Having the right laptop can make a world of difference when playing video games. These machines routinely cost in the thousands of dollars, so you can’t afford to make a mistake or you may have to deal with the consequences of your choice until you can afford a new machine or make upgrades. Thankfully, picking a good machine is simple once you understand the basics and know which features should get most of your attention. Here are some of the most important features to look for when shopping for a gaming laptop.
The GPU
Some people may have expected to see the CPU at the top of the list. But the graphics card, or GPU as it’s often referred to, is in our opinion the most important component of a gaming machine. While the CPU will be responsible for coordinating and processing information, it is the GPU that will do most of the heavy lifting, so you have to know which type of cards are the best for the type of games you want to play.
If you like playing light games, an NVIDIA GTX card in the 16s might hold you off, but most people recommend that you go for something in the 30s. You can also look into higher cards than that, but know that the difference in performance will be marginal.
If you’re looking for gaming laptops with great graphics cards, we suggest you check out AMD gaming laptops. They have machines with smaller and bigger cards, so you should be able to find a perfect machine whether you like playing light MOBA and MMORPG games or more demanding ones.
CPU
We put CPU at number two because all laptops need a CPU, but you’ll have a hard time finding a laptop being sold today that doesn’t have a processor that can handle most video games. We’re not saying you should get a 1.1ghz Celeron here, but anything north of 2ghz should have the features needed. If you need something specific, we would suggest that you go for something with around 3.5ghz of clock speed and at least six cores. This will be more than enough to run any game now and in the foreseeable future.
Storage and RAM
You now have to look at things like RAM and the different types of hard drives. When it comes to hard drives, you can either go for a solid-state drive (SSD) or a mechanical hard drive (HDD). The easy choice here is the SSD because they don’t have moving parts and can access data from different parts of a drive in the fraction of the time it would take an HDD. Besides, you’ll have a hard time finding a modern laptop that has an HDD in it, so SSD should be the only option available anyway.
When it comes to RAM, the bigger is usually the better, but anything over 16Gb should be more than enough. You can always start with a 16Gb stick as this is what most games recommend right now, though you may have some slight lagging or ping issues depending on the game or the action going on on the screen.
Conclusion
As you can see, finding a great gaming laptop doesn’t have to be that complicated after all. Just make sure that you know what to concentrate on and be ready to sacrifice in some areas if you have limitations.
