This breadth of choice means choosing a gaming laptop in 2026 is no easy task. While choosing any of the options in our best gaming laptops, best cheap gaming laptops and best laptops guides is a good place to start, you may still not find the perfect gaming laptop for your needs. After testing numerous gaming laptops over more than a decade of reviewing products, I’ll break down each element of these spendy machines to point you in the right direction, as well as tell you what to expect from the major laptop brands.
Updated February 2026: We’ve added the latest gaming laptop announcements from CES, as well as new reference information on pricing, memory constraints, and CPUs.
What size gaming laptop should you get?
This is a great place to start when shopping for a gaming laptop. When we talk about the “size” of these machines, we’re usually comparing display sizes measured diagonally. You’ll often see three sizes across all brands: 14-inch, 16-inch, and 18-inch.
16 inches It’s a happy medium. Even though they’re large laptops, they give the powerful gaming hardware enough room to breathe thermally. Having a bigger screen is certainly not a bad thing. These 16-inch gaming laptops replace the 15.6-inch gaming laptops of the past, which used 16:9 aspect ratio screens. However, those 15-inch laptops aren’t completely gone, some of our favorite gaming laptops like the Lenovo LOQ 15 are still using 16:9. With a few exceptions, most modern displays use 16:10 aspect ratio displays with thin bezels. 16-inch laptops can be as thin as the Razer Blade 16 and Asus ROG Zephyrus G16, or as thick as the Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 10 or Asus ROG Strix G16.
14 inches And 18-inch gaming laptops are more niche, but they still have specific use cases where they are good solutions. 14-inch laptops are a new development, which are highly portable and compact. The two primary standouts are the Razer Blade 14 and the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, but there are also other models like the Acer Nitro 14, Asus TUF A14, and HP Omen Transcend 14.
18 inch Gaming laptops are the complete opposite. They are too large for bags, too heavy to travel with comfortably, and often quite thick. These are gaming laptops that are primarily left on desks or workstations. Why buy them? Well, if you plan to play games mostly at home, you won’t mind the extra weight. The 18-inch screen gives you plenty of real estate to play games on. This is especially nice if you’re not playing on an external monitor. Some notable options are the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 or the MSI Titan 18 HX AI.
How to navigate the display
There’s a lot to consider when it comes to performance, but the place to start is with the graphics card. A gaming laptop needs a dedicated GPU to be ready for 3D gaming, and usually, that means choosing something from Nvidia’s RTX lineup. The latest options, the RTX 50-series, launching in 2025, include the RTX 5090, 5080, 5070, 5070 Ti, 5060, and 5050. Nvidia would have you believe that multi-frame generation is a reason to buy a new laptop with one of these GPUs, though in my testing, that hasn’t always proven to be true. Either way, this feature is available to play with no matter what GPU you have in your laptop.
As you’d expect, performance and price scale step by step. I won’t list all the specifications of these graphics cards, but there are some important things to know when making a decision. The RTX 5090 (24GB), 5080 (16GB), and 5070 Ti (12GB) all received extra VRAM compared to their predecessors in the RTX 40-series, while the RTX 5070, 5060, and 5050 are all stuck with just 8GB. This means that for certain game performance, the upgrade from RTX 5070 to 5070 Ti is larger than that from 5060 to 5070. It’s also important to remember that these laptops are not in line with the desktop versions in terms of GPU specifications.
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