Best RTX 4050 laptop in 2024 – our top picks

Although there are other gaming laptop selections on this page with more powerful processors, the Acer Nitro 5 has one of the highest TGP RTX 4050 laptop GPUs we’ve seen so far, which alone makes it one of the best in-game performers. It even performs as well as some lower-powered RTX 3060 laptop models, and that’s before the benefits of DLSS 3.0 are taken into account. You get 16GG of the latest DDR5 RAM, which is all you need on an affordable machine like this, plus 512GB of SSD storage.

The 144Hz maximum fresh rate is again all you need for gaming at this level, and a 1080p 15.6” display is all you’re likely to get at this budget. Looking at the other screen specs, the average response time hits at around 17ms gray-to-gray, which isn’t great, but it’s pretty standard across gaming laptops at this price point. Similarly, the 60% sRGB color coverage and 29 0nits peak brightness aren’t very good results, but they are not untypical. The contrast ratio of 1700:1 is, however, above average.

Besides this, the build quality of the Acer Nitro 5 is pretty solid for a cheaper machine, and it deserves to be one of the best Acer gaming laptops. The battery life hits at around 4 hours, which isn’t great but, again, fairly standard, and it’s a reasonably nice-looking machine.

This MSI Thin GF63 is one of the cheapest RTX 4050 gaming laptops in the market. Although the machine comes with a powerful (for the price) Intel Core 12650H processor, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, plus a 144Hz display – all of which are good specs, it falls down majorly in a couple of other areas.

The main drawback is that, despite the general 35-115W claim, the actual TGP of the laptop is only 45W TGP, which really drags down its gaming performance considerably, even with the CPU.

The display is slightly worse than the other picks on this page, with a response time of around 19ms gray-to-gray, 53% sRGB coverage, 250 nits of brightness, and a lackluster contrast ratio of around 1000:1. On top of this, though, you get a mediocre battery life of around 4 hours, plus flimsy build quality. In case you want to explore more options from the same brand, check out our top picks for the best MSI gaming laptops.

If you’re after a gaming laptop powered by an AMD CPU, then the Ryzen 7 7735HS processor this model comes with is about the same power level in benchmarks as the previous-gen Intel Core 12650H, which is a good result. The RTX 4050 is another high-TGP variant as well, meaning good gaming performance overall.

Like some of the best Lenovo gaming laptops, the Lenovo Ideapad Gaming 3 laptop comes with 16GB of DDR5 RAM, which is nice, plus a 512GB SSD. Again, the screen isn’t great in terms of response time, brightness, or color gamut (limited to around 50% sRGB), but this is pretty much what you’d expect at this price point.

The display on this device is limited to 120Hz, which is obviously less than our top pick. However, the noticeable difference between this and a 144Hz laptop will be limited. The battery life on this laptop is also superior, clocking in at up to around 6 hours of web browsing, which adds to its utility as a general-purpose machine outside of gaming.

The Gigabyte AERO 14 OLED is a terrific 14-inch RTX 4050 laptop if you want a machine you can do creative work on, such as picture and video editing, and is even suitable for light gaming with its 90Hz refresh rate. The RTX 4050 it comes paired with is admittedly the lowest-powered on this page in TGP terms, but given its designed purpose, it is still adequate. You get a couple of different CPU options, including an older Intel 12th Gen 12500H or a newer, more powerful 13th Gen Intel Core i7-13700H for more money. The 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM is very nice, as is the 1TB of SSD storage. The port coverage is good, as is the quality of the keyboard, and it has reasonable build quality overall. At around 7 hours of general use/web browsing, the battery life is better than any other laptop on this page.

Looking at the screen, the 2880 x 1800 (i.e., 3K) resolution gives a nice sharp image, and the contrast (as you’d expect from an OLED screen) is superb – far above what a conventional IPS screen could manage. The brightness is good enough at 430nits (though reportedly it reaches 600 when viewing HDR content) for the laptop to be used outdoors. Color gamut coverage covers 100% sRGB and 99% DCI-P3, and it is also (generally) very color accurate, meaning you can use it to complete work in either of these spectrums to a professional level.

The one caveat about this, however, is that the accuracy only stretches up to the calibrated brightness of 161.348 cd/m², and anything above this, the display loses substantial accuracy, so be aware you will have to limit yourself to this brightness when doing such workflows. All-in-all, though, this is a fantastic machine, and it deserves to be one of the best Gigabyte gaming laptops.