Software and bloatware: A gaming laptop should come with software for controlling the fans, performance, and lighting.

Upgradability: You should be able to easily remove the bottom panel of the laptop to upgrade the memory and storage-to keep prices low, laptop makers often design budget models to be less upgradable.

For that reason, battery life, size, and weight remain important in this category.

Portability: Plenty of gaming laptops are used for school or work, too.

Trackpad: Most people use a mouse while gaming, but a decent trackpad still matters for web browsing and everyday tasks.

4 IPS screens are usually brighter and more color accurate than TN panels, but we didn’t rule out a laptop with a TN panel if it otherwise met our requirements. Some laptops in this price range now have high-refresh-rate (120 Hz or 144 Hz) panels, which are a nice bonus for first-person games like Overwatch or PUBG the higher the refresh rate, the smoother animations appear, as long as the frame rate is also high.

Lower resolutions look terrible, and the GPUs in these laptops can’t play games well at resolutions above 1080p anyway. Any pick we make for the best cheap gaming laptop needs to have a 1920×1080 screen-no exceptions.

Display: 15-inch laptops strike a good balance between screen size and relative portability, and they fit our budget.Keyboard: The keyboard should be comfortable and responsive, as you use it for the majority of game inputs.The fans shouldn’t blast during non-gaming activities, either. Noise: Noisy fans are a reasonable trade-off for a cool laptop, but ideally a gaming laptop can keep high-contact areas cool without drowning out the speakers with loud fans.It’s more forgivable for a laptop to get hot in areas where you make less direct skin contact. But a laptop must keep its high-contact areas, such as the WASD keys and the left palm rest, cool the same goes for its internal components. 3 No gaming laptop can keep completely cool-all the heat from the CPU and GPU has to go somewhere. Heat: Without an effective cooling system, a gaming laptop will overheat, which can slow gaming performance, shorten the laptop’s lifespan, or even burn you.

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