Best Gaming Laptop Under $800 in 2023 – our top picks

How to pick the best gaming laptop under $800

Here’s how you can pick a gaming laptop within your budget.

GPU

With a $800 budget, you can get entry-level graphics cards like the NVIDIA GTX 1650 or 1660 Ti, which offer excellent performance with a super-reasonable price tag. If you want a slightly better performance, then you can check out laptops with the RTX 2000 series GPUs.

However, if you’re planning to play demanding games or run intense software, then we recommend checking out laptops with RTX 3000 series GPUs. For instance, the best RTX 3050 laptops are capable of running AAA games.

CPU

Within the given budget, there are a lot of laptops available with Intel 11th gen and 12th gen processors. If you want to run resource-intensive applications, then you should consider investing in one of the best Intel 12th gen laptops. With that being said, we also have a budget pick in this guide that sports an Intel 13th gen CPU – in case you want to check out other options.

Display

When we say “display” it means – screen size, resolution, and refresh rate.

Now, most of the picks in this price range have 15.6-inch displays – if you prefer this size, then you will have plenty of options to choose from. However, if you want a 17.3-inch display, then the options get narrowed down.

Further, most gaming laptops in this guide have an FHD resolution, which gives you good picture quality. We’d recommend you to get an FHD resolution, and nothing below this, if you want a good gaming experience.

Then, you have to get a fast refresh rate that would give you smooth gameplay. Most picks in this guide have a 144Hz refresh rate, which is sufficient for playing most games.

Storage

Video games can take up a significant amount of space on your laptop. In addition to this, many people will use their laptops for other things, such as listening to music or doing work, so you really need to think about the amount of storage on the laptop. In an ideal world, you should be looking for a laptop with an SSD hard drive disk – you should be able to find this without much problem on a lot of laptops at this price point. With an SSD, your transfer speed is generally faster, and as a result, your games are likely to load significantly faster. It’s worth keeping an eye out for 256 GB SSDs for this price.

It’s also worth noting that some laptops come with expandable storage options, so it’s worth looking for this when you’re deciding which laptop to buy. Other laptops may give you both an SSD and an HDD, and these are especially handy for extra storage capacity.

Other Features

There are also a number of other factors that are worth considering when you are looking to buy a laptop. For instance, consider the battery. Can it last for a while without needing to be plugged into power? This factor may not be awfully important to you if you plan on keeping the laptop mainly in one place, but if you are going to be moving your laptop from one place to the next all the time, such as for school or college, then getting a laptop that can hold its own when it isn’t connected to power is a very good idea.

Likewise, on the subject of portability, you should think about the size and weight of the laptop. You don’t want to be carrying around a heavy laptop all the time if you’re also using your laptop for school, but many gaming laptops can be a little heavier.

There are some other things that are also worth thinking about. Look out for laptops that have things such as backlit keyboards. These are very handy in the event that you enjoy playing during the nighttime hours or in the dark. Think about the connectivity, too – how many devices can you connect to the device at any given time? It’s also a good idea to think about the cooling system of the laptop. Laptops can get overheated very easily when you’re gaming, and a cooling system helps to ensure that your laptop can last for longer periods of time as it is well maintained.