's complained about with every ultra-high spec laptop under heavy load, but the Titan 18 HX really is something to behold.

On my office adventure, I had to stop myself from benching this laptop at my desk lest it annoyed the entire floor with its jet-engine-like roar. I know this sounds like overstatement, but it really is loud to the point of embarrassing. I've included another video clip here, because you really need to hear it for yourself to get the point across.

I'd suggest turning the sound up for the full effect.

Battery life is, well, the sort of battery life you'd expect from a desktop replacement. I have to say that under real world usage, you can definitely get a few hours out of it, but give it the chance to spin up those fans (and it'll take any excuse it can get) and battery life plummets considerably.

There are yet more day-to-day teething issues that I can't let go, and seeing as I'm on a roll here I'd better list them. The keyboard, for one. This is a SteelSeries unit, complete with the SteelSeries text printed proudly on the top deck. I quite like SteelSeries keyboards, but the only thing reminiscent of a good SteelSeries keeb here is the font.

It crunches, pings, and pops, with the sort of resistance that makes me physically screw my face up as I type. It's mostly mechanical at least, by which I mean there's proper mechanical travel on most of the keys—apart from the odd few, like the Escape, the left Ctrl, and the arrow keys, which feel like scissor units.

To keep costs down, I would imagine. Got to save those pennies somewhere, ey?

Hear that springy pinging? Yep, once you've noticed it, there's no un-noticing it. Another personal record broken here, as I've never heard a laptop keeb sound quite as loud as this one.

The speakers are dreadful, too. I put the Titan side by side with my partner's default HP work machine, and somehow the cheap and cheerful model managed to exceed the volume of the big bruiser by a country mile, and sounded better balanced, to boot.

They're hollow units, and that lack of volume is going to be a real problem when those fans kick into high gear. In short, if you're buying one of these, you're going to need a headset. A properly loud one, ideally with noise cancelling.

This is all sounding very negative, isn't it? I'd better mention that screen once more for balance, which really is a lovely panel. It's just a shame it's only 120 Hz, which seems like an odd omission given everything else here is specced up to the guns. The previous Titan featured a 17-inch 144 Hz Mini-LED display, so I can only imagine that 18-inch high-refresh panels are difficult to get hold of.

Still, it's a good-looking 4K display. It's just a shame that, err, 4K performance is where the Titan falls down compared to similarly-specced machines.

So then, what to say about this behemoth of a gaming laptop? In certain benchmarks it's the fastest we've ever tested, and for that it deserves a certain degree of acclaim. However, almost every other desirable facet of a modern laptop has been sacrificed as a result.

It's not slim nor sleek. It's not a premium feeling object. The battery life is rubbish, the keyboard is crunchy, and the trackpad looks awful—with a click that feels worse.

It's loud, cantankerous, unwieldy, and at 4K it still gets beaten out by the Lenovo Legion 9i. That's a laptop with phenomenal build quality, a sleek form factor, a superb keyboard, and so many other desirable aspects it's simply no contest as to which you'd rather have. Lenovo has released a refreshed version since our review that should do you rather nicely, and you can often pick one up for well under $4,000.

That's still a silly amount of money for any laptop, but it's still massively cheaper than the MSI. The price of a nice mini-break for two—saved.

Should an 18-inch lappy be what you desire for desktop replacement duties, why not take a look at the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18? It's also horrendously loud, subtle as a brick, and angular to a fault. But having personally tested and reviewed both, I'd take the Asus all day long. It's an old-fashioned feeling machine, but at least it has build quality to match—and can often be found cheaper, too.

I just can't get my head around why MSI keeps making the Titan. Gaming and creator laptops have come such a long way in the past few years, and so much of that is down to taking powerful components and balancing them with the day-to-day niceties that make a premium object such a wonderful thing to behold. A thing of desirability, worthy of serious levels of cash for serious levels of luxury.

Fast, the Titan 18 HX A14V may be. But luxurious? Not a bit of it. If I was being generous, and at this point I feel I have to be for balance's sake, I like that it no longer has a large rear lip like the previous model. That feels like an improvement, and I've reflected it in the score.

But otherwise? It might be a performance monster compared to many, but charging this amount of money for a laptop with this little refinement is asking for trouble. I should be desperate to hang on to a machine with this kind of firepower inside it, but honestly? MSI, you can have it back.

As spotted by Wccftech, Firebat has announced the Huan 16 Air, which is a laptop with an upgradable GPU. The graphics card is discrete, which means that, unlike some laptops and the best handheld gaming PCs, it doesn't use an integrated GPU alongside the CPU. 

This isn't uncommon for gaming laptops of course, but what makes this specific model stand out is that you can essentially buy a new, specifically made graphics card and slot it in for better performance. 

At just $780 (before tax) for the RTX 4060 model, this is a bargain price, especially when you consider you would be partially purchasing it as an investment piece. Whereas other laptops only degrade with age, this one's upgradable GPU means that its shelf life is a little better. However, as of right now, it seems it will only launch in China. This means you will pay a lot more to import it or have to hope a bigger store starts stocking Firebat models. 

Comparing it to the Framework, which we previously gave a positive review, the Huan 16 Air isn't quite as customizable. Firebat has only announced you can swap out the GPU and not the rest of the laptop, like Framework. As is the case with many laptops, the SSD may be upgradeable too but we'd have to actually open it up and take a look to find out. 

However, it being less upgradable than the Framework isn't the biggest downside to the future of this model. Instead, you need to look at previous upgradable designs to get the bigger picture.

The Alienware Area-51M launched back in 2019 and was pitched as an upgradable gaming laptop. Just two years after that, Alienware found itself in the middle of a class action lawsuit for false advertising over just how upgradable that machine is. 

When you buy an upgradable machine, you are buying a promise of it staying relevant and supported by the time you want to upgrade, and this is the major problem with a machine like the Huan 16 Air. 

You may be able to swap out that RTX 4060 now but if you want to upgrade with the arrival of the RTX 5070 next year, your chances of doing so seem pretty slim. Because you seemingly can't upgrade the amount of power this thing gets, even if it somehow supports next-gen cards, it would have a very low TDP, which negatively impacts performance. 

Firebat has not proven itself as a brand that can promise long-term support and even Alienware, one of the biggest in the world, seemingly couldn't manage it. I'm excited to watch what Firebat do with this machine but I'll be keeping my distance for now. 

If you’re looking to buy an all-in-one PC that covers all of your gaming and creativity pursuits, then it’s important to buy one that delivers across the board. Traditional gaming laptops go strong on CPU and GPU performance alongside quick refresh rates and response times. But when you are spending the big bucks on a fancy new rig, you want to make sure it isn’t just a one trick pony.

With NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics cards, it’s not just your gaming that will see a boost — this new generation of graphics cards turns laptops into versatile machines that excel in gaming, productivity, and content creation.

We went hands on with one of the best laptops around at the moment for this technology: the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16. With the help of the new wave of programmes with AI features, its GeForce RTX GPU means that it can perfectly balance gaming and creativity — perfect for professionals who are seeking high performance without sacrificing portability and style.

Whether you’re a gaming enthusiast, competitive player, or streamer, with an RTX AI PC you’ll be backed up by industry-leading hardware and software that keeps you ahead of the game. The same is true for creatives. With GPU acceleration, photographers, designers, video editors, YouTubers, Twitch streamers, and digital artists can unlock AI features for applications they use on a daily basis.

Supercharging creativity

GPU accelerated AI features are becoming more widespread across major creative apps.

Two applications that are leading the way with AI tools are Adobe’s Photoshop and Premiere Pro. It feels transformational to have these rather complex and technical pieces of software streamlined with AI.

When editing videos in Premiere Pro, for example, you get access to text-based editing, smart reframing, automatic captions, and speech-to-text. Tasks that previously took an age can now be performed at the click of a button, leaving you to focus on bringing your masterpiece to life. There are similar efficiency boosts in Photoshop, from sprucing up photographs with the Spot Healing Brush, Neural Filters or Smart Filters, to graphic design features such as Match Font, or the Curvature Pen Tool. All of these features rely on the power of an RTX AI PC to make sure your computer isn’t spending hours slogging through each task.

Similarly, DaVinci Resolve Studio 19 has new AI features that make video editing significantly more efficient. These include the much-loved IntelliTrack AI point tracker for object tracking, stabilisation and audio panning, as well as UltraNR for spatial noise reduction. Then there’s AI GPU-accelerated colour grading, video editing, encoding and decoding. You’ll love how smooth scrubbing and playback are now, thanks to the accelerated power of an NVIDIA GPU.

Unsurprisingly, with NVIDIA behind them, 3D visualisers have also been given a boost. Blender’s OptiX ray-tracing in Cycles enables 3D artists to see their work in real time. Professional 3D artist and content creator Janice.Journal notes: “Simply put, GPU acceleration and AI allow me to see renders in real time as they process modelling, lighting and the entire environment, enabling a preview as if I were to hit 'render’ right away. It makes life 10 times easier for me.”

Alongside faster and more realistic rendering, you’ll also get accelerated motion blur rendering and nanoVBD for easier rendering of volumes. And if you’re an ON1 Photo RAW user, you can enjoy faster performance with an RTX GPU.

So it should come as no surprise that RTX 40 Series GPUs guarantee next-level ray-tracing, time-busting productivity features, with unbelievable visual quality, currently power over 600 AI-enabled applications and games, and are the favoured option across almost all fields.

AI-powered gaming

For gamers, one of the biggest benefits of RTX AI GPUs is DLSS 3, a breakthrough in AI graphics that multiplies performance by up to 400% over brute-force rendering. In essence, DLSS 3 uses AI to create additional frames and improve image quality, often with dramatic results. This makes it possible to access more games on a wider range of devices than ever before. RTX technology is outperforming its competitors across all the biggest titles, including Star Wars™ Outlaws, Black Myth: Wukong, and Counter Strike 2 .

Enabling both DLSS Frame Generation and Ray Reconstruction in supported titles really drives home the potential of AI in gaming, and can drastically improve frame rates and provide a massively improved visual experience, with highly realistic ray-traced lighting. In Cyberpunk 2077, performance can jump from around 20 fps with DLSS off to more than 100 fps with it enabled. That’s more than a 5X improvement — pretty amazing!

Future ready

By now, you’ll be getting the picture of the many day-to-day applications for an RTX AI PC, and how it levels-up the outdated concept of a ‘gaming PC’. With a new slate of technology, we need to update our ways of measuring it too. While noodling around with the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16, we tried out popular AI editing apps Topaz Video AI and ON1 Resize AI, which both include their own benchmarking tools to test AI-powered performance.

First, we booted up the Topaz Video AI benchmark, which renders a stock video using a variety of effects, models, and enhancement settings to measure how the hardware holds up in AI-driven scenarios. With our input resolution set to 4K, we saw impressive results across the board, especially when looking at the APFast SlowMo model, which rendered at 17.28 frames per second. This is almost double the performance on equivalent last-generation cards, and is a promising sign for the future, as AI-supported workloads continue to expand in scope.

Heading over to ON1 Resize AI, we took five example images and upscaled them to 200% their original size by harnessing the power of the RTX 4070 installed on the system. Each image took anywhere from 10 to 14.5 seconds to upscale, highlighting the potential time-saving power of AI when used to support creative workflows.

Getting hands-on with RTX AI

RTX AI laptops can do absolutely everything, from gaming to productivity to creativity. You might think such machines would weigh a lot, but in reality, AI laptops like the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 (2024) GA605, are surprisingly portable. If you’re a gamer wanting high performance without sacrificing portability and style, then the G16 is a great option. The fact we used just this machine to access all the above features tells you all you need to know!

We spoke very highly of it in our ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 review and summarised it as a "16-inch laptop with an aluminium chassis, vibrant OLED screen and genuinely decent speaker system”.

Creatives will particularly love the HDR technology that delivers 100% coverage of the DCI-P3 colour space, while gamers will drool over the 240Hz refresh rate.

Inside the laptop, intelligent cooling components work together in harmony to keep the PC cool and quiet. This means you can focus on your game or that creative deadline you’ve got to meet. The liquid metal ultra-high performance thermal interface material keeps the machine operating at its peak while staying quieter than ever.

RTX GPUs deliver unrivalled performance for gamers, creatives, and all users needing a productivity boost. With ground-breaking AI technology, RTX AI PCs are both versatile and future-proof. If you’re looking to upgrade your system or invest in a new laptop, consider an RTX AI PC for your next laptop purchase.

Now, at this point my review of the Asus TUF A14 gaming laptop could go either way. I could throw up some Tory boi Clarkson-esque, gravel-voiced switchback, with a "...but that's not what we get here" style zinger, or I could be setting up a glowing rundown of all the reasons why I think this is one of the best 14-inch gaming laptops I've ever tested.

But you've seen the score up there 👆 so you know it's the latter.

The new TUF A14 follows Asus' recent line of gaming laptops in the Zephyrus G-series, taking many of the design notes into this, its more affordable range of notebooks. And it really works. Previously TUF laptops have been well-priced, relatively chonky, kinda ugly slabs that still performed well for the money.

They were effective, affordable, but ultimately not particularly desirable. That's all changed with this wee beauty. The new TUF A14 look is far more pared back than other TUF machines I've tested, keeping the clean lines of the Zephyrus G14 and Zephyrus G16 laptops we've loved so well. And it's impressively svelte in terms of the diminutive 14-inch chassis, too.

Proportionally, it's very well designed, with a slim bezel around the 1600p display and a keyboard that delivers far more space around each individual key than I would normally expect. I'm typing this review on it at the moment, and while the key response doesn't massively excite me, it's still an effective unit and I'm not suffering from any miss-strikes. It's unicolour, too, with white being the only key illumination on offer. And, honestly, I'm fine with that—I'd only make it pink otherwise.

And there's a Copilot button. Y'know, for AI-ing. For… all… those… things… we… gamers… use… AI… for.... Yeah, I'll admit, I don't know, either. Just know there are some TOPs here, whether you're going direct from the AMD NPU or the Nvidia GPU.

The trackpad's pretty great as well; a really nice-feeling glass option, which takes up more than a third of the space below the keyboard. It's responsive, slippy, and obviously a greasy fingerprint magnet. Such is life. I will also say the physical response of pressing either corner of the trackpad to engage the left or right-click function feels slightly gritty. It's the only place where it feels anything other than perfectly machined, as out of the box it feels like it's rubbing against the frame around it.

On the whole, though, it feels far more premium than its $1,500 price tag might otherwise suggest. I would also note that, while this feels a lot for an RTX 4060 gaming laptop at the tail-end of 2024, the 14-inch form factor generally garners a higher price that its larger compatriots, and the Asus TUF range is also one that's prone to a healthy discount, too. We regularly see TUF laptops on sale around the big retailers, so I would expect the TUF A14 to drop in price pretty quickly.

Now, somehow I've gotten this far through the review without actually mentioning what's powering this thing. And that's another place where the TUF A14 feels premium. As the 'A' designation signifies, this is an AMD-powered Asus machine, sporting the latest AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. That gives you both an excellent Zen 5 processor—with four full Zen 5 cores and eight Zen 5c cores—and the most powerful iGPU you can buy today.

That means you've got an impressive amount of raw processing/productivity power in this little laptop, as well as some genuinely good 1080p gaming performance from just the Radeon 890M silicon alone. That will get you the pleasing mix of both good frame rates and decent battery life when you're away from a plug socket.

For when you're not, however, you also have a 100 W TGP RTX 4060 available. That's able to deliver over and above what you'll get out of the iGPU, enabling you to bump up to 1440p or the native 1600p resolution and still get a playable frame rate out of your system.

And, unlike a lot of gaming laptops I've tested, it doesn't get too annoyingly loud when you are making that Nvidia GPU do its work. Sure, when you stick Armoury Crate onto Turbo settings with Ultimate GPU mode enabled, you're going to hear those fans spin up, but such is the tuned pitch that it doesn't feel oppressive, and isn't going to bleed into your consciousness through a gaming headset, either.

Alongside those two primary PC gamer concerns—the GPU and CPU—-you're getting up to 32 GB LPDDR5 and up to a 2 TB SSD in the package. Impressively, you also get a spare M.2 slot for you to drop in a secondary SSD down the line. And it's not a freaking trial trying to get the back off the TUF A14, either; Asus makes it mercifully simple to pull the rear off and access the insides.

Though that is purely for SSD management as its RAM is soldered, which also means you need to be confident the amount of memory you start with will be enough for your needs for the foreseeable future, cos it ain't going to change.

I'm into the overall port selection, too. There's a full width venting system on the back of the device to help achieve the machine's cooling, which leaves either side free for the port connections. That means USB Type-C and Type-A ports on both sides, though there's only a 40 Gbps Type-C connection with PD on the left hand side. That's where the diminutive power socket, HDMI, and 3.5 mm audio jacks are, too, while on the right hand side you also get an SD card slot alongside the two 10 Gbps USB Type-A and Type-C ports.

For me, there really aren't a ton of gaming laptops that feel this well put together. That feel like they can fit into your whole life and not just that part of you which loves to slap down bugs in Helldivers 2, commune with Illithids in Baldur's Gate 3, or manage the vagaries of fate and young millionaires in Football Manager. And, honestly, right now it's almost exclusively Asus laptops that are doing that. The Zephyrus G14 is the one which springs to mind, but the new TUF A14 is just as capable of fulfilling a dual role as gaming companion and office/school machine with equal aplomb.

I do still have a soft spot for the HP Transcend 14, but that machine's Meteor Lake core lets it down in comparison with the mighty Ryzen AI 9 APU, and the build quality isn't up to the same standard as this Asus lappy, either.

It's sturdy, surprisingly thin and light, impressively well-specced, and as performant as you could wish from a 14-inch RTX 4060 gaming laptop. It's the sort of machine I can throw into a bag and know it will adapt to whatever situation I'm using it in.

So, yeah, you can colour me impressed with the latest Asus TUF A14, it's been one of my favourite things to like this year.

News of the decision was reported by Ars Technica which had, in part, learned of the move via Jeff Geerling, a software developer. Geerling had picked up one of the dev kits in early October but was decidedly less than impressed with it. Inside the sleek little box is a Snapdragon X Elite processor, clocked 100 MHz higher than those used in Copilot+ laptops.

Along with 32 GB of LPDDR5x RAM and a 512 GB SSD, there's a range of connectivity options (Wi-Fi 7, USB4, etc) and, specifically, a HDMI socket to hook it up to a monitor. Except when Geerling unboxed his sample, he was surprised to note that in its place, Qualcomm dropped a USB-to-HDMI dongle in the box.

Digging into the system itself, Geerling discovered that Qualcomm had designed for there to be an HDMI port present, including all of the necessary circuitry and signal converter chips, but clearly changed its mind late on the production of the dev kits. He also immediately noticed that his system was clearly labelled with 'Evaluation only; not FCC approved for resale.'

The general consensus appears to be that Qualcomm couldn't get the whole HDMI thing to work properly to pass FCC requirements, hence the stamp on the case and the dongle in the box. Either way, it didn't say much for Qualcomm's engineering.

Somewhat bizarrely, Qualcomm also chose to ship the dev kits with Windows 11 Home installed, which nixes developer-favoured features. One can upgrade the licence, of course, but if you're paying the best part of $900 for a device that's purely aimed at developers, one would naturally expect any software to be appropriate for its use.

None of that matters now, as Qualcomm has issued a full refund to anyone who has already purchased one and said that the hardware doesn't need to be returned. That puts those who do own one in a bit of a tricky position, as the FCC stamp clearly states that it technically can't be resold.

All of this means that if you fancy developing an application or game for a Snapdragon X-based Windows laptop, then you'll just have to go out and buy a Copilot+ device. But given that Qualcomm is hoping to make a big dent in AMD and Intel's share of the laptop processor market with its Snapdragon X series, not properly supporting developers isn't going to help matters.

And it may just give Nvidia and MediaTek the opportunity to step in and snatch the Arm-based laptop sector right from under Qualcomm's nose.

And that's what we've got here. You can tell it's a creative laptop because it comes with Nvidia's Studio drivers installed rather than the Game Ready ones. And because there's a stylus in the box. The ProArt PX13 is also a touchscreen 2-in-1 model with the kind of trick hinge that allows you to fold it back on itself into a tent or even something approaching a tablet. A fat tablet.

As a result of this it needs to be gripped securely when being held like something out of Star Trek, which has led to a design that eschews both the slender wedge-shape beloved of ultrabooks and the weird angles and unexpected vents of a true gaming machine. Even the power button is on the side of the machine, which can make it a little hard to find the first time you want to turn it on. As a 13-inch laptop it's compact, one might almost say diddy. Adorable. Charming. Which is an odd thing to say about a black rectangle of metal and plastic, but the last laptop I reviewed was the monstrous Acer Predator Helios 18, and the contrast is stark.

A 13-incher makes for a very portable laptop, easy to throw in a bag or slide in a suitcase, and while the PX13 is thicker than the slimmest portables out there, the really tiny ones don't come with an RTX 4070 on board. 

What's also notable about this machine is that it comes with one of AMD's latest chips, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. This is, according to the marketing bumf, 'for premium AI PCs' and this comes down mainly to the presence of the XDNA NPU, a chunk of parallel-processing architecture that can handle the less exciting tasks Windows can offload to a neural network, such as blurring the background in video calls and object recognition in images. 

It adds 50 TOPS of AI-ness to the processor, for a total of 80 TOPS overall. This takes it well over the threshold for being a Copilot+ PC. That particular sobriquet was reserved for laptops with ARM processors at launch, but since the release of AMD's Ryzen AI 300-series and Intel's Lunar Lake chips, that definition has broadened. There is also a Copilot button on the keyboard if you can't get enough of chatbots.

The CPU in question here is a Zen 5 model, codename Strix Point, and brings 12 cores to the party. Four of them are full-fat Zen 5, and eight are the more cache-limited Zen 5c units. It has a default TDP of 28 W, a boost speed of 5.1 GHz, and comes with Radeon 890M (RDNA 3.5) integrated graphics that it uses to save power when the Nvidia chip isn't needed. 

It's hard to say exactly what the NPU is doing, with two GPUs on board too, but generative AI in apps such as Photoshop was certainly smooth, though apart from Lightroom denoising on 60 MP images these aren't unacceptably slow using integrated graphics. Adobe offers the choice of local or cloud processing for its Firefly features, but while GPU acceleration is available in the apps' preferences menu, there's no mention of NPU assistance.

Switch on the big fella, and you get some very nice gaming performance, though a quirk of the screen resolution (2880 x 1800, 16:10) meant it was unable to run anything in 1440p. 1080p is available in games, but native resolution is naturally the best option, and in testing the PX13 offered up 60 fps in Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition, but only 15 fps in Cyberpunk 2077's Ultra ray-tracing mode. The Razer Blade 14, which also has an AMD CPU/RTX 4070 combination, was faster in most games. The PX13 also has an oddly slow SSD compared to its gaming-focused brethren, putting out an average bandwidth figure almost 120 MB/s lower than the Blade 14's in testing, and over 200 MB/s less than some of the bigger laptops.

Still, it's not all bad, in fact there's much here that's very good. Having a 2-in-1 is very convenient if you can get over the greater thickness compares to a tablet and that Windows 11 still isn't 100% happy with being a touchscreen interface. Hook up a Bluetooth controller and you can upend it to play without the keyboard getting in the way, but if you want to play WSAD old-school style the key travel and feel are very good, testament to the increased chassis depth on offer.  

The trackpad can be a little problematic—it can't decide whether it wants to be tapped or clicked, and I found myself accidentally rearranging the icons on the taskbar when I was merely trying to execute applications. It also comes with an interesting little dial area that will be of no use to gamers other than as a volume control, as it's really meant to control brush sizes in Lightroom and scrub through the timeline in video editing apps, and it's fun to use, just twirling your finger to make things happen.

The screen, being an OLED, is as bright and contrasty as you might expect. It tops out at 60 Hz though, which is a mark against it in these days of 360 Hz laptops. However, its touch interface is fast and accurate, and having a stylus in the box instead of being an optional extra is great to see. It also has a really nice charging connector—a reversible rectangle not too dissimilar to a MiniDisplayPort plug but smaller than the one Lenovo uses. It keeps the Thunderbolt 4 ports free for video and fast data transfer uses, and there's a full-size HDMI 2.1 too, for that OLED ultrawide.

Overall, the ProArt PX13 is a good laptop to use if you make money from your digital creations and want to play some games afterwards. It makes no sense as a dedicated gaming machine, however, and it's unfair to expect it to. Until game NPCs start using ChatGPT to generate their dialogue (there is a Skyrim mod that did this, but at the time of writing it had been 'hidden' on Nexusmods) the NPU feels superfluous too. So, while Asus has put together a really interesting machine using a mix of the newest tech and the old standby of a honking great GPU plus a good dollop of RAM, it will be a while before it has much bearing on games.

Not all cards carrying the GeForce RTX 4090 name are created equal, with the version you’ll find in a laptop different to the desktop model in just about every way that matters. For a start, the laptop model is built around a different GPU—Nvidia’s AD103 rather than the desktop version’s AD102—and has 8 GB less memory to work with. And then, even after all of that compromise, there’s also the price.

The most obvious source of this divergence is that the desktop RTX 4090 has some serious heft that would make it an undertaking to fit into a traditional laptop shell. So naturally, an enterprising modder got to thinking.

According to VideoCardz, a Chinese modder known as ‘A Beginner Who Enjoys Overclocking’ (or ‘爱超频的小白’) has answered a question I definitely wasn’t asking: ‘What would a laptop with a desktop 4090 look like?’

The resulting build uses a custom blower-style RTX 4090 card that is, in a word, chunky. Photographic evidence depicts it still fitting inside a backpack but, weighing about the same as a jack russell terrier strapped to your back, it’s really pushing the limits of portability (even if it is less wriggly than the dog). Weighing 6.7 kg while unplugged, and boasting a 7 cm thick profile on top of that heft, it’s more than a handful—and definitely not one you’d want to drop on your foot.

Then there’s the power situation. A typical laptop RTX 4090 has a TGP between 80 to 175 W, but as this mod job uses the desktop version, that number jumps up dramatically to between 450 to 600 W. As such, the unit must be plugged into a power supply at all times. That, plus the weight, plus the fact the desktop RTX 4090 can get as hot as 70°C during peak performance at the best of times, and it’s not exactly the comfiest situation to perch atop your lap.

You won't be short for performance with this machine, at least. Thanks to the desktop-grade, entirely overkill RTX 4090 and Ryzen 9 7950X3D, this machine scores a whopping 28,490 in Time Spy. That's with a GPU score of 36,426. The average GPU score for an RTX 4090 is 21,593—meaning the desktop part is around 68% faster, even stuffed into a laptop.

Still, despite all of its impracticalities, I just can’t tear my eyes away from this absolute beast of a machine. The efforts of a self-described ‘Beginner,’ it’s an impressive piece of work.

The Acer Nitro 14 I've been testing, complete with an RTX 4050, Ryzen 7 8845HS, and 512 GB of SSD storage, demonstrates this tension well for me. It's quite a pretty laptop, and its size and heat dissipation make it super convenient, yet I don't see why it's launching now at its current price point given the aging tech inside it. It's a bit too late and a lot too expensive to make much of a splash, even if I think it's quite nice.

This isn't to say it doesn't handle those specs decently. The RTX 4050 GPU inside my machine has a 110 W TGP, and even manages to outpace lower-powered RTX 4060 machines we've tried before, such as the HP Omen Transcend 14, in some tests. Games perform okay given the specs and the 120 Hz sRGB 100% screen is accurate enough to let the likes of Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure and The Plucky Squire shine, even if I might have wanted something a little sharper or smoother for that £1,200 price point. 

The 300 nits peak brightness the 16:10 screen reaches isn't distractingly dull but, once again, it feels like you're paying for more and getting less here. 

It is worth noting the RTX 4050-equipped review model I got my hands on is not currently available to purchase in the US, and there doesn't seem to be any sign of it arriving there. The lowest-spec model available in the US is a $1,300 version fitted with an RTX 4060. Weirdly, you can also pick up that same RTX 4060 version in the UK currently for the same price as this RTX 4050 version. Quite what Acer is doing with the pricing and positioning of this low-powered laptop is beyond me, but none of it makes me warm to this overpriced spec. 

Upon first bootup, two things are made abundantly clear: Acer really wants you to use its Nitro Sense program, and this is an "AI-powered laptop". Both functions have their own unique keys on the keyboard too, so there's no real escaping from it. Nitro Sense is a relatively intuitive application that lets you adjust fan temperatures, set profiles to run the laptop as hard or gentle as you like during certain uses, and it lets you monitor performance and check on vital things like battery, RAM, and storage health. It has, once or twice, entirely locked up, requiring a restart or a pause, defeating the purpose of that dedicated button but it's mostly a boon to laptop use. 

Copilot also comes automatically installed, it being a modern Windows 11 laptop, with the chatbot being able to answer questions and "give advice". I don't know if I really see the average gamer using Copilot so much they need the dedicated key, but it doesn't necessarily hurt the experience of using the laptop—other than having one extra app and a button to occasionally misclick. 

As well as this, Acer Purified Voice, a built-in program to suppress background noise is just not very good. Sound is muffled and it makes more professional mics actively sound worse, forcing you to turn it all off almost immediately. The 720p webcam fares a little better than the mic, being clear enough to recognise in video calls. 

The Acer Nitro's size and shape, being 14 inches and only a little chunky, does make it look rather compact. You can easily pop it in a backpack and walk to a local cafe and its battery life is good enough to carry you through some light writing work for a while without having to charge it again. 

In regard to gaming battery life, I got just over an hour and a half, with close to five hours when casually browsing. These figures are decent for a gaming laptop but make sense when you consider the hardware in it isn't all that intensive.  

Unfortunately, the biggest discrepancy between price and specs is with the RTX 4050. For that price, you should be expecting much more. In fact, you can regularly get RTX 4060 laptops and even RTX 4070-equipped machines for this sort of money, and they don't compromise on performance quite as much for that price. 

Though its peak numbers are significantly below the competition, I found myself pleasantly surprised with just how consistent this machine is. The engineering is well-balanced, with great heat dissipation. Dual fans on the bottom and vents on the back means that I never ran into that problem of the keyboard feeling too warm to comfortably play on.

Cranking the laptop to its max in Metro Exodus with all the shiny options enabled, I found the GPU clock speed to be incredibly consistent and, though it is outperformed by some of its closest competition, I found the minimum frame rate of games to be a tad more consistent.

The Omen mentioned above got almost 30 more frames per second on average in Hitman 3's Dubai benchmark, but it also dropped almost 30 below the minimum of the Nitro 14. I saw similar results with Horizon Zero Dawn, which saw the Acer outpaced in averages but managing to beat the Omen in minimums. Temperatures stayed at around 74°C, which is a little above the Omen despite having a larger chassis. 

GPU and CPU performance in 3D Mark Time Spy Extreme and performance in Port Royal placed the Nitro firmly in last place at similar price points, though a little ahead of the similarly RTX 4050-powered Lenovo LOQ, which we were critical of last year for almost the same pricing problems. The Acer's AI-powered kit just isn't helping it keep up with other laptops in the market, and this is before mentioning its mediocre Blender and single-core Cinebench R23 scores. In multi-core performance, the Ryzen 7 8845HS CPU does perform decently though. 

In terms of the aesthetic, this little 14-inch machine looks pretty good, without too much branding on it, but is unfortunately a total fingerprint magnet. Within minutes, mine was covered in prints, and I don't see myself as a person with particularly oily fingers—though I imagine everyone says that about themselves, right? 

As well as this, in a padded security backpack, my Acer Nitro 14 sample seemed to get a rather nasty scratch from just 25 minutes of walking. This backpack has housed multiple laptops without the same problem, though there's a chance a coin or errant USB stick accidentally got caught in there. This scratch isn't necessarily a reason to think it's particularly vulnerable to them as it could just be human (or should I say my?) error, but it's worth noting nonetheless. 

Luckily, when you open the laptop up, it has a nice backlit keyboard with clear keys. Even in the dark, it's easy to find keys, though the frame around it has a little too much bounce for my taste. If you press keys hard, the board itself moves and this can feel a little unwelcoming, though this isn't peculiar for a gaming laptop, especially of the Nitro 14's size. The keyboard is mostly okay but you will likely want a good gaming mouse, as the trackpad isn't good, even for casual browsing. 

The click in the pad isn't super firm which is occasionally confusing and can also be a real nightmare if you need to click a few times in a row on the page. I regularly found myself accidentally dragging icons, or missclicking with it. 

Unfortunately, the laptop's biggest problems can't be solved quite as easily. The RAM is soldered on, which means no room for upgrades, and the SSD is the only slot in the machine. With an extra slot, the 512 GB of storage wouldn't be quite as prohibitive but, if you want an upgrade, you need to jump through hoops. First, you need to move all your data to a secondary drive. Then, you need to take out the old SSD, put in your larger one, and move all your files across again. After all this, you're still stuck with the original 512 GB of SSD storage spare, likely to go unused. 

When HP's own 14-inch offering, the Omen Transcend 14—which launched early this year—comes with a gorgeous OLED screen, better specs, and a nicer feel for the same price, it becomes very hard to recommend this Acer machine. 

There are things I like about Acer's latest offering but I feel like almost every upside I could name has some major caveats. It's quite consistent in performance but the specs are very low. The keyboard and screen look nice but the former bends under pressure and the latter has pretty poor brightness. Nitro Sense allows you to set up custom profiles and play around with the fans but it crashes sometimes and other apps on the laptop bloat the experience. 

The main thing, however, is that I can't think of much of a reason why you'd go for this machine over one the best gaming laptops at a similar price, other than if you manage to get it at nearly half price. Or you just really like that Acer Nitro symbol. Even then, there are certainly better options even for a hardcore Acer fan.  

But just being confident about the specific graphics chip inside is sadly no longer enough—you now need to know how much power the manufacturers are letting that GPU chow down on, commonly referred to as the TGP. And it's not always easy to tell, as each individual GPU has a range of potential power configurations and laptop manufacturers often have a habit of hiding the power spec.

Just know that even if your thin little gaming laptop is rocking an RTX 4090 it might still get outperformed by a significantly cheaper RTX 4080 if the TGP is right. And it's for that reason, for us, the best graphics card for laptops is Nvidia's RTX 4080. It can outperform an RTX 4090 at times, and won't necessarily break your bank account wide open to do it.

And, as prices have dropped, the RTX 4060 has become our pick as the best budget GPU for gaming laptops, because it can make sub-$1,000 notebooks shine at 1080p. Just be careful about what wattage version is in whatever laptop you end up choosing.

The quick list

Best graphics card for laptops

The best graphics card for laptops is the mobile Nvidia RTX 4080. It packs a great mix of gaming performance and efficiency, all built out of the excellent Ada Lovelace GPU architecture. The RTX 4090 might be the most powerful GPU of this generation, but it's a big, hot, power-hungry slice of graphics silicon that will make demands of mobile cooling that most laptops cannot contend with.

The RTX 4080, however, can be tuned to deliver gaming performance that is sometimes capable of beating an overheating RTX 4090 jammed into the same chassis. When I first started testing this generation of GPUs this realisation led me to question why exactly anyone would pick an RTX 4090 laptop, though I've softened a little having toyed with the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 and Lenovo Legion 9i, but that would be the super high-end choice only.

In straight technical terms, the RTX 4080 in laptop form sits somewhere between the desktop versions of the RTX 4070 Super and RTX 4070 Ti. It uses the same GPU, but has a CUDA core count that's slap bang in the middle of the two. That means it also comes with 12 GB of GDDR6 (not the more power-hungry GDDR6X), so if you were hoping the RTX 4080 mobile would be the same as the ~$1,000 desktop RTX 4080 I'm afraid you're going to be mildly disappointed.

But when it comes to gaming on a laptop's 1080p, 1440p, or 1600p display you're going to be treated to a great experience. The RTX 4080 GPU is more than capable of delivering at those resolutions, often even without upscaling—now almost a requisite of modern games. And when you add in both DLSS3 and the weird magic of Frame Generation, you're going to see slick gaming frame rates in the top titles with this graphics silicon built into your laptop.

It will still wind up those laptop fans, however, and if you put your machine into full performance mode you are definitely going to want to don a good gaming headset to keep your sanity and your ears intact. Such is the way with gaming laptops…

There are a variety of different TDPs you'll see with RTX 4080 gaming laptops, but we've tested at 150 W and 175 W and would happily recommend machines running at either of those levels.

Our Nvidia RTX 4080 gaming laptop reviews:

• Razer Blade 16
• Lenovo Legion Pro 7i
• Acer Predator Helios 16
• Alienware X16
• HP Omen 16

Best budget graphics card for laptops

If you're after a good, affordable 1080p gaming laptop then you're going to be looking at the lower end of Nvidia's GPU stack. And, for us, the best graphics card for budget laptops is the RTX 4060. In all honesty, at some levels there isn't a lot between that and the lower spec RTX 4050—so when you're getting down to the lower echelons of the possible TDP configurations of the RTX 4060 I would suggest thinking twice about pulling the trigger—but so long as you're looking at 65 W or above it's a great GPU.

You should be looking at well below the $1,000 mark for an RTX 4060 gaming laptop, and that will deliver a 1080p machine that's able to bring the twin barrels of DLSS3 and Frame Generation to bear on the latest games, giving excellent frame rates for the money.

It's also our pick over the RTX 4050 right now as—despite performance sometimes being very close and some cheap laptops rolling around with the lowest tier Nvidia GPU—that extra little bit of VRAM does make a difference. And that will likely make more of a difference throughout the lifetime of your laptop, too.

You also get more of the ray tracing good stuff when it comes to the relative GPU hardware, and that means any more demanding modern game is going to be far more comfortable and performant running on the RTX 4060 than the RTX 4050, no matter how close their standard raster performance is.

The RTX 4060 is a bit of an anomaly in the Ada generation, in that both the mobile and desktop versions of the GPU share the same silicon. The AD107 in the RTX 4060 mobile is more or less the same as the AD107 in the desktop graphics card. There are the same 3072 CUDA cores, and the same 8 GB of GDDR6 on a 128-bit bus, but there are a couple of anomalies between them all the same. The mobile chip has more L2 cache, but fewer render output units (ROPs), though overall the two chips are very, very similar.

As well as being great for budget gaming laptops, the RTX 4060 is also a great pick for small form factor machines, too. In something like the HP Omen Transcend 14, with its slight chassis and lightweight design, the low-power GPU at its heart is great for keeping thermals down, but also capable of delivering great performance in a truly mobile form factor.

Our Nvidia RTX 4060 gaming laptop reviews:

• Gigabyte G6X
• HP Omen Transcend 14
• Lenovo Legion Pro 5i
• MSI Crosshair 16 HX
• RedMagic Titan 16 Pro

Best mid-range graphics card for laptops

It's easy to get caught up in the fact that the RTX 4070 is the third-tier graphics chip in the Ada Lovelace generation, but it's also worth noting that it's capable of delivering the same level of gaming performance as the RTX 3080 of last-gen gaming laptops. That was arguably the best graphics card for laptops just a few years ago, and now we're looking at those same kinds of frame rates in the best mid-range laptop GPU: the RTX 4070.

As is the case with most of the other mobile GPUs in this generation, the laptop version of the RTX 4070 is a step down from the desktop version, coming in with a core spec that's just a little bit above the RTX 4060 Ti silicon. Sadly, though you are getting more CUDA cores, you don't get the extra VRAM the 16 GB version of the desktop RTX 4060 Ti can offer, or even the 12 GB of the discrete RTX 4070 you'll find in a full-size gaming PC. No, here you get 8 GB and you're going to have to like it or lump it.

At standard 1080p gaming resolutions that's not going to be a hassle in even some of the most demanding of modern games, but you'll likely see the RTX 4070 mobile strapped into laptops with higher spec screens; either 1440p or 1600p. At that level the extra video memory would have come in handy—luckily you still get the twin might of DLSS 3 and Frame Generation to help boost those native frame rates.

Those native frame rates, however, are still pretty decent even running at 1440p, and really impressive at 1080p. When you consider that the pricing of RTX 4070-powered gaming laptops are consistently dropping, that makes the sort of gaming chops you get with them even more tantalising.

At the moment you can regularly pick up an RTX 4070 gaming laptop—with a high TDP, too—for less than $1,500. Realistically, I wouldn't look at paying any more than that for one unless there's a special reason to. If it's a particularly premium device, such as a Razer Blade 14 or 15, or one of the gorgeous new Asus ROG Zephyrus machines, then there's a case to be made, but if you're just after the most affordable RTX 4070 laptop then there's no reason to pay more.

In fact, today and most definitely around the late-year sales periods, you're liable to find great RTX 4070 gaming laptops for as little as $1,200. When you think you might have been lucky to get an RTX 4060 machine for that last year, it's a pleasing turnaround for proper gaming laptop performance.

Our Nvidia RTX 4070 gaming laptop reviews:

• Asus ROG Zephyrus G16
• MSI Vector 17 HX
• Asus ROG Zephyrus G14
• Razer Blade 14
• Gigabyte 16X

Best high-end graphics card for laptops

Okay, I get it. It probably seems kinda hypocritical of me to stick the RTX 4090 in as the best high-end GPU when I have been pretty explicit in the past recommending people steer clear of gaming laptops powered by that beast. But that is primarily because most of the time the RTX 4090 is just getting jammed into the same chassis designed for lower performance, lower power graphics silicon.

When the top Ada Lovelace mobile GPU is thermally constrained by a tight laptop chassis and the associated cooling, then you will often see gaming performance that is on par—and sometimes even behind—a cheaper, more balanced machine powered by an RTX 4080.

BUT (see, that's a big 'but' so pay attention) if the laptop manufacturer has made sure to pair Nvidia's GPU with a proper cooling solution designed to cope with this sort of power-hungry, hot silicon, then the result is the best gaming performance you will see outside of a hulking desktop.

That does mean that a good RTX 4090 machine will necessarily also be a big gaming laptop, arguably more of a desktop replacement, but conversely that doesn't have to mean some grotesque slab like the MSI Titan GT77HX. The most powerful gaming laptop I've ever tested is the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 with AMD's stellar Ryzen 9 7945HX3D inside it. And while it's no shrinking violet of a notebook with its 17-inch display, it's still a pretty lovely looking device.

Okay, I am a bit of a sucker for an RGB strip, but it's still a great laptop.

The combination of the extra cooling capacity of a 17-inch frame and the 3D V-cache CPU mean the RTX 4090 is able to really flex its gaming muscles and it shows in the performance figures.

With 9728 CUDA cores and 16 GB of GDDR6 memory you are looking at a mobile GPU with the essential specs of the desktop RTX 4080. Now, just for a second, go look at what an RTX 4080 graphics card looks like… big, isn't it? That's the sort of cooling you need to keep that GPU running at peak performance and you can instantly see why as a graphics chip it utterly fails when packed into a seriously thermally constrained environment.

If you're not going to give it room to shine, just don't bother.

Obviously, with the desktop equivalent GPU retailing for around $1,000 on its own, an RTX 4090 laptop is not going to be a cheap thing. The most affordable we've seen recently has been the Acer Predator Helios 18 at around $3,000 (with the occasional discount in the sales), but normally you'd be looking somewhere between $3,500 and $4,000. Which is a lot for any laptop.

But if you want the best gaming performance from a laptop, but also the best GPU performance for productivity tasks in what could be a mobile workstation, then the RTX 4090 is the graphics card you want filling your next laptop.

Our Nvidia RTX 4090 gaming laptop reviews:

• Asus Strix Scar 17
• Asus Strix Scar 17X3D
• Acer Predator Helios 18
• Razer Blade 16 (2023)
• Lenovo Legion 9

Best integrated graphics

Finally, there's an AMD GPU in the list. Sorry, AMD fans, when it comes to graphics cards for laptops there is such a heavy weighting towards Nvidia's discrete mobile GPUs that Radeon chips barely get a look-in. That's shared at the manufacturer level where you will find precious few AMD graphics cards being used in laptops you can actually buy.

The counter to that is with regards to integrated graphics. If you want a mobile machine without a dedicated graphics card, but still with actually decent gaming performance, then right now you either buy a device with an AMD APU inside it or you suffer with Intel's patchy gaming performance. At least until Lunar Lake laptops arrive, potentially, although our early testing suggest they'll still be behind the 890M.

This is why, when you look at the handheld gaming PC market as it currently stands, it's almost entirely AMD-based, from the Steam Deck and up. And the best current integrated graphics chip (iGPU) is the latest Radeon 890M that you'll find in the current AMD Ryzen AI HX 300-series.

It's a pretty big upgrade from the Radeon 780M, which you'll find in all the latest handhelds, offering 16 RDNA 3.5 compute units (CUs) compared with the previous top chip's 12 CUs, or the eight CUs you'll find in the Steam Deck OLED's Sephiroth APU. In terms of shader count, that's a 33% uplift on the previous gen.

And it makes for a big difference in gaming performance, too, and in a lot of cases is pretty linear in line with that core count boost. We've seen frame rate boosts of anywhere between 20% and 38% higher average fps.

The Radeon 890M isn't yet available in any gaming handheld we've tested yet—the ROG Ally X is still using the same APU despite its other upgrades—but you will find it in a host of new laptops, from standard to actual gaming designs. But it's worth noting that not all of the new Strix Point, Ryzen AI chips sport the top iGPU. It's only the Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 and HX 370—the two 12-core variants—which come with the full 16 CU GPU. The Ryzen AI 9 365 uses the Radeon 880M which comes with the same 12 CU config as the Radeon 780M.

The main takeaway here, though, is that with AMD's latest iGPUs you're getting genuine 1080p gaming performance, even if you do have to be a little more studious about how you manage your graphics settings. High settings can still be achieved, but medium and low settings are more likely to get you a better experience. Though AMD's Fluid Motion Frames 2 feature (AFMF2) is functioning on the new mobile chips, and that gives you universal frame generation on any DX11 or DX12 game, and that can deliver great performance gains for integrated graphics.

The benefits of AMD's iGPUs are obvious for standard office-style laptops—you can do some light gaming on your down time or while travelling—but it's also a boon for gaming laptops, too. They have traditionally poor gaming battery life, meaning that truly mobile gaming is often not do-able on them for more than 60 mins at best. Switch over to your iGPU, however, and you can carry on playing away from the plug socket for a hell of a lot longer when your dedicated GPU is lying dormant and not sucking up all the juice.

• AMD Radeon 890M graphics tested

Laptop GPU head-to-head

Where to buy

US

• Amazon: Regular deals on gaming laptops featuring every GPU on this page
• Best Buy: Some of the biggest discounts on gaming laptops from all the major brands
• Asus: Deals on Asus gaming laptops of all types @ Newegg
• MSI: Some of the cheapest MSI deals @ Best Buy
• Gigabyte: Discounts on some of our favorite budget laptops @ Best Buy
• Lenovo: Regular discounts on high-spec RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 machines @ B&H Photo
• Walmart: HP gaming laptops and much more
• Target: Manufacturer refurbs from Acer for low prices
• Razer: Regular savings on RTX 40-series Blades
• Newegg: Gaming laptops from all the major brands, often with major price reductions
• Dell: A large range of Alienware and regular Dell gaming laptops, often on discount

UK

• Amazon: Gaming laptops from all the major brands, often on discount
• Laptops Direct: RTX 4060 to RTX 4090 machines with regular price drops
• Overclockers: A wide selection of gaming machines
• Razer UK: £100s off RTX 40-series Blade laptops
• Scan: Asus gaming laptops and many more
• PC Specialist: Configurable RTX 40-series laptops
• Cyberpower: MSI and Asus laptops galore
• Currys: Surprisingly good prices on laptops from many of the major brands

FAQ

Out of the box, it's clear all that gaming smartphone design has influenced the Titan 16 Pro. We're talking sheer, beautifully milled, matte black metal with hardly any greebles, just the RedMagic logo illuminated with RGB lighting on the back. It's made from a single piece of machined metal, and although the power cable blocks the screen from going back too far and the front edge is a bit sharp, the chassis is nicely understated. Personally, I think it's external looks rival the Razer Blade machines our Dave is so in love with, but that's an argument for behind the scenes.

One of the specs listed on the RedMagic Titan 16 Pro site is "All black internal components", as if that's something people are looking for in a laptop. Will it help you game better? Probably not, but it's totally brutal (throws horns).

Opening the laptop lid tells a far less subtle story, with a somewhat overdone keyboard design. It's busy. Lots of graphics on the space and enter keys make it visually confusing to look at, though you do get used to it after a while. And if warning stripes are your preferred aesthetic, this one's very urban. There are a couple of inconsistencies with the typeface on certain keys, which is upsetting, but the designers have at least managed to fit a full sized keyboard in. It's a little squished, but that's to be expected on a 16-incher.

The Titan 16 Pro isn't exorbitantly heavy either at 2.4 kg / 5.3 lb. It's not as svelte as some notebooks, but it's easy enough to carry about. It's made even easier with the compact adapter attached to the cable, which can't be said for most higher-powered laptops. Still there's no use taking it around with you if it doesn't game. 

In the initial 3D Mark Time Spy Extreme synthetic benchmark it looked as if the Titan 16 Pro was going to be a pretty nippy machine, particularly when pitted against other machines with lower-wattage RTX 4060s. And as far as rendering goes, I was thoroughly impressed with the Core i9 14900H's Blender and Cinebench scores. Generally, that bodes well for CPU-intensive games with a lot of simulation going on, like the notorious Metro Exodus, but that wasn't exactly the case here.

With the Titan 16 Pro's frame rates beating even some of the more expensive RTX 4070 machines of recent years, particularly those backed by the mid and lower end of Intel's 13th and 14th generation processors, the numbers might look promising… but sadly it struggles when it comes to CPU intensive games.

I watched the Titan 16 Pro stutter something awful in the Cyberpunk 2077 and Metro Exodus benchies, even at 1080p. And although the frame rates seem not to reflect the issue—looking pretty standard for a lappy of its weight class—it was definitely having trouble keeping up, especially when I whacked it up to 1440p, or its native 2560 x 1600p. From the super-low minimum CPU scores in Hitman's Dartmoor benchmark, it's plain that Intel's beastly Core i9 14900H is suffering from a low-end GPU pairing

It's also likely having issues due to its single-channel memory. Sure, it's speedy DDR5 RAM, but without the bandwidth you might have some trouble multitasking.

Still, as long as you're playing compatible games, Nvidia DLSS does go a long way to sorting out the stuttering. And the Titan 16 Pro does alright in the majority of games in our ringer, performing entirely averagely for a high-wattage RTX 4060 GPU. The bigger problems lie a little deeper. 

Thanks to the Titan 16 Pro's high-wattage GPU, its battery life is sapped pretty sharpish when gaming. It only lasts around an hour and fifteen minutes which sort of negates the point of having a portable machine. I've tested 140 W RTX 4090 gaming laptops with better battery life than that, such as the Gigabyte Aorus 17X which has a whole half an hour on the Titan 16 Pro.

On top of that little nugget, the fans whirr up pretty intensely even when the Titan 16 Pro is sitting idle, making it difficult to have a conversation in its presence. You'd think that would keep it cooler, but you're still looking at max CPU temps of 100 °C, and GPU temps topping out at 78 °C.

I have to give the machine its dues on the screen, though. It's gorgeous, with vivid colors and a great 16:10 aspect ratio that's well suited for productivity. And while the Titan 16 Pro might not be able to make the most of that 240 Hz panel without some graphical tweaking, it's good to have more speed and not need it, than to need and not have it, especially when RedMagic isn't charging an arm and a leg for the privilege. 

With a price to rival the similarly specced, but slightly less powerful Asus ROG Flow X13, it looks like the Titan 16 Pro pretty much hits the mark money-wise. But compare it to something like the $400/£400 cheaper Gigabyte G6X, and it's made clear what the Titan 16 Pro could have been with less of a gulf between the core components. 

It is a bit sad that such a powerful processor is being undermined by a lower-end GPU and single-channel 16GB RAM, causing some bottlenecking in CPU intensive games. And despite being one of my favorite looking laptops to date (at least on the outside), it falls into one too many gaming laptop pitfalls to recommend entirely.

There's a combination of technological trickery said to be at play here to achieve such a drastic reduction in power usage (via Tom's Hardware). According to Sina Technology, Intel's IIDT 2.0 tech uses ALLR (Autonomous Low Refresh Rate), UBRR (User-Based Refresh Rate) and PixOptix to not only detect a users presence and reduce the refresh rate when it's not needed, but also reduce backlight power consumption.

The report also claims that, using AI, the refresh rate can be dynamically adjusted on different parts of the panel, separately. So, you could be viewing a video on one side of the screen with a smooth refresh rate, while making notes on the other at a much lower speed, thereby significantly reducing battery drain.

That huge 65% power reduction figure, however, is said to be with the screen running at a single Hz—which doesn't strike as particularly usable. Although it's also claimed that the optical flicker performance is "superior", and still meets the Intel LPDT (Low Power Display Technology) standard.

The first version of IIDT was demonstrated on Meteor Lake laptops, whereas the new version is claimed to be coming to devices on Intel's new Lunar Lake platform. This was apparently unveiled as part of BOE's Global Innovation Partner Conference 2024, although both Intel and BOE's sites still haven't made any official mention of it.

Still, if the power drain improvements are anywhere near as good as the report claims, that'd be quite the achievement. Asus has already said that its Vivobook S 14 achieves 27 hours of battery life thanks to Lunar Lake's power efficiency and a 70 Whr battery, although whether that proves out in real world usage remains to be seen.

That being said, intelligently dropping the refresh rate on different parts of the screen to save power does make sense, as high-refresh rate panels with the brightness turned up can significantly reduce battery life on mobile devices.

Regardless, while this tech may well eke out the power on a next-gen laptop, having the screen constantly fuss around with different refresh rates does sound annoying in practice. Not as annoying as having your battery die at a crucial moment when on the move, I guess, but I can't help be reminded of OLED burn-in protection mechanisms kicking in at the worst possible moment when you're trying to get something done.

Take the Asus Vivobook S 14, one of the company's latest thin and light laptops. It's not one to stand out for a gaming laptop connoisseur yet for a new office or school laptop, take note of the OLED screen, all-metal chassis, 1.3 kg weight, and 27 hours of battery life.

Yeah, 27 hours. Or so say Asus. 

The Zenbook S 14, too, comes with lofty claims of well over 20 hours of battery life, and that's a sleeker shell than the Vivobook that I'd prefer myself. The new ExpertBook P5 also promising up to 28 hours of video playback life, or 20 hours of "office productivity", though that could be anything from opening a word document every hour to furiously filling in spreadsheets. 

All utilise batteries 70 Whr or greater in size.

If we're being a bit more realistic for a moment, these are going to be best case scenarios. Though they're still pretty good evidence for power efficiency gains made by Intel with its latest Core Ultra 200V, codename Lunar Lake, chips.

Intel says it's been focused squarely on power efficiency for a good part of Lunar Lake's development. Combined with TSMC's power savvy process node, it's all turned out seemingly very well for Intel. All offer four E-cores, four P-cores and a reasonably chunky Xe2 GPU, too, so they're not shaping up to be a slouch.

Asus also announced new ARM-powered laptops at IFA. Importantly, one makes for good comparison here. There's the Asus Vivobook S 15, with a 70 Whr battery and new Snapdragon X Plus chip, providing "19+ hours" of battery life. It also has a 3K OLED, though a larger 15-inch version; and comes with plenty of connectivity and Wi-Fi 7.

Now, that's still a stellar battery life by any standard, though Intel does appear to have it beat for battery in Asus' designs. The Intel-based design does have the slight advantage of another 5 Whr in the battery, however, at 75 Whr to 70 Whr in the larger Qualcomm-powered device. 

Whether we'll see these claims play out quite so neatly when it comes to independent testing, well, we'll see about that. These battery tests can be pretty variable in method and execution. Though this gain for Intel putting it onto a more equal footing with Qualcomm does bode well for claims repeatedly made by Intel VP Robert Hallock that "it is not the instruction set architecture (ISA) that broadly dictates power." In short, it's not as simple as ARM versus x86.

That's a point that Intel needs to prove through actions, not words, if it's to stave off new competition from ARM-based laptops, largely powered by Qualcomm's processors These are laptop designs that forego any sort of x86-based processor from itself or AMD, and which have been seen as a huge threat to Intel's lucrative mobile business.

These Asus laptops certainly offer a strong rebuttal to any claims ARM is intrinsically better, though I have a strong feeling this battle for battery life is far from over.

Acer just unveiled a gaming laptop concept that I seriously hope it follows through on. Not just for the absurdity of it, either, because after my initial surprise at seeing this thing—and much against my more cynical nature—I can't help but think it could be a genuinely cool and useful product.

The Acer Project DualPlay is a concept design for a gaming laptop that has a two-in-one gamepad on the underside of the trackpad and some pop-out speakers. The basic idea is to have a device where you can slip out the controller when you want to sit back and game and then slot it back when you want to get back to more serious computering.

The benefit to this is obviously its portability—no need to carry around one of the best gaming controllers when travelling as there'll be a controller built right into your gaming laptop. 

Acer says, "Players can easily wield the wireless controller from its electromagnetic lock by simply placing two fingers on the release button located on top of the keyboard. This action also triggers the two high-fidelity, 5-watt pop-out speakers to emerge from the sides of the laptop, immersing players in heart-pounding audio that brings every scene to life."

I'm not so sure about the pop-out speakers. It seems like a surefire way to turn what could be a practical solution to a real problem (controller portability) into a rather silly-looking gimmick. Buzz Lightyear vibes, you know?

It's also imagined to have tons of RGB lighting: "The device is wrapped with customizable 360-degree dynamic RGB lighting on the keyboard, screen bezels, and wide trackpad area to add to its visual appeal. The mesmerizing light show extends even further to the infinity mirror lighting bar at the backside and the detachable controller’s joysticks, dazzling players during gameplay."

Back to the thing that really counts: the controller. Really, I should say "controllers", plural, because, much like a Nintendo Switch, the controller can be separated into two, making for some quick and easy co-op gameplay.

Of course, this device is still in its conceptual infancy and might never make it to market. But even when concept hardware doesn't get developed it sometimes influences future generations of some of the coolest and most innovative tech. 

I do hope that even if Project DualPlay never sees the light of day, the slide-out controller idea sticks around. It could be a space-saver for those looking to travel with their gaming laptop, and sure would be convenient, especially if you're looking to do some local co-op gaming.

I guess it would all depend on how good the controller actually is because a flimsy controller could ruin the otherwise cool concept. I'd also not want to see it come at the expense of the laptop's actual gaming performance. The cynic in me can foresee an overpriced and underperforming but flashy RGB laptop with pop-out speakers and controller, which wouldn't be great.

Focus on the convenience and the practicality and I'm sold. Just ditch the pop-out mini Buzz Lightyear speaker wing… things, make a great laptop with a pop-out DualPlay gamepad, and we're golden.

It also has one of the loudest cooling systems I've ever come across. It's a cliche in gaming PC reviews to say that a machine sounds like a jet taking off, and as I've been not too far away from a few Eurofighters, an F-35C (loudest thing ever when hovering) and a Gripen this summer I can say it does not sound like that. It sounds like what it is, a pair of massive fans doing their best to keep some hot chips under control in a tight space.

While it's possible to keep the laptop quiet by putting it in silent mode—which does what you'd expect—in balanced mode and above (turbo mode requires a 40% battery charge even when you've got the laptop plugged in, which is odd) we heard it spin up the fans even while installing games through Steam, sitting idle with Notepad open, and in sleep mode with the lid shut. 

Leaving it in sleep mode overnight completely emptied the battery, so perhaps it wasn't as asleep as it was pretending to be. If laptops could sweat this one would be positively dripping, though all that cooling does have the effect of keeping the CPU and GPU temperatures mostly in the 70s or 80s (°C, though the Intel Core i9 can hit 100°C), but you're not going to want it on your lap when it's working hard as it gets very hot underneath. 

The payback for all this heat generation and noise is some very tasty performance. Though using one of the best headsets is probably a good idea while playing games on it, as the built-in speakers, while generally pretty good, are going to struggle to produce clear dialogue over the fans. 

In synthetic benchmarks it beats the Zephyrus M16 (which gives up 25 W of GPU power) and the Strix Scar 18 but comes in slightly lower than the pricey Lenovo Legion 9i and the ridiculously expensive MSI Titan GT77 HX, all of which have 175 W graphics chips. It's helped by a fast SSD, which posts an average bandwidth score higher than anything except the Lenovo. Compared to those machines it almost looks cheap, and this all makes it one of the best performing laptops we've ever tested, a crown it will wear for a few months until the first RTX 5090 laptop comes along next year. 

The CPU is one of those Intel 14th-gen Raptor Lake chips you've probably read about recently. This is still a developing situation at the time of writing, and all I can say is that in my time using it for games, VR, creative software and synthetic benchmarking, I didn't see any evidence of instability despite pushing it to 100% on all cores. Reviewers only spend a few weeks with a machine at best, and long-term problems that only affect a portion of users are impossible to account for. It remains an excellent CPU. Rarely have I seen the Cinebench CPU rendering benchmark go so fast. It was a joy to watch… if you're weird like me.

Though it must be said the Intel chip isn't performing at its absolute best, though. The cooling might be loud, but it's still running up to 100°C and hitting a limit, and a limit that's holding its chip back compared with the same CPU inside the Asus Scar 18.

All that processing power is contained in a fairly simple black chassis, which is chunky and stiff and unlikely to bend if you're unwise enough to attempt to hold it by one corner. Being an 18-incher there's plenty of room for a keyboard that doesn't have any hand-contorting or muscle-memory-ruining keys placed in odd positions for the sake of saving space, and while the WASD keys light up brighter than the rest —and there's a unicorn trapped somewhere underneath constantly vomiting rainbows—it's not too aggressively or obnoxiously styled. What it does do is make a dreadful noise when you first turn it on, the sort of thing that does nothing for the user (you know it's starting up because the unicorn immediately starts puking) and can (and should) be switched off immediately in the PredatorSense app.

Above the keyboard you will find, as is traditional, a screen. This is a 16:10 IPS with a 250 Hz max refresh rate that's... fine, I guess. It's nothing special. An OLED would have been nice. However, this isn't a particularly portable laptop, so the idea here may well be that it spends its time using the HDMI 2.1 or USB-C port on the back to hook up to a 4K OLED or ultrawide external screen, an arrangement that turns it from a laptop to a desktop replacement that tidies away neatly and doesn't spray cables everywhere. 

Further evidence for this supposition is found in the positioning of the ports, which see power and video sockets on the back of the Helios 18, from where they can trail neatly across your desk and disappear rather than poking from the sides.

Speaking of power, it can charge over USB-C if you can give it enough juice, so it could potentially single-cable with a suitable screen, but also comes with a separate and enormous brick that puts out 330W and fills the machine's gigantic battery surprisingly fast. This isn't reflected in the Helios' battery life, sadly, as the power-hungry components mean while you might get four hours out of it if you're being frugal, turning on the rendering hose sees the battery life drop to more like an hour. 

What Acer has produced here is a whacking great gaming laptop containing some of the finest components it's possible to obtain in 2024. It's ludicrous, and I love that it exists. It's not throw-in-a-bag portable, and the screen looks dull compared to the OLEDs that are starting to proliferate, but if you can put up with the noise (and afford it) then there are few better ways to play games on a laptop right now. 

16:10 resolution is making a massive comeback thanks to laptops, this much is known. Everyone loves 16:10 laptops.

Even here at PC Gamer, people just can't keep themselves from banging on about them. Over a year ago Katie Wickens was speaking about how 16:10 gaming laptops show we're finally evolving, and the love for these slightly stretched displays has only spread since. 

Our page outlining our picks for the best gaming laptops is adorned with "16:10 this, 16:10 that". As far back as April 2023, our hardware commander Dave even reckon that gaming monitors are doing aspect ratios wrong—you know, because they're not 16:10.

And listen, I get it (honest!). My very first monitor that I purchased almost two decades go was 16:10 (a 1680 x 1050 TFT panel). They're spacious and they feel great to use not just for gaming but for everything else besides. Which is especially important for laptops given they are, more often than not, diagonally challenged.

But there's something nobody seems to want to discuss that makes 16:10 gaming less than ideal, and this is that at least some games (certainly all the ones I tested) are initially designed to run in 16:9. 

This means you don't get any extra vision of the game scene on top when you switch to 16:10. Instead, you get a zoomed-in crop of the full 16:9 remit which means you're losing out on some pixels and are at a slight competitive disadvantage (for those who care about such things). 

This seems unintuitive, I know. I didn't believe it at first when I tried out the HP Omen Transcend 14 for a review on a different website, but eventually I accepted that my eyes weren't deceiving me. And after looking into it some more I discovered that that's just the way many games are made: Adding extra vertical real estate isn't really a thing, at least in the games I looked at.

Yes, of course you get extra pixels up top, but my point is these pixels don't correspond to new in-game visuals. You're getting a zoomed-in picture and losing out on some in-game FoV, in other words. Here's a side-by-side showing what I mean:

The left-side image is 16:9, the right-side 16:10. If you look to the left and right of the screen you can see more in-game real estate is displayed at 16:9 resolution.

Which brings me to the next part of the problem, and this is why I say it's a problem for laptop gaming.

When I realised this was a problem with the Transcend 14 my first thought was: Okay, I don't want a stretched aspect ratio, and 16:10 is cutting off some game real-estate, so I guess I should play 16:9 with black borders. This should have been the end of it. Unfortunately, however, it wasn't that simple. 

The Transcend 14, has hybrid graphics that lets you switch between integrated and dedicated graphics depending on what you're doing. This is great in theory because it allows for low power consumption when you're not gaming but full performance when you are.

But it makes changing things like aspect resolution atrociously difficult. Unless you have a MUX switch (unlikely), this is all done in the background. And what this crucially meant for me is that I couldn't access the Display tab in the Nvidia Control Panel, because the Nvidia GPU didn't see itself as connected to the operating system at large.

Ultimately, this meant I couldn't change the way GPU scaling worked. Which meant I was stuck with stretched visuals (eg, skinny in-game characters that are hard to hit) if I wanted the extra pixels that 16:9 offers. Intel Graphics Command Center didn't resolve the problem for me, either.

The only way to get black borders was to change my resolution outside the game and then run each game in borderless windowed, which was a hassle and at any rate introduces more input lag (I know, I checked). In fact, for some reason, doing this even completely crashed my system in one game (Counter-Strike 2).

Now, it's hard to lay blame in any one place for all this. It's partially the fault of the way hybrid graphics systems currently work, sure. But this wouldn't have to be the case if laptops were sticking to 16:9. And ultimately, it wouldn't be an issue if games didn't work the way some seem to and extra real estate could just be stacked on top on taller screens.

But that's not the way it works, and nobody seems to want to hear it. Fingers in ears, everyone's content pretending 16:10 laptop gaming is perfect. Well, sorry to be a party pooper, but I think I'll stick to 16:9 for now.

I've run through what's new in AMD's Ryzen AI 300-series in greater detail in my recent story all about testing AMD's Strix Point chip. But let me quickly break it down for you here: 

• New cores: Inside the HX 370 are two new architectures, Zen 5 and Zen 5c. They're pretty much the same except the four Zen 5 cores have access to 16 MB of L3 cache, whereas the eight Zen 5c cores just 8 MB.
• New iGPU: One of the best bits of the new HX 370 chip is the Radeon 890M integrated GPU. With four more than the previous generation's 780M and an improved architecture, RDNA 3.5, it's a step-up for low-power 1080p gaming.
• New NPU: Is this a benefit for gamers? I'm not convinced there's for gamers to get out of this new dedicated AI acceleration block just yet. Many of the AI applications you may use are also accelerated by Nvidia's GPUs, and there's one of those inside most gaming laptops. But it's still early doors for good ol' locally-processed AI.

Got all that? A great deal of new silicon stuffed inside one monolithic mobile processor, that's for sure, and it shows when it comes to the benchmarks as we'll get to shortly.

But let's look at the Zephyrus G16 itself. It offers a thin chassis for a 16-inch laptop, which even at its thickest point including the rubber feet, by my own measurements, is just 2 cm thick. It tapers down to a thickness much thinner than that, though. It also weighs just 1.8 kg, which is great considering its 16-inch size.

The G16 is slim and light enough to slip into my backpack without much of a second thought. I've taken it to and from the office and once found myself checking I hadn't been robbed on the bus because my backpack felt suspiciously light. Not to worry, it was still there—I managed to avoid a very awkward conversation with Asus—though this laptop was light enough to make me second guess myself. For a regular traveller that lightweight frame is awfully appealing.

The chassis is made possible through the use of LPDDR5X memory. This is a type of RAM we more often expect to find in office thin-and-light laptops, though increasingly it is becoming commonplace in gaming devices, namely handheld gaming PCs but also some thinner gaming laptops, such as this. The reason it's not so frequently used in gaming machines is due to the fact it's non-replaceable—or at the very least non-replaceable without some industrial soldering techniques. You can't just replace the RAM in this laptop yourself.

The non-replaceable RAM is definitely one of the bigger downsides to the G16. The 32 GB capacity is more than enough for my uses and I'm unlikely to want to upgrade that down the line, but I know opinion swings wildly person-to-person on this. I said the same thing in my Zephyrus G14 (2024) review, as both new models have fully soldered memory.

That said, whereas the G14 only has a single NVMe slot and it comes occupied by the boot drive, the G16 comes with a spare. Phew. That saves a lot of hassle when upgrading the storage capacity on this thing, which isn't bad out of the box at 2 TB but could always be bigger. Removing the underside of the laptop is a bit of a pain, as the clips holding the rear on are quite stiff, though with a bit of luck and muscle you'll do alright.

There are a few areas where the G16 is surprisingly stellar. One is the speaker system, complete with reasonably large woofers (for a laptop).

To avoid relitigating Andy's ROG Zephyrus G16 review for the RTX 4090/Intel Meteor Lake model, I'll instead broadly agree with his sentiment: "these are actually surprisingly punchy. While I wouldn't go as far as to say they could replace a portable Bluetooth unit, unlike most laptop speakers I've heard they actually have some genuinely meaningful bass and mid-range, enough to give you a bit of a kick underneath your wrists when listening to music or cranking up the game audio."

Well said, Andy.

Another area of excellence is the trackpad. Obviously it's huge, at 15 x 10 cm, but it's hella responsive too. My only complaint here is that the deadzone for the physical trackpad click is quite large, at around 1.5 cm from the top of the trackpad, though it isn't such an issue on a trackpad of this size.

The OLED screen is another highlight. It's a Nebula Display, according to Asus, which is a fancy name for a 16:10, 240 Hz glossy OLED. Whatever you want to call it, it's gorgeous for gaming. What I find more than anything is how much I appreciate the larger 16-inch screen size when playing competitive shooters, which this speedy 0.2 ms panel is well cut-out for. The 14-inch panel is convenient as all heck but 16-inch feels like a much more natural fit for FPS gaming.

What's left to comment on but the GPU? Usually the star of the show, the RTX 40-series is a well-known quantity by now. This laptop comes with an RTX 4070 rated to 105 W. That's lower than some we've tested, including the Gigabyte Aorus 16X at 140 W and Lenovo Legion 7i 16 Gen 9 at 130 W. The slimmer power budget does make a difference when it comes to game performance, as you can see in the charts below.

The G16 can be anywhere between less than 1% slower and 10% slower than the Lenovo Legion 7i, despite containing the same GPU. The Legion does come with a beefier Intel CPU, however.

The G16's power-savvy RTX 4070 does have the benefit of allowing for quieter, less intensive cooling. It's also a boon to battery. However, Asus has trimmed down the G16's thickness to such an extent that this RTX 4070 actually runs hotter than most we've tested. That's despite three fans and liquid metal from Thermal Grizzly. That's not really a massive surprise, but it shows you're paying for this laptop's thin chassis in more ways than one. 

This model with an RTX 4070 inside it is is preferable to the alternative, which is an RTX 4060. The RTX 4060 will age quicker and you're stuck with your choice of chip in any gaming laptop. You could buy an RTX 4070 gaming laptop from another manufacturer for less than the price of either model of G16, too—so I'm not sure there's really a 'budget option' to be had here. Stick with the RTX 4070 and you'll go just fine, however.

But it's time to face the music. Pricing is a big factor in the gaming laptop biz, and Asus knows it has a competitive package in the G16, even compared to stalwart premium models from Razer. It's asking for $2,300 for our American friends, and while I'm yet to find a specific listing, I'm told it will start out at £2,400 in the UK.

That's a lot of cash, even by gaming laptop standards.

I can see where the money goes, and compared to premium offerings from Razer and the larger 16-inch Blade models, the G16 is not that expensive. Though you are undeniably paying for that luscious chassis, sleek form factor and gorgeous screen. That feels a fair deal, and this sensible RTX 4070 and Ryzen AI combo more so than the slightly absurd RTX 4090/14900HS model our Andy reviewed initially. 

No doubt if I could pick any gaming laptop to buy with a view to working across both my gaming and work lives, it'd be the Zephyrus G16. And in this exact spec—shame I'll have to send it back almost imminently, then, isn't it?

Inside the all-metal, precision-carved chassis you'll find an Intel Core i9-14900HX CPU and the 140W Nvidia RTX 4060 GPU. Together with 16GB of 5600MHz DDR5 RAM, these components push the 16-inch 1600p screen to a refresh rate as high as 240Hz. 

The Redmagic Titan 16 Pro's stylish body hides some impressive cooling. Created from aviation-grade aluminium with a glass touch panel, and with an anti-fingerprint coating to keep those annoying smudges at bay, it contains four heatpipes and two custom 4500 RPM fans to effectively funnel heat away from the important components. The cooling system's high air volume and pressure helps prevent any reduction in performance from overheating, while the precision liquid crystal polymer fan blades reduce noise levels. 

It's all meticulously put together, from the screw posts to the way the components have been laid out to help ensure stability and reliability. The work that has gone into making the laptop look good can be most easily appreciated in the folding section that bridges screen and body, with the two beautifully made hinges spaced well apart, leaving a gap that makes the screen appear to float above the chassis.

Your attention will be fixed on the screen itself, however. The Redmagic Titan 16 Pro uses a 16-inch panel from BOE, one of the world's largest display manufacturers, and thanks to its high refresh rate and speedy response time, it easily keeps up with fast-paced esports shooters and other games that require split-second reactions. With a Dolby Vision certification and a maximum brightness of 500 nits, you're going to see everything in highly saturated colour, rendering games and movies with a true-to-life clarity, something enhanced by not only the RTX graphics card's DLSS 3.5 frame generation tech, but Redmagic's Ultra HD Live algorithm, which enhances picture detail and reduces distortion. If you want to hook the Redmagic Titan 16 Pro up to an external monitor, there's a full-size HDMI 2.1 port ready for you. Redmagic offers performance tuning and personalised configurations of the four-zone RGB lighting system, so you can really make the Titan Pro 16 your own.

And if you want to hook the laptop up to more than just a bigger screen, there are plenty of options waiting for you. Best of all is the Thunderbolt 4 port, which also supports 100W Power Delivery. There's a 10Gb USB 3 port too, waiting for fast external storage should your gaming library take up too much space on the internal SSD (there's an extra M.2 slot available inside too), and Wi-Fi 6E and gigabit Ethernet ready for fast internet access. It's a well-rounded connectivity package that neatly complements the gaming potential of the laptop, and is taken further thanks to features such as an FHD camera that supports Windows Hello, plus DTS-X ultra immersive audio.

But it's not only gamers who are going to find the Redmagic Titan Pro 16 an attractive prospect. With a screen capable of displaying 100% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut favoured by video editors, content creators and streamers will find much to like about the laptop. A 16-inch screen on a portable is an excellent choice for mobile video editing, and the Thunderbolt 4 port will ease the process of getting video footage onto the machine ready to be edited. Multitasking between creative apps is easy thanks to the 24 cores available on the CPU, while video and generative AI effects can all be accelerated by the Nvidia GPU.

So if you're looking to upgrade from a gaming laptop that's starting to show its age, or want to experience PC gaming for the first time, the Redmagic Titan Pro 16 could be the laptop for you, with top-tier technological innovation at a reasonable price.

Get ready for the unveiling of the Redmagic Titan 16 Pro on August 29. US customers will be able to grab one then, with the international launch coming after. Limited units will be available for purchase at United States, Mexico, and European Union members' redmagic.gg stores. Get ready to witness the rise of a new gaming legend.

Users can secure their spot with a limited daily offer available at redmagic.gg by making a $99 deposit. Early access to the Redmagic Titan 16 Pro can be obtained, along with free accessories valued at up to $199. The daily offer is available from August 22 to 29 with limited availability.

The MSI Crosshair 16 is not a subtle looking machine, at all. It's chunky and a little bit funky, with a cyberpunk-style engraved design on the back, chamfers around the keyboard, hatching above it, and translucent WASD keys that shine through showing the mechanism underneath. Those keys forgo the pudding top design of the others, and while they're not specifically unattractive, I would have appreciated a black legend on them since the white is a little difficult to see.

I appreciate the Crosshair's keyboard layout, though, which pushes the numpad aside in favour of the important bits. I've ended up pressing FN a lot instead of the left arrow due to the placement of the directionals, but it's far nicer to type on than a lot of squished gaming laptop keyboards I've tested. 

The keypress also feels closer to a low profile mechanical key switch than your average membrane, with good pop to the actuation. The only real problem I've had with typing or playing on it is the sharp edge on the front. It makes it a little awkward if you're sitting lower than the laptop. Otherwise it's a relatively curvy machine compared to something like the Gigabyte Aorus 17X with its super-sharp aesthetic.

Looks aside, it all feels very sturdy. Opening and closing the lid there's hardly any shake, and I love that the screen sits slightly forward as the bit protruding behind it makes for a good handle when you want to shuffle into a different room without closing the lid. Despite being heavy, it still feels supremely portable. The 76 minute gaming battery life lets it down a little in that respect, but it's still 20+ minutes more game time than others in its weight class.

While RTX 4060 gaming laptops are common as muck, ones that go up to 1440p are a little more rare, let alone a spicy 16:10 aspect ratio at 2560 x 1600 pixels—objectively the best aspect ratio according to our Dave. The reason being that the RTX 4060 is generally better suited to 1080p gaming. 

Pit the MSI Crosshair 16 HX against lower wattage RTX 4060 machines with 1080p panels and it'll outdo them nine times out of ten in the GPU-centered benchies. That 140 W GPU lets it push the envelope as to what you can achieve with low-end, current-gen Nvidia graphics. And although that means it runs a little hotter due to the extra power under the hood, it's pretty good at dissipating that heat without sounding like it's taking off. 

Compare it to something of a more identical spec, price and panel like the Legion Pro 5i Gen 9, and it's clear where MSI concentrated with the Crosshair. It might not match the kind of frame rates that the Legion pumps out, but it's a much more balanced machine. A better bandwidth on the RAM and higher refresh rate for the same price would make any hot blooded gamer lean toward the MSI.

The problem is that, even when gaming in 1080p the Crosshair still can't make the most of the high refresh rate. And while the MSI Crosshair still performs admirably, even in its native resolution, there's a feeling that the 240 Hz refresh rate panel you've paid extra for is a little wasted.

For a few hundred less, you can bag yourself a Gigabyte G6X that often outperforms the Crosshair at 1080p, even with its 105 W GPU and a last-gen Intel CPU backing it up. Sure, the battery life isn't anything to write home about, but at least you aren't paying extra for a wasted refresh rate. But then, if you want to play games in a higher resolution you don't have that option at all without plugging in one of the best gaming monitors.

At the end of the day, the MSI Crosshair 16 HX is a joy to use, bar an initial session of uninstalling bloatware. The speakers are a little tinny, and the edge is a little sharp but these are all very tolerable qualms. And while it really shines in productivity and CPU-heavy tasks with its 14th gen Intel processor, and reaches over 100 fps in plenty of games, its major imbalance comes with throwing too much speed at a laptop that's ostensibly competitive, but really is better suited for RPG heads.

If you just want a steady 60 fps to see you through at 1440p+, or see more of your Excel spreadsheet between gaming sessions with a taller panel, the MSI Crosshair 16 HX might be worth a punt. But what you don't need is to pay extra for a 240 Hz panel meant for competitive gaming that your GPU can't make the most of.

I did not love the new Framework 13 laptop. The latest machine to come from the only company to put repairability and upgradeability at the forefront of its laptop design, sports the new Intel Meteor Lake mainboard, the Core Ultra Series 1. And, honestly, that new Intel chip doesn't really do a whole lot for the Framework 13 as a whole.

Sure, you get better battery life and improved fan noise, but its performance lags behind both the impressive AMD Ryzen version it released last year and the even older Intel 13th Gen model, too. Because of that, I'm going back to the old AMD Framework 13 I've been using since it first landed in the PCG test lab. Well, I say 'lab', but what I really mean is the grubby, tech-strewn corner of the office I call my own, but that's beside the point.

Having said all that, there is one thing I wish the Ryzen Framework had that arrived alongside the new Intel Core Ultra Series 1 version: The new system came with an updated, higher resolution, high refresh rate display.

And, because of the way Framework operates, I don't need to just wish. I can whip out a screwdriver and mercilessly cannibalise the hapless laptop. And it's why I love the Framework 13 and the way this company handles its business.

There is no other laptop manufacturer on the planet where you could have bought a machine three years ago, with four-generation-old hardware inside it, and then it releases a new laptop with a much better screen and you can easily slot that into your effectively ancient device.

I don't know of any other manufacturer that would let you do that, let alone sell the panel on its own marketplace for $269. 

That's the situation here with the Framework 13. I picked up this Ship of Theseus in 2022 with an original Intel 11th Gen CPU inside it. And I could have changed nothing and, still using the same screwdriver which came with that first device, simply removed the improved screen from the new laptop and plopped it into this old one in maybe 10 minutes and have it just work the instant it was powered on.

As it happens, I have actually changed a whole lot of things in this laptop since first getting hold of the Framework 13. I've changed out the mainboard multiple times, settling now with the excellent Ryzen 7 7840U board, swapped memory, Wi-Fi module, and battery. And now I'm definitely going to change over that screen because it's been my one persistent issue with the otherwise excellent laptop.

The older screen has a pretty poor response time and its 60 Hz refresh rate doesn't help dissipate the detail-smear you get when playing games on it. The new 120 Hz screen isn't perfect, but then I've been spoiled by expensive 240 Hz OLED panels recently, and this is still very much an improvement. I would urge any Framework 13 owners to make the upgrade, especially as it's an incredibly simple upgrade to make.

You probably wouldn't think changing over an entire laptop panel would be either quick or straightforward, but I can swap the panel out in literally five minutes. It's a hell of a thing. Just watch...

@pcgamer_mag

♬ Natural Emotions - Muspace Lofi

You ever look at your gaming laptop and think, "Damn, I wish I'd built this thing myself over the course of the last 14 months?" Me either—but where would we be without those willing to boldly go where others won't?

YouTuber Socket Science spent over a year making an entirely bespoke DIY gaming laptop (via Hackaday), and not only does it seem to actually run games pretty well, it also looks rather dashing. This seems to be as much a surprise to Socket Science as to me, because they say they're "still amazed that it all came together and actually works".

In explaining why they decided to undertake this task, Socket Science points out a somewhat open secret about gaming laptop GPUs: they're not as good as the desktop graphics cards of the same name. 

A laptop RTX 4080 isn't as powerful as a desktop one. In fact, a laptop RTX 4080 uses the same AD104 GPU as a desktop RTX 4070 Ti. Throw in mobile power limitations and you have a not insignificantly worse chip.

So, what does Socket Science do about this? Yep, they re-fashion desktop parts into a gaming laptop. The parts in question are an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, an XFX Radeon RX 6600, a Gigabyte ITX motherboard, some "very low profile RAM", a 120 Hz QHD portable gaming monitor, a thin keyboard, a touchpad, and a DC-to-DC power supply.

To state the obvious, building a laptop is nothing like building a PC. Building a PC is easy: Just order the parts and fit them all together with loads of space to spare. Not so with a laptop. Parts need to be packed together tightly with densely packed cooling and laid out very strategically. It's usually not a job for home enthusiasts.

I won't spoil every detail because the video's well worth watching, but the general gist is as follows: Socket Science makes everything thin enough to place in laptop format thanks to a lot of motherboard desoldering and snipping followed by taking apart the graphics card to use just the PCB with the GPU on. 

There's lots of slapping together copper, heatsinks, and heatpipes, followed by putting this all together inside a 3D printed case alongside some 3D printed fans. The base of the build even includes fishing line and popsicle sticks, apparently. 

Finally, the LCD is taken out of the portable monitor and set up in a bespoke 3D printed lid, and the keyboard and touchpad is fitted into the base of the case. None of this is even mentioning the mottled copper finish.

Just writing my very simplified version made me feel a little overwhelmed—I can see why it took Socket Science 14 months. Worth it, though? I'll stick to spending a little extra on a laptop with a seemingly misnomered chip, myself, but I'm glad I've now witnessed a veritable gaming laptop being built in DIY fashion without having to raise a finger.

You can get more cooling, beefier GPUs, and broader screen real estate in a 15- to 18-inch notebook, but the higher up the scale you go the less wieldy, the less portable they become as actual mobile devices. And you can, of course, get smaller laptops in the 13-inch scale, but as soon as you start down that road you're really limiting what you can do with your machine.

Okay, in our best gaming laptop guide we have a 16-inch machine as the top pick, but that's for PC gamers in general. You and I, we know better, right? We know that 14-inch is where it's at. The 14-inch gaming laptop, then, is the perfect fulcrum point for portability and performance. They will support proper discrete graphics chips, retain enough chassis space for a quality screen, and still have capacity enough for the sort of cooling a modern GPU requires to game successfully. And you will still have a laptop you can take around with you, use for office/school work on the go, and still have the gaming chops to play the latest titles with ease.

If I'm buying a new gaming laptop, then it's going to be a 14-inch notebook. We've been testing new machines for years, and these are our absolute favorite 14-inch gaming laptops and the ones we'd recommend to you.

It's worth noting that, whilst these laptops are the absolute best in the business right now, the RTX 50 series of graphics cards have started to roll out and laptops are next. However, if you're looking for a gaming laptop upgrade, all our choices are still worth considering as they're both powerful and light.

The Quick List

The best 14-inch gaming laptop

Our favorite config:

Asus' ROG Zephyrus G14 has been one of the best compact gaming laptops since the company brought its 14-inch machine to the world back in 2020. But it's not been the best 14-inch gaming laptop… until now. With the current 2024 generation of Zephyrus G14 Asus has really dialled into what people want from a premium compact laptop, and that has pushed it beyond Razer's Blade 14 for the best overall crown.

A big part of its success is that new chassis. Previously, this was the thing which had me leaning towards Razer's diminutive Blade: its unibody, super premium aluminum chassis. The slightly plasticky Zephyrus G14 surrounds, however, by comparison, made it cheaper from a bill of materials point of view, but also made it feel cheaper than the Razer.

That's all changed now, with Asus creating a full unibody chassis for the latest 2024 version… and it's gorgeous. It feels every inch the premium laptop now, and is really stealing the Blade 14's thunder as the PC notebook giving that proper gaming-MacBook aesthetic. It's slim, it feels great in the hands, and it has just the right amount of flair without being overly 'gamery'.

This might come as a surprise for people who haven't seen a recent Asus gaming laptop. Gone are the aggressive angles, extreme gamer text, and RGB LEDs plastered all over the chassis.

The Zephyrus G14 has always been one of Asus' key AMD-based gaming laptops and that has played right into the 14-inch notebook's hands given that the recent Ryzen chips have been fantastic mobile CPUs. The Ryzen 9 8945HS chip at its heart is a great eight-core, 16-thread chip, with the best of the last-gen iGPUs inside it. That's the integrated graphics powering the best handheld gaming PCs around right now and means you can save some battery, leave the discrete GPU off, and still get impressive 1080p gaming frame rates.

But with the option to have up to a discrete RTX 4070 GPU inside it means you can still get proper gaming performance at higher resolutions, too. There are RTX 4050 and RTX 4060 versions also available, which gives you some scope to pick up more affordable versions of this premium machine.

It's worth noting that the RTX 4070 is limited to 90 W TGP, where the Blade 14 is given 140 W to play with, which does make that the most performant of the 14-inch gaming laptops. But for overall experience, the new Zephyrus G14 is absolutely the one for me. The design makes it far more portable—the latest Blade 14 chassis has put on a bit of weight in its old age—and it comes with a glorious OLED screen no matter which GPU you pair it with.

The 2880 x 1800 OLED screen sports a 120 Hz refresh rate and looks stunning. The colors are vibrant and the contrast is effectively limitless. As an OLED panel, it has the tell-tale inky blacks, but also has enough brightness to really make its gaming visuals pop. It really does make it stand out from the more standard IPS in the Blade 14. Usually, in a list like this, we'd have a dedicated spot for the best screen but the G14 would just take that too so consider this not only the best laptop overall for its size but also the best screen.

Given the slimline chassis, I can see why we're getting fully soldered memory here, and the 32 GB of LPDDR5x pairs beautifully with the eight-core Zen 4 CPU, but it does put some limits on its upgradeability. As does the solitary M.2 SSD slot, which means if you want more than 1 TB of storage you need to do some technical gymnastics to get a fresh Windows install onto your larger drive.

But those are all relatively minor niggles for what is an absolutely stunning gaming laptop all told. And not just a stunning compact gaming laptop, either. If I've got the money to spend on a new machine, then you best believe I'm spending it on a ROG Zephyrus G14—it's my current object of desire, and Razer is going to have to do some serious work to get back on top.

It's worth noting that there is an RTX 50 series Zephyr 14 set to launch in the future, using the same Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 you can find in the current model. If you don't need that upgrade right away, it may be worth waiting to see the performance out of the next line. If not, you're still getting an excellent little laptop.

Read our full Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 review.

The best budget 14-inch gaming laptop

Our favorite config:

It's a wonderful thing as a tech reviewer to be genuinely surprised by a new product. And another thing entirely for it to be a pleasant surprise, too. The Asus TUF A14 is both. It's the latest 14-inch gaming laptop from Asus' more affordable TUF range of gaming laptops, and rather than using the function-over-form styling previous generations of TUF machines have presented with, the TUF A14 is taking a few style pointers from its older, more glamorous siblings.

The Zephyrus G14 is the prettier one, for sure, but there are absolutely the same familial traits on show with the TUF A14. Gone are the more aggressive, more 'gamer' lines of the chassis, and instead we've got a much more restrained, much sleeker vibe, that feels far more grown up.

Honestly, it's the sort of laptop I could take anywhere with me and not feel embarrassed whenever I flip open the lid and fear a rainbow unicorn vomit of RGB gushing out to greet me. Asus, in its wisdom, and from a desire to keep costs down, has just gone with plain white LEDs for the keyboard backlighting, adding to the restrained feel of this laptop.

And that keyboard is great, too. The spacing between the keys themselves makes it a pleasure to type on, making it an excellent productivity tool—backed up by the fact the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is a 12-core, 24-thread processor is able to smash through seriously demanding applications with its Zen 5 architecture giving it real grunt.

That chip also comes with the Radeon 890M iGPU, which is essentially the fastest integrated graphics chip you will find. That means you can disable the more power-hungry Nvidia RTX 4060 discrete GPU when you're on battery power, extend that already impressive battery life even further, and still be able to game happily at medium 1080p settings in even the latest games.

And with the 100 W RTX 4060, you're getting high-end 1080p gaming performance and even passable 1600p frame rates to match your higher resolution screen. The 2560 x 1600 panel isn't the most exciting I've used, but it's got a 165 Hz refresh rate, is crisp and clear, and bright enough for me. It doesn't necessarily pop but I'd prioritise price over this part of the build right now.

An added bonus I wasn't expecting is the extra M.2 slot inside the machine, which means you can add a secondary SSD without having to mess around cloning your OS or reinstalling Windows to get some extra storage space. Unfortunately, that is the only thing you can upgrade as the RAM is soldered onto the board. That means you're going to have to pick your starting RAM point carefully when it comes to the 16 GB or 32 GB options, as you can't change your mind down the line. Not without a lot of engineering experience and some solder.

Read our full Asus TUF A14 review.

The most powerful 14-inch gaming laptop

Our favorite config:

Razer's only AMD-powered machine may not be my absolute favorite compact gaming laptop anymore, but the Blade 14 is still the outright fastest 14-inch gaming laptop you can buy. It delivers the highest frame rates of any of these wee notebooks, and if that's all you care about then—so long as you have the cash—the Blade 14 is the best place to be spending your money.

But you will have to make sure you're happy to spend that much, because this brushed all-aluminum chassis, improved cooling, high-performance GPU, and that Razer premium tax all add up to a big ol' price tag.

For the money-no-object crowd maybe that's going to be worth it for the gaming performance the 140 W RTX 4070 can deliver. On the 1600p screen—still blessedly 16:10 even if it's not quite as high res as the panels on the Omen Transcend 14 or ROG Zephyrus G14—that is what allows it to maintain its performance lead over the rest of the compact laptops we've tested.

And once upon a time that higher gaming performance and the classic Razer chassis would have been enough for me to declare a resounding overall win for the company, but Asus has been laser-focused on breaking Razer's hold on this market with its new Zephyrus G14 and the glorious unibody chassis it's wrapped its laptop in.

The Asus ROG laptop is thinner, lighter, and performs really, really well, even if it can't quite match the Blade 14's overall performance. With the last two generations of Nvidia GPUs Razer has bulked up its laptop, too, meaning the current Blade is thicker than it was and heavier. We could cope with the extra thickness, but the extra weight is certainly noticeable if you hold either the HP or Asus ones.

Though that thickness and improved cooling have certainly helped from a gaming perspective. The cooling allows you to run the GPU at a lower temperature than the competition, but you can also brave the Synapse software and let it run hotter, but crucially quieter, too. That's one of the benefits of that extra laptop girth.

It also has a surprisingly healthy battery life, comparatively speaking. From a standard notebook perspective, no gaming laptop has a good battery life, but you get nearly an hour and 40 minutes worth of discrete GPU gaming time with the Blade 14. The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 and HP Omen Transcend 14, on the other hand, are lucky if they get to 60 minutes total.

That's impressive given the smaller battery capacity.

Where the performance maybe isn't on par with the others here is in the screen Razer has dropped into its 14-incher. In the Blade 16 Razer has opted for a glorious 240 Hz OLED panel, and for me, it's the absolute best laptop screen you'll see. The Blade 14, however, is rocking a more standard IPS panel, and while it is still a very, very good display, with a 1600p resolution and 240 Hz refresh—it's not got the wow factor of the OLEDs in either the Zephyrus G14 or Transcend 14.

In the end, if you have the money, and its power and performance that you prize above all else, then the Blade 14 is the best-performing 14-inch gaming laptop around today.

The most powerful 14 inch gaming laptop is expected to get even more powerful this year, with the potential launch of RTX 50 series Razer Blade 14 in the future. This is still an excellent buy, especially if you can get it at a discount, but it's worth watching out for a potential 50-series launch.

Read our full Razer Blade 14 review.

Also tested

Where to find the best gaming laptop deals

We regularly curate the best gaming laptop deals each week, so check out our updated deals hub for the latest offers. But here are also the places that we would generally be looking to find those deals for ourselves:

• Amazon: Acer Predator Triton 14-inch 250 Hz RTX 4070 laptop for $1,300
• Asus: Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 2023 RTX 4070 gaming laptop for $1,080
• MSI: 14-inch RTX 4070 laptop for $1,239 @ Amazon
• Gigabyte: RTX 4060 G6 laptop 32 GB DDR5 for $1,050 @ Best Buy
• Walmart: HP Victus RTX 4050 gaming laptop for $654
• Target: Manufacturer refurbs from Acer from $760
• Razer: $100s saved on RTX 40-series Blades
• Newegg: MSI Sword RTX 4070 for $1,230
• Best Buy: Alienware RTX 4070 gaming laptop for $1,425
• Dell: Gaming laptops from $800

FAQ

The latest AMD Ryzen chips are storming ahead in benchmarks and real-world gaming, and when backed by plenty of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce RTX GPU they make MSI’s laptops into potent gaming machines. The AMD Ryzen™ 9 8945HS processors  are the first to contain an XDNA AI accelerator for a performance figure of up to 39TOPS across the chip. Combine this with the firepower of Zen 4 cores and a maximum boost speed of 5.2GHz, and you get a lot of processing power for gaming and more.

Zen 4, the architecture at the heart of the new MSI laptops, offers some intriguing performance features. They’re a major upgrade over the generation before, and thanks to their excellent performance per Watt of power are the ideal chips for a gaming laptop. AMD’s figures also show the XDNA NPU helping complete AI workloads faster than the competition and using less power. New features in Windows such as Copilot and the Windows Studio Effects take less time to process thanks to the AMD chips.

Despite being excellent PCs for all kinds of tasks - a powerful CPU and GPU combination is perfect for all kinds of content creation, video editing and other creative work - it’s gaming that MSI’s new laptops are most tightly focused on. MSI responded to feedback from users asking when it would release some AMD-equipped gear, and it’s risen to the challenge with relish.

The new Katana A15 is the latest wallet-friendly model, offering up to an AMD Ryzen™ 9 8945H processor, 16GB of DDR5 RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 GPU. This combo will net you as much as 169FPS when playing Modern Warfare 3 at 1080p, enough to outstrip the built-in IPS screen’s 144Hz refresh rate. Luckily, there's a full-size HDMI 2.1 port on the MSI Katana A15, so you can attach an external monitor to really make the most of the GPU’s fearsome framerates. The MUX switch, which lets you decide whether to use the Nvidia chip or the AMD Ryzen’s iGPU, can help prolong battery life if you’re not going gaming.

Elsewhere on the Katana A15 you’ll find dual-band Wi-Fi 6E, USB Type-C, and a four-zone RGB backlit keyboard. There's a 1TB SSD inside to store your game library too, and MSI’s Cooler Boost 5 technology - a clever amalgam of heatpipes and fans - to suck heat away from your components and keep them working at peak efficiency.

If that sounds intriguing, but you’d like even more performance, then check out the MSI Raider. It’s built around the mighty AMD Ryzen™ 9 7945HX3D processor and the Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU, two of the best laptop chips money can buy, with MSI Overboost technology to allow it to reach up to 250W total power. It’s topped off with a gigantic (for a laptop) 18in IPS screen with a 240Hz refresh rate and an HDMI port for an external monitor, allowing you to pour all that processing power into your gaming and working life.

The Raider, with its iconic RGB light bar, has always been MSI’s best gaming laptop, and the current model is no exception. With 16 full-speed cores from the AMD Ryzen™ processor, you have no excuse not to be feeding that enormous GPU chip with frame after perfectly set-up frame for silky smooth visuals. All this comes backed by DDR 5 RAM, a PCIe Gen 5 SSD, and Wi-Fi 7, offering fast transfers and plenty of bandwidth to get your data where it needs to be. It’s also surrounded by five USB 3.2 ports, allowing you to connect it up to all manner of gaming (or more serious) peripherals.

These new laptops from MSI, with their powerful and efficient AMD Ryzen™ processors, don’t only offer excellent gaming performance, but they’re an ideal choice for all kinds of PC tasks. From graphic design, video editing, or running an AI chatbot, MSI has the definitive answer to the question ‘What PC do I need?’

Everything else about it is great, from the new higher resolution, higher refresh rate screen, to the improved cooling, but—and I hate to kick a guy while he's down—that Intel Core Ultra 7 155H chip at its heart is doing nothing good for it as a device.

This may be a more recent mainboard inside the Framework 13 Intel Core Ultra Series 1 device, but it feels like it's lagging behind the excellent Framework 13 AMD Ryzen series it launched last year, pretty much on all fronts. It's got better raw processing chops, more reliable gaming performance, and the AMD version is now cheaper, to the tune of $150. It's also a little lacking in terms of computational grunt compared with the even older Intel 13th Gen mainboard.

None of that takes away from the feeling you get, as a dyed-in-the-wool PC nerd, when you open up the Framework 13 DIY box. This is the first time I've experienced the DIY package; previously I've either had the pre-built machine arrive in one piece, ready to go out of the box, or had mainboards shipped over for me to upgrade my existing machine.

And it's a really pleasing experience. Everything's snugly boxed up, with the main unit already made up with the mainboard, screen, and associated Wi-Fi and webcam modules, and you're left to install the RAM, SSD, I/O modules, bezel, and keyboard. 

It's simple stuff and just requires the supplied hex screwdriver you use for any Framework upgrades. But it's that level of getting intimately involved with the device that I love, and it's what has engendered such affection in the unit I've been using as my go-to work laptop ever since I first laid mitts on the Framework 13.

That's an experience, however, you can have with any Framework laptop and not one restricted to this Intel Core Ultra Series 1 version. So, what do you get with this Meteor Lake-based setup? You get better cooling, and better battery life, and... that's kinda it.

To be fair, cooling has been an issue with the Framework 13 machines. They're relatively thin devices and the need for their mainboards to be removable and upgradeable means they can't be too tightly interwoven with the insides of the chassis. And that means the fans are pretty small and have to work hard to keep things cool. With the Framework 13, that means they can get real loud, real quick.

That's not such a problem with the Core Ultra Series 1 mainboard, which manages to be relatively unobtrusive even when on max performance and pushing the CPU and iGPU to their limits. Even just running Football Manager on the Ryzen series board, by comparison, proves too much for me to be able to game in polite company.

But, as you can see from the benchmark numbers, the Ryzen chip is still the king of gaming and productivity performance. And, honestly, I'll take the louder fans for the extra performance. It's not really even about extra frame rates, or faster rendering, either, it's about the consistency of performance. I've found it rare in my long experience for an Intel device to be more flaky than a comparative AMD one, but that's where we are here.

Gaming performance, as we know from experience with Intel's GPU architecture, is up and down, and the 22-thread Core Ultra 155H in this mainboard isn't capable of beating the 16 Zen 4 threads in the Ryzen 7 7840U on a regular basis, either.

It's also rather damning that, gaming aside, the Core Ultra seems like a definite backward step from the Intel 13th Gen mainboard when it comes to performance. Unless you really want to play some games on your Framework, then there doesn't seem to be any reason to move from the 13th Gen to the Core Ultra Series, and if you did want to play some games you're better off getting the cheaper AMD mainboard anyway.

Still, the battery life and fan noise are moderately better, eh?

Frustratingly, you still have no control over how the system is set up in terms of anything more granular than Windows' own three power levels, and there is no hint of fan control on offer for any Framework owners. I ache for a bit of controller software like Ayaneo's AyaSpace app, which gives you almost endless control over its mini PCs and gaming handhelds.

That would allow you to squeeze a bit more gaming battery life out of your device, as you can do on modern handheld PCs. But, to be fair to the Meteor Lake mainboard, it does have a better battery life using the same capacity power brick as the AMD version. In gaming terms that only translates to some 12 minutes of extra playtime, but in standard office work that would stretch out to be a relatively significant extra bit of usable life.

The only other complaint I have from that otherwise stellar AMD-based Framework 13 is the screen. The 2256 x 1504 panel is only a 60 Hz display, and it does have some pretty rough ghosting issues when you're playing games on it. The new screen shipped with this DIY laptop, however, is the 2880 x 1920 version, which sports a 120 Hz refresh rate and a higher peak luminance, too. 

It's definitely a superior panel to the original and a very welcome potential upgrade for anyone who has already bought a Framework 13. For some reason, the company's CEO has felt duty-bound to overshare about the rounded corners of the panel, and kudos for a commitment to transparency, but it's absolutely not an issue that I've paid any attention to in my time using the device.

What I will say, however, is that the ghosting is not gone. There is still a certain amount of it present with this panel, and that can lead to a slightly smeary effect when things are moving around the screen at speed, with you losing some detail in the image. It's better than the previous panel, for sure, but not night and day.

One oddity, however, is that the new screen seems to only be available to the DIY community. If you buy the prebuilt version of the Framework 13, in any form, your only option is the previous lower-res display, while you can choose to spend another $130 and get the better display if you go down the DIY route. It's worth noting here that you can also pick up the panel on the excellent Framework marketplace as a standalone component for $269. And it's an upgrade I would urge anyone with an existing device to make.

And it literally takes less than five minutes to stick into your laptop, too. Believe me, we've timed it.

I actually had quite high hopes for the Core Ultra Series 1 version of the Framework 13. In the plus column, we have both better battery life and quieter fans, but on the negative side, it's more expensive and slower than the AMD option.

And just feels a lot more unreliable in terms of what level of performance you're going to get out of it on a per-app, per-game basis. The Ryzen 7 7840U is utterly consistent, and you really know what you're going to get—namely top gaming performance and an eminently powerful eight-core Zen 4 processor.

In the end, that's the version of the Framework I'm going to go back to. I might take the higher resolution panel with me—I'm a damned sucker for high refresh rates, after all—but I'm not sold on the latest Intel mainboard itself at all.

To celebrate, MSI is inviting tech enthusiasts and historians to an event in London that will explore the journey of MSI laptops, from their tentative beginnings in 2004, to their place at the top of the pack today.

Here's what you need to know about the event:

The Venue: Outernet, Pop One, Charing Cross Rd, London WC2H 8LH (In front of Tottenham Court Road Station)

The Date: 17-18 August, 2024

The Price: FREE—come along, and bring your techy friends. Not only is the event free, but you'll be in with a chance of winning a small gift by playing on a claw machine! 

One venue, five areas

The event will take place across five different areas in the building, focusing on different aspects of MSI laptop history. Check out the History Wall to chart MSI's journey, where you will also get to see some of MSI's earliest laptops face-to-screen, including the world's first overclockable gaming laptop: the MSI GX600 (2007).

Once you've left MSI memory lane, reintegrate yourself with the modern age by putting MSI's latest laptops—such as the Cyborg and Katana series—through their paces with the latest major releases. You can even have a go on the limited edition Stealth 18 Mercedes-AMG Motorsport—an 18" magnesium-aluminium beast of a laptop powered by a GeForce RTX 4080 GPU. You'll even get to play the Mercedes-AMG racing sim designed exclusively for this rig.

Then, once you're burned out from all that gaming firepower, kick back with MSI's new handheld offering, the MSI Claw. Going head to head with heavy hitters like the Steam Deck and the ASUS ROG Ally, the Claw had some teething issues when it first launched, but MSI are out for redemption, having released multiple BIOS and driver updates that they claim have improved performance immeasurably. So why not put those claims to the test yourself?

The event will be a great way to kill a couple of hours in London, so whether you're sightseeing in Central or living in the Big Smoke, pop your head in August 17-18, and embark on a journey into MSI's past, present and a little bit of future. Staff will be on hand to chat to you about everything from MSI's laptop range, to reminiscing about nostalgic tech like the MSI X340, the thinnest laptop in the world when it first came out in 2009 (you might even find some Windows Vista defenders among the staff, but no promises).

So celebrate the 20th anniversary of MSI laptops in style. If you can't get down there in person, then catch up on the event (and everything else happening at MSI labs) on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It's been an epic journey, and if MSI showcases the same kind of progress over the next 20 years as they have these past 20 years, then it's going to be a trailblazing ride. 

My testing is carried out on the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16, fitted with the new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. This is one of the top chips out of the red team with 12 cores and 24 threads. It also comes with an integrated GPU with 16 Compute Units (CUs) of the new and improved RDNA 3.5 graphics architecture. To add to its already lengthy list of additions, this chip also houses an XDNA 2 powered AI processor, known as an NPU. Hence the clumsy addition of 'AI' to the name.

That's a lot of new stuff stuffed inside one singular slab of silicon—unlike Intel, AMD's latest chips are still monolithic. It's even more impressive what AMD has stuffed in this chip considering a 'default' TDP of 25 W and a max TDP of 54 W. The chip I'm testing given the full 54 W tether to play with.

AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 specs

Some of the cores within the HX 370 are not like the others. AMD is opting for a mix between Zen 5 and Zen 5c for its mobile lineup—what's known as a heterogeneous architecture. You might be familiar with the concept already as it's what Intel has been doing with its mobile and desktop chips. Except while Intel's P-cores and E-cores are very different, AMD's Zen 5 and Zen 5c cores are awfully alike.

There are four Zen 5 and eight Zen 5c cores in the HX 370, divided into two CCXs. One CCX with the four Zen 5 cores, and the other with eight Zen 5c cores. The 'compact' Zen 5c cores take up less room than full-fat Zen 5 cores, hence why AMD can stuff more of them into a single CCX than usual.

This compact design has a few benefits: not only can AMD stuff more cores onto a given die area, but these cores also consume less power than the full-size versions. Nothing comes for free in silicon land, however. To achieve these gains the Zen 5c cores have access to a much smaller shared L3 cache than the Zen 5 cores.

For the 24 MB of L3 cache shared between all 12 cores on the HX 370, only 8 MB is accessible by the eight Zen 5c cores. In a way that comes down to just 1 MB per core, but since it can be divvied out between any cores as required it won't necessarily work out that way. 

The Zen 5 cores get to gobble up the remaining 16 MB between just four cores.

Otherwise, the Zen 5c cores are quite similar to their larger siblings. That's a savvy move on AMD's part, as will become clear once we move onto the benchmarks. These Zen 5c cores contribute to tremendous multithreaded performance in a relatively low-power mobile chip without hindering performance in more single-threaded tasks, such as gaming.

Before that, let's talk about the other new additions to this Ryzen AI chip. First, and most abundantly obvious, the 'AI' bit. 

The HX 370 comes with an NPU powered by the XDNA 2 architecture. You might remember all the fuss AMD made about it at Computex this year, when it became apparent that AMD's NPU was bigger than Intel and Qualcomm's at 50 TOPS. What are those TOPS good for? Accelerating artificial intelligence on-chip, i.e. local AI processing.

Admittedly the carousel of applications that use on-chip AI acceleration is limited, and not all of those specifically utilise the NPU, if available. It's early doors for this sort of accelerator on-chip. You can push Photoshop to do it, and you can run some generative AI, though most of the time these sorts of AI software run all the heavy-duty stuff up in the cloud. 

For gaming, at least, there's no immediate benefit to an NPU on the die. That said, when a killer app does arrive requiring local AI compute, you might be glad it's there. Then again there's also a mega AI accelerator built into most gaming machines, called a GPU.

The Zephyrus G16 has two GPUs. There's the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 mobile coming as a separate chip and the Radeon 890M included with the HX 370. We've seen plenty of RTX 4070 laptops, so that's not very important right now. What's more exciting is the Radeon 890M.

The 890M is using a brand new graphics architecture—maybe that's overselling it a little—a renewed graphics architecture. It's called RDNA 3.5 and it's mostly defined by a focus on improving mobile graphics performance. That's good news for the Zephyrus G16 and our hopes of genuinely impressive 1080p performance on a low-power chip or handheld gaming PC.

The 890M within the HX 370 is equipped with 16 CUs running at up to 2,900 MHz. That's a step-up over the very popular Radeon 780M, which comes with 12 CUs at 2,700 MHz. AMD provided further details about RDNA 3.5 at a recent event, and it effectively boils down to optimisations for low-power, low-shader operation, i.e. for use within an integrated GPU, not a discrete one.

AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 performance

AMD told us to expect big uplifts in performance with Strix Point versus its most up-to-date competition thus far, Intel's Meteor Lake. Specifically, the company pointed to big gains between the HX 370 and the Core Ultra 9 185H, an Intel chip with more cores (16 > 12) but fewer threads (22 < 24). 

AMD claims various productivity and creative application boons with its latest chips, such as in 3D modelling application Blender, which was touted previously to run up to 74% faster on the HX 370. Or Cinebench R24, claimed to be up to 47% quicker.

I can report from my own testing of these two chips—within the same overall model of laptop, in fact, the Zephyrus G16 (2024)—the HX 370 draws a confident lead over the Ultra 185H in a handful of tests.

In Cinebench R23, the HX 370 is 25% faster than the Ultra 185H when wielding only a single thread. That lends weight to AMD's claims of up to 16% improved IPC through those Zen 5 cores. The good news for AMD is that the HX 370 is also 25% faster in multithreaded tests, which is impressive considering the fewer physical cores on the Ryzen processor. 

It's worth noting that all of AMD's cores are capable of simultaneous multithreading (SMT) and therefore has 24 threads to play with. That's two more than the Ultra 185H. Only the P-cores are capable of Hyper-Threading (Intel's version of SMT) on the Ultra 185H and thus it only has 22 at its disposal. Intel has more physical cores, sure, but fewer threads. Though I'd say for comparing two heterogenous processors, the HX 370 and Ultra 185H are about as close as we're going to get to comparable chips—at least until Lunar Lake arrives.

In 3DMark's Time Spy Extreme benchmark, taking only the CPU score, the HX 370 is 15% quicker. 

I'm unable to make any direct comparisons on graphics performance as we've entirely different GPUs in each laptop—an RTX 4070 in one, RTX 4090 in the other; a higher TDP on one, lower TDP on the other—it wouldn't be a fair comparison. I cannot get the Blender benchmark scores, either. The damned thing won't run until AMD's chips are supported in the application, which happens with some pre-release hardware, and means I'm unable to test that lofty claim from the red team. With time we'll know how that shakes out.

AMD can claim another victory in the X264 benchmark. This is a measure of a CPU's ability to encode a 1080p video, four times over back-to-back, and is a multithreading-friendly benchmark. Unsurprisingly, with Strix Point's previous lead in multithreading, the HX 370 is able to claim a 13% improvement over the Ultra 185H.

The max power draw I measured this CPU running at while gaming was 54 W. Now compare that to another similar performing chip in testing, the Core i9 14900HX. This Intel chip is a much higher wattage CPU, which means we're seeing much lower power demands for similar performance with AMD's latest. The benefit of that is you can stuff a chip like this into a thinner, lighter laptop and still claim top performance—as per this Zephyrus model.

I generally saw lower CPU temperatures on the HX 370 than on the Ultra 185H within the same laptop design, which bodes well for any sort of gaming handheld built around one of AMD's latest chips.

AMD Radeon 890M performance

From the ROG Ally X to the Legion Go, many of the best handheld gaming PCs are built around a single iGPU: the Radeon 780M. Included with the popular Ryzen 7 7840U, and its follow-up, the Ryzen 7 8840U, this RDNA 3 iGPU was also included within the semi-custom Ryzen Z1 Extreme within the ROG Ally, ROG Ally X, and Lenovo Legion Go. It also made its way into heaps of gaming laptops, largely as a low-power alternative to a beefy Nvidia GPU.

The Radeon 890M is the first major upgrade on that design out of AMD. It's bigger, with 16 CUs to the 780M's 12, and features an improved RDNA 3.5 architecture—specifically designed to improve mobile graphics performance. That's 1,024 shader cores to 768—a 33% increase—and it should come as no surprise that this translates to much improved performance versus the 780M.

The 890M's increased shader count is almost perfectly mapped to the performance in F1 22. I recorded a 31% increase in average fps versus the 890M.

In Hitman's Dubai benchmark, it's 38% faster. I also saw a significant uplift in 1% low frame rates, which was consistent across multiple runs, but Hitman can be a little inconsistent when it comes to this metric.

In Horizon Zero Dawn these GPUs are squished closer together. The 890M still leads the way by a good 20% margin, but it's not quite representative of the performance uplift one would expect from 33% more cores.

The 890M is not only a bigger GPU, it comes with a design tailored to this sort of mobile workloads in RDNA 3.5. Our test chip, within the Zephyrus G16, also has more power budget to work with than those found in popular handheld gaming PCs. That should all make for a commanding lead, though clearly not every game is able to take full advantage. It may prove that in a more compact design, the 890M's lead will be reduced further.

Still, it'd be wrong to chastise this iGPU too harshly when it does offer a big uplift in mobile performance over its predecessor. These are considerable improvements to gaming performance, which, if replicated within a gaming handheld, should make for a much more consistent gaming experience on-the-go.

While we carry out most of our tests at largely the highest graphical presets, crank down the quality a touch and you can expect consistent and steady performance at 1080p from the 890M.

AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 analysis

Would I be happy with a Ryzen AI processor inside my next gaming laptop? My answer is a resounding yes. The processing power on offer in a monolithic mobile processor is a marked improvement on what came before. Not for its new 'AI' nomenclature or NPU, which I've found tough to make use of in practice, but the improvements to the CPU and GPU components that PC gamers actually rely on.

This Zen 5/Zen 5c hybrid leaps ahead of AMD's previous generation and makes easy work of the Ultra 185H within the same Zephyrus chassis. This mix of cache-laden and cache-limited cores delivers both multithreaded and single-threaded performance to rival some of the most power-hungry laptop chips, while keeping power demands quite low. This bodes well for the Ryzen 9000-series, which we'll have to wait a little longer to get our hands on.

The fear that the addition of a new AI accelerator nixing any potential upgrades to the GPU component have been quashed, thanks to the four extra cores and improved RDNA 3.5 architecture on the HX 370. Clearly the higher core counts do wonders for gaming, even if the RDNA 3.5 architectural benefits are harder to quantify with a handful of benchmarks. 

The 890M is most exciting in the context of gaming handhelds: even the smallest improvement between the 890M and the 780M amounted to a 20% improvement in frame rates. That is not to be sniffed at, and was on the lower end of the gains I experienced in testing. An increase in frame rates of roughly a third is also on the cards. 

Moreover, this sort of GPU improvement should be convincing to many handheld PC manufacturers, many of whom are likely deciding when is the best time to release a new and improved model. We've had the sort of mid-generation upgrades in the Steam Deck OLED and ROG Ally X, though a true successor to either will be requiring more firepower at its disposal. Providing the 890M still delivers when confined to a smaller form factor, I believe it could be powerful enough to warrant a new wave of handhelds.

Though I'm yet to be convinced by AMD's new NPU—specifically its utility to an average user. Even less so from a PC gamer's perspective. One of the few remotely useful applications taking advantage of it is tangential to PC gaming at best. That's Amuse image generation, which is effectively Stable Diffusion running locally on your machine. It would be neat to run image generation locally on my laptop at least once, though I ran into multiple errors that prevented me from doing so. Issues aside, this just doesn't feel like a killer app for local AI, and the NPU doesn't feel to me like a must-have just yet.

Though I'm not torn up about it just yet. Whether you class the NPU as nice to have or practically pointless, it's included on an otherwise excellent gaming processor.

I should spend a moment to praise the Zephyrus G16, too. It's a prime specimen—I can see why Andy rated it so highly in his Zephyrus G16 2024 review. The AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and RTX 4070 combo offers performance at a frenetic pace, and pairs extremely well with the sleek chassis from Asus. If I had it my way, I'd keep this laptop as my daily driver.

It isn't a 16-inch laptop I'm hoping to get my hands on, though. It's a handheld gaming PC with the full complement of Ryzen AI 300-series features and power-savvy performance that doesn't drop the ball on frame rates. It'll come, I'm sure of it. 

First things first, we need to see what Zen 5 can do with fewer power restrictions in the Ryzen 9000-series. Those chips are coming in just a couple of weeks, so stay tuned.

Don't worry, MSI and Currys have thought about this, and have joined forces to offer two super-portable gaming devices at excellent prices that will keep you locked in wherever you are—whether that's during evening downtime on vacation or lounging under a sun brolly in your garden.

MSI Claw

 Price £579/£499 (down from £799/£699) | Buy at Currys

First up is the MSI Claw A1M, MSI's foray into the handheld gaming PC space. Powered by the Intel Ultra 7 or Intel Ultra 5 processor, this nifty device packs a 120Hz 7" display, RGB lighting, and Hall Effect Sensors on its joysticks and triggers, making it way more durable than the typical carbon film sensors you'll find on most gaming handhelds. 

The Claw's Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU lets you play modern games like Red Dead Redemption 2, Fortnite, Diablo 4, and Dead Island 2, and with XeSS 1.3 (Intel's answer to the framerate-boosting DLSS and FSR technologies) just around the corner, you'll effectively be getting a free performance boost to your handheld gaming experience.

Combine those Hall Effect Sensors with an ergonomic design inspired by anthropometry, and you have a device that remains comfortable throughout long play sessions, while regular GPU and BIOS updates continue to squeeze the most out of its hardware (the recent driver update in May, for instance, boosted in-game performance by up to 30%). 

Promotion 

Best of all, right now you can grab the Claw at Currys for a discount. The Intel Core Ultra 7 + 1TB SSD model is available for £579 (down from £799), while the Ultra 5 + 512GB SSD variant is just £499 (down from £699). On top of that, you'll get a $50 Steam Wallet code when registering your purchase via the MSI Member website and uploading proof of purchase.

Full T&Cs can be found on the product listing on Currys.

MSI Stealth 14 AI Studio A1VFG-001UK 

Price: £1549 (down from £1949) | Buy at Currys (Star Blue, White)

If you want to get a bit more heavyweight with your gaming (but still in an extremely lightweight form factor), then MSI's Stealth 14 series of gaming laptops is some of the best value you can get in its spec range.

With a stunning 14" OLED 2800x1800 display (Star Blue model only) capable of up to 120Hz refresh rates, and an RTX 4060 Laptop GPU, the Stealth 14 is a powerhouse in a small package. It comes with 32GB DDR5 RAM, and unlike most laptops at this size, you can upgrade this yourself up to 64GB, futureproofing you for years.

The Core Ultra 7 155H CPU will handle all your multitasking with ease, making it perfect for creatives and students, while the GPU will knock out all the latest games nice and smoothly. The 16:10 aspect ratio, meanwhile, offers that bit more vertical space, making it more comfortable for everyday tasks.

So if you're looking for a deceptively powerful, compact sidekick for your gaming this summer, look no further than MSI's Claw and Stealth 14 ranges (just try to grab one before summer's out to get the perks!). To keep up with everything that's cooking in MSI's labs, follow them on Facebook and Instagram. 

The Pro 5i Gen 9 comes equipped with one of the latest Intel Core processors, the Core i7 14650HX. It's a mobile version of Raptor Lake, the same architecture currently leading the way on desktop for Intel. A 24-thread processor, divided into eight P-cores (16 threads with Hyper-Threading) and eight E-cores, that's a lot of processing power for what is ostensibly a gaming laptop on the more affordable end of the market.

The GPU is very much a known quantity: the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 mobile, with 8GB of GDDR6 and rated to a total graphics power (TGP) of 140 W. That last bit is important, as this determines how much headroom the GPU has available to it and ultimately has a pretty significant impact on the overall gaming performance of the machine. The good news here is that 140 W is as good as it gets for the RTX 4060 mobile—a 115 W TGP with an extra 25 W boost—and it's far and away the fastest RTX 4060 we've tested to date as a result.

Before we get to that shortly, we first need to talk about a few things the Pro 5i Gen 9 doesn't do well.

It comes equipped with only a single stick of DDR5 memory, rated at 5,600 MT/s. While retaining 16 GB capacity—suitable for a laptop at this price point—a single stick limits the overall bandwidth. It could be much higher with dual-channel memory. While a single stick doesn't appear to hinder the laptop hugely in many games I've tested—luck of the draw with our choice of tests—it could, it might, and it probably will at some point.

Single-channel memory also doesn't scream 'Pro' to me, which feels like a miss on the 'Pro 5i'.

The good news is you can easily access the laptop's innards through 10 Phillips head screws. Adding a second stick or upgrading to an entirely new kit—the latter likely being preferable to avoid compatibility woes but running a higher cost—is as simple as removing the metal shield, popping the old stuff out, and slotting the new stuff in. 

You'll likely be in the undercarriage of this laptop at some point shortly after buying it, anyways. With that, let's talk about the second disappointment.

The SSD in the Pro 5i is awfully small. It's a measly 512 GB. When combined with a Windows 11 install and a few Lenovo pre-installed applications (including McAfee) it is a tight squeeze for a few major triple-A games. I ran into issues with storage space during benchmarking and had to uninstall one game to test another. Luckily I have a handy external SSD to transfer my game library to and from, which saves downloading games over and over, but if you don't have one, you might have to rely on redownloading game files instead.

Though, again, you could pop the undercarriage off and add another larger gaming SSD. There's a spare slot going—a small recompense for the lack of capacity out of the box.

The odd thing about the SSD is how it's small but mighty. It's one of the faster drives in our testing. That performance feels a little bit wasted, but it'd make for a fantastic boot drive alongside a much larger data drive in that second NVMe slot.

Once I opened this laptop up, I realised this isn't your average cheapo gaming laptop. The cooling, motherboard, and layout inside the machine are much more impressive than most around this price or lower. That's definitely saying something for this laptop—for PC builders comfortable with taking apart machines and installing new parts, it has plenty of headroom for upgrades. Though that's mostly beside the point.

You shouldn't have to be ripping the rear off your shiny new gaming laptop to fix what is a pretty poor configuration in 2024, at least at this price. I was unable to find a retailer selling this exact model (SN: 83DF000DUS), though Lenovo sells almost an identical unit with a 1 TB SSD for $1,520 (I've also seen it discounted to $1,274/$1,330). 

That solves the storage problem, to some extent, though that model similarly comes with single-channel memory, according to Lenovo's own specifications database, and you can buy an RTX 4060-powered Lenovo laptop for a whole lot less.

Or even an RTX 4070 for less.

What's frustrating is that this laptop, with more memory and a larger SSD as standard, would be fantastic. The screen is a 16-inch IPS with a 165 Hz refresh rate and a 2560 x 1600, 16:10 resolution. The keyboard is a full-size unit with a numpad included and full RGB backlighting. There are tons of ports, a decent webcam with a privacy switch, and a responsive trackpad.

It's all good stuff, except those few key misses.

Thankfully there is a saving grace for this machine. The gaming performance is absolutely awesome, somewhat bewilderingly for a laptop with single-channel memory. The extra oomph from the graphics wattage drives higher performance and it's handled well thanks to its high-quality interior.

I've run multiple benchmarks on this laptop in Performance mode to get a feel for where it tops out across 1080p, 1440p, and its native resolution, 2560 x 1600. In most games, the Pro 5i Gen 9 performs exceptionally well, with performance-topping RTX 4060-powered machines.

This is the first RTX 4060 laptop we've tested with a 140 W TGP and it's blazing the trail.

The GPU reaches a moderate 75°C under load while gaming, however, the CPU gets toasty at 100°C. What's interesting is the high GPU clock of 2,709 MHz, which is higher than the comparable laptops shown in the charts and the result of a minor GPU overclock automatically applied in Performance mode, and yet an average wattage of only one 1 W higher than the Gigabyte G6X.

I have to admit I'm a little surprised at the results. I was expecting single-channel memory to hold this laptop back more so than it actually did. 

That's not to say I'm softening my stance on single-channel memory—at this price, this laptop should absolutely have dual-channel with 16 GB of memory—but practically it hasn't made as much of a difference across our benchmarking suite as I'd thought it might. However, we do know that single-channel can have an impact on performance in some cases.

This gaming laptop isn't strong on battery life. In running at RTX 4060 at a high wattage, the 80 WHr battery is unable to keep it juiced for long. Even once I turned off Performance mode and ran in standard Balanced mode with Hybrid GPU switching enabled (which will choose between iGPU and discrete GPU as required), the Pro 5i only mustered 41 minutes of battery life in the PCMark gaming battery benchmark.

A few thumbs up and a few thumbs down, then—the Pro 5i is truly a mixed bag. The deciding factor is the price tag attached to this gaming laptop. Let's just take the 1 TB model since 1) I can't find a listing for the 500 GB model, and 2) I definitely wouldn't buy the 500 GB model, anyways. 

So, if I had the $1,520 (or even $1,274) asked of the 1 TB model to spend on a gaming laptop, would I spend it on this? 

No, I wouldn't. There are far too many great offers on gaming laptops right now that roundly beat this laptop where it counts. The HP Victus with a Core i7 13700H, 16 GB RAM, and an RTX 4070 is $1,199 right now. There's also Lenovo's own Legion Slim 5 with a Ryzen 7, 16 GB of admittedly single-channel RAM, and an RTX 4070 for $1,220. 

Regardless of how well the RTX 4060 runs inside the Pro 5i Gen 9, it's no match for the superior RTX 4070 silicon.

I like a lot about the Lenovo Legion Pro 5i Gen 9—that might sound weird for a laptop I've awarded a mere 58%—but with a few tweaks, it could be so much more impressive. The screen is good, the chassis is good, the internals are good. That said, I'm reviewing the spec in front of me and it's not a very balanced machine. Not at all.

The Pro 5i's performance could be undermined by its single-channel memory. Its high-wattage GPU obliterates the battery life. Moreover, it's not competitive enough at its current pricing. Across three generations of comparable laptops with RTX 40-series GPUs, we're not short of genuinely excellent gaming laptops to choose from today, and there's no reason at all to buy this particular one.