The best gaming laptops in 2025 can finally be the do-anything notebooks we've always wanted them to be. As well as being just as capable 3D rendering in Blender, or thrashing the GPU with generative AI, now they're not just frame rate-chewing gaming monsters when plugged into the power socket, they're machines that can game when running on battery, too.

The new Nvidia GPUs paired up with either AMD's mighty Strix Point APUs, or Intel's Arrow Lake H-series CPUs, have delivered the best gaming laptops we've ever tested on PC Gamer. And the team here have been testing notebooks with a collective 60+ years of tech-prodding experience. We know what makes them tick, and what makes a great system.

We might well have seen the ultimate head-to-heads already, and that has given us a new winner for the best overall machine. The best gaming laptop today is the new Razer Blade 16, and it is a stunning machine that rights all the wrongs of its previously portly chassis of the past few years. It's now a gloriously slimline machine, but still utterly on point in terms of the experience you want from a powerful notebook for gaming. It's put the latest Asus Zephyrus G16 in the shade, though that's largely down to its preference for Intel over AMD CPUs and a vastly improved Razer design. And it actually has battery life. Yes, this is the big change for gaming laptops in 2025, they actually have decent gaming battery life.

It's the same situation when it comes to the compact machines, too, with the best 14-inch gaming laptop being the new Razer Blade 14, which has just pipped the Asus Zephyrus G14 to the title thanks to its gorgeous design and sumptuous gaming experience.

The quick list

Curated by...

Dave has had his head in PCs and gaming laptops for a couple of decades now, and knows what makes them tick, and what makes the best gaming laptop for every budget. Whether it's about looking for the highest performance, the best value, best screen, or just the best build quality, Dave has spent time prodding and tweaking pretty much all the laptops on this list.

The best gaming laptop

Our favorite config:

We tested: AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 | RTX 5090 | 32 GB | 2 TB SSD

The new Razer Blade 16 is the best gaming laptop I've ever used, and I've been messing around with them professionally for the best part of 20 years now. But it's not about the fact I've been using an RTX 5090-powered version, and that it's simply the fastest, most powerful machine I've had the pleasure of toasting my lap. Because it's not. The real kicker, the real reason why this is the best gaming laptop is because the experience of actually using the device itself is a genuine pleasure—whether that's gaming, productivity, or just general laptopery.

The interesting thing about this new generation of gaming laptop GPU is that Nvidia hasn't—too some disdain around the internet—made the RTX 50-series notably faster than what went before with the Ada mobile GPUs. The RTX 5090 in this Blade 16 is barely any faster than the RTX 4090 of the previous generation, and I've had RTX 5080-powered machines in my hands that delivered the same frame rates; sometimes even better.

What Nvidia has done with the mobile form of the RTX Blackwell GPU architecture is make it far more efficient and effective in a laptop form factor.

So yes, it's not about the performance, it's about the experience. Which sounds like a thoroughly unsatisfying way to recommend a gaming laptop, but do give me a chance to explain. High-performance gaming laptops are rarely the sorts of mobile devices that you would want to use day-in-day-out to use for all your computing needs.

They're often super chonky, super loud, and deliver atrocious battery life. The Blade 16 is the antithesis to all of those failings, with a chassis that is has a 30% reduction in overall volume and uses a smart "thermal hood" which sits over the fans and heatsink, giving some extra space to shift air around without making the overall feel of the machine anywhere near as thick as the Blade 16 has been. We're getting back to the slimline feel of the original Blade 15 and that is a welcome return to form.

That cooling hood, and improved overall thermal design, means the Blade 16, even at full volume, doesn't get its fan noise up to the same level as something like the new Asus Zephyrus G16 or the Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 I've checked out. It is still noticeable, and you're not going to want to sit in a library with the fans on full, but it has none of the turbine whoosh of the Gigabyte or the whine of the Asus.

And even when you rein the fans in, knocking the cooling performance down a notch or two, the thing will still deliver great frame rates. Partly that's where Nvidia's new Multi Frame Generation party trick comes into its own on mobile, allowing you to dial the hardware down while still enjoying high frame rates at the same time.

That also helps on battery when you're gaming, as does the GPU architecture's ability to quickly shift gears in terms of the frequency and power draw, within the timing of a single frame, even. That efficiency delivers a huge difference in gaming away from the plug, and Nvidia's new BatteryBoost tech helps, too. Now, it will crush the in-game settings if you allow it to optimise them on its own, but it also comes with a context-aware algorithm that will drop the frame rate to 30 fps when it sees there's limited action on screen. Think something like an inventory or dialogue screen.

The speed at which the GPU can pull things back means the RTX 50-series is able to deliver both excellent frame rates on battery while still delivering genuine gaming time away from a power source.

It's worth noting the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 isn't just twiddling its thumbs, either. The AMD silicon is definitely helping with efficient battery usage, too, and offers a quality iGPU for when you're running less demanding games and want to take the discrete GPU out of the equation and really max out gaming battery life.

I will say that the Arrow Lake H CPUs are more powerful in gaming terms, and if there's a title, such as Baldur's Gate 3, which is heavily CPU-limited, then the Intel machines do pull ahead. But, they are also louder and have lower battery life numbers.

Then there's the actual machine itself. I've already noted how much slimmer the chassis design is, but it's still feels beautifully rigid—even if it is still a total fingerprint magnet—but the keyboard is soooo much better now, too. The extra travel really makes it a pleasure to type on, in a way not a lot of chiclet keyboards are. The vast trackpad from previous Blades remains, and it's just as responsive as ever, so long as your digits aren't either too dry or too sweaty.

And that screen. Oh my, there has not been another laptop screen that has impressed so much as the 1600p OLED in the Blade. Yes, it's the same as last year, but there has been no other panel that can match it. We've had other 1600p OLED panels side-by-side with it and the Blade's is absolutely best—and there aren't a ton of actual OLED panel manufacturers so there must be something to Razer's tuning and electronics going on here.

All told, the Blade 16 is the do-anything gaming laptop I've always wanted. It can game like a champ on the latest games at high resolution and frame rates, it can even do it on battery, and will do it quietly, too. But it can also be a productivity notebook I've been able to use in my day-to-day work away from the plug with no concerns about scrabbling around for a charger. It's the best gaming laptop around today, and there's going to have to be something special if another manufacturer wants to topple it.

Read our full Razer Blade 16 (2025) review.

The best budget gaming laptop

Our favorite config:

We tested: Intel Core i7 13650HX | Nvidia RTX 4060 | 32 GB DDR5-4800 | 1 TB NVMe SSD

The best budget gaming laptop is the Gigabyte G6X (2024). It takes the place of the Gigabyte G5 we had in this spot previously, mostly because it offers more affordable gaming performance but with newer, improved parts inside.

The model we reviewed contains a Core i7 13650HX, which is not actually Intel's most recent mobile gaming processor generation. However, that's an omission I'm happy to make. They're mostly the same and the six P-cores and eight E-cores on this Core i7 are plenty for your needs.

That chip is combined with a 105 W RTX 4060—that's actually a large power budget for this GPU, and that shows in the performance it delivers, as evidenced in the benchmark charts below. What's more, it's a small dose faster than the outgoing Gigabyte G5 KF I've replaced in this spot—those hardware changes do count for something in games.

Let's talk about the screen. It's a full 16 inches in size, with a 16:10 aspect ratio, 1920 x 1200 pixels, and a refresh rate of 165 Hz. It's pretty darn good, in other words.

Importantly, that screen is a good fit for the hardware beneath it. Though it does suffer from a bit of the case of the blands—that is to say, it's a bit dull and overly dark. These budget laptops often tend to suffer this fate and the G6X is no different to its predecessors on this point. Ultimately, I'd call it "perfectly average."

The noise from the fans when they're running at full bore is also quite average, which means this laptop is rather loud. That's just part of the parcel with a gaming laptop, but more so these affordable models.

The design of this laptop is pretty standard stuff, too. Though it's decisively less 'gamery' than some. A single zone of RGB LEDs illuminates the keyboard and there's room for a reasonably big trackpad. Within the chassis, you can easily access the spare NVMe slot should you wish to bolster your storage above 1TB, which you probably will, and this machine comes with two DIMM slots. In our review model, these were accommodating 32 GB of DDR5-4800—though you could save some cash on the 16 GB model and get by in games just fine. It wouldn't be difficult to swap out for a higher-capacity kit down the line.

Overall, the Gigabyte G6X offers exactly what we ask for in a budget gaming laptop. You could happily game on one right out of the box, though it's an easily upgradeable platform if required.

Read our full Gigabyte G6X (2024) review.

The best 14-inch gaming laptop

Our favorite config:

We tested: Ryzen 9 AI 365 | RTX 5070 115 W | 32 GB RAM | 1 TB SSD

For my money, the new Blade 14 is absolutely the best 14-inch gaming laptop you can buy today. Though that was certainly not the case in the previous generation, where Asus went straight for Razer's jugular, redesigning its Zephyrus G14 to create a beautiful little AMD-powered laptop that had our hearts aflutter.

But that forced Razer to go back to the drawing board, and its own redesign—one that's also seen the Blade 16 given a nip and tuck—has now delivered a fantastic compact notebook that just about has the edge over Asus' still impressive device.

The slimmer chassis design makes the new Blade 14 look more modern than last year's far chonkier design, something that really put me off all the Blade laptops of the previous generation. But now we're back with the MacBook-ish aesthetic that means the new machine would fit as well in a boardroom meeting as in your gaming den. Well, so long as you disable the green glow of that Razer logo on the lid anyways.

It's a little heavier than the G14 still, despite being essentially the same size, but it's still easily picked up in one hand and will comfortably slip into your day bag for your trip to the office or school and won't weigh you down. It feels reassuringly solid, with Razer's classic unibody chassis giving it a rigidity that speaks of a robust laptop you really can take everywhere with you. And it will also happily survive away from a plug socket on your travels, too, as we've tracked gaming performance that measures well over two hours, so standard desktop battery life is well above that.

That slimmer chassis does mean Razer has had to do away with configurable memory, which means soldered memory and no option to upgrade down the line, at least not for the folk without solder for blood. That's mostly a non-issue for me, with the RTX 5070 version coming with 32 GB or 64 GB options at point of sale, but does give me pause for the RTX 5060 Blade 14. It's still more than $2,000 and comes with just 16 GB LPDDR5X and nowhere to go after that.

The limited spec options are a bit of an issue on the surface for the Blade 14, especially with the inevitable comparison to the new Zephyrus G14. The Asus laptop can be configured with RTX 5070, RTX 5070 Ti, or RTX 5080 GPUs, making more powerful options on offer for those who want the raw performance, while the Blade 14 is restricted to the 8 GB RTX 5070 as the top GPU offering.

For some, with a bee in their bonnet about 8 GB GPUs, that will be a deal-breaker. But having personally tested the RTX 5070 Blade 14 against the RTX 5070 Ti G14 there really isn't a lot between them even at the native 1880 x 1800 resolution of their identical (and identically gorgeous) 120 Hz OLED displays. And when you have the twin boons of DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation the Blade 14 remains a solid gaming device.

More concerning for the RTX 5070 Ti-toting Zephyrus G14, however, is its new cooling design. There is an unpleasant dual-tone fan noise which becomes truly distracting when pushing the Asus laptop at all in-game. The only solution I found to deliver a decent aural experience was to use the manual configuration options to restrict power, which ended up restricting the gaming performance to that of the lower spec Blade 14 anyway. With both machines running at a similar level of fan noise they essentially run at the same speed.

The weaker AMD APU in the Blade 14, however, is disappointing. Not necessarily for lacking a pair of Zen 5c cores from its make up—it's still a 10-core, 20-thread chip—but for its integrated GPU. The iGPU in the G14 is the top-of-the-AMD-range Strix Point 890M, and that delivers notably better gaming performance, and in a 14-inch gaming laptop the ability to park the power hungry discrete GPU on the go makes for much longer battery life and still decent 1080p gaming frame rates.

The Ryzen AI 9 365 in the Blade 14 is more akin to the last generation of iGPUs, the sort you will find in something like the Asus ROG Ally X, so it's certainly not awful, just not the top-spec I'd want when I'm spending $2,500 on a compact gaming laptop.

But the Razer Blade 14 is still the gaming laptop that I would actually want to be spending my own money on. I've spent a long while testing both this and the G14 together, and while the Asus is still a quality machine, there's only one I'd be looking to buy myself, and that's the Razer. It delivers a better experience, is a better looking system, and though it is pricey (while still being cheaper than the previous generation) it's still the best 14-inch gaming laptop you can buy.

Read our full Razer Blade 14 review.

The best mid-range gaming laptop

Our favorite config:

We tested: Intel Core Ultra 9 275X | RTX 5080 | 32 GB DDR5-5600 | 1 TB

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