A good gaming laptop will cost you in the low thousands at the very least, so you can’t afford to make too many mistakes when picking one. If you want to make sure that you’re happy with your purchase, you’ll need to know what makes for a good gaming laptop. You need a basic understanding of computer components, and what you should focus on for optimal performance. You may also want to look at where, how, and when you want to do most of your gaming. Let’s take a look at what you should look for when shopping for a gaming laptop.
Battery Life
We have listed battery life at number one because this is one of the features many people overlook when it should be a priority. Some gaming laptops have extremely short battery lives, and you might be taken aback by this if you’ve never used a gaming laptop.
The main goal of getting a gaming laptop is portability, and you can’t assume that you’ll always have access to an outlet. There’s also no point in getting a laptop if it needs to be plugged in all the time. So, get a laptop that will give you at least five hours of battery life, which is about above average for gaming laptops.
Screen Quality and Resolution
The next thing you’ll have to look at is the quality of the laptop’s screen and the resolution. You have to be very careful here since more powerful monitors are more demanding on a machine. This not only means that the fluidity of the games might be affected, but that your battery life will be shorter. This is why we recommend that you stick with a full HD (1920X1080) or 1440p display. This will be more than enough for you to enjoy games with good settings.
Two other things you need to look at are response time and refresh rate. The refresh rate is how many times a screen can refresh the image on the screen per second, which is measured in Hertz. A 60hz screen will be able to display 60 frames per second, a 144hz screen will be able to display 144 frames per second, and a 300 Hz screen will be able to display 300 frames per second.
The sweet spot here is a 144hz refresh rate since very few games need to run over 144fps. Don’t go for anything under that as it will be too slow. The only people who should invest in a screen over 144hz are people who like to play games where the frame rate is important, like CS:GO and other shooters. You should also note that you’ll only see a difference if you’re playing at an elite level, so this is another thing you’ll have to consider.
Response time refers to how fast a screen can shift from one colour to another. Here, look for something with a 1ms to 5ms response time max. Anything higher than that and you could experience ghosting, which is when you see the remnants of an object on the screen after it appeared.
Another very important thing to consider is the technology used on the screen. Here, you have three main options. You have IPS displays, TN displays, and VA screens.
We’re not going to go in-depth with the different technologies here, but we would suggest that you stick with TN and IPS screens with a preference for IPS displays. They have the best viewing angles and colour accuracy, and they are recognised by the community as the best screens for gaming, so you can’t go wrong here.
The Graphics Card
The graphics card is considered the most important component in a gaming machine since it will be the part responsible for managing most of the information in games. You don’t necessarily have to go for the biggest, most powerful card in the world, however, especially if all you’re going to do is play simple games like online slots, for instance. If that’s what you’re into, you should make a list of some of the top slot sites and see their requirements first. If you’re looking for a place to start doing your research, check out the following link: https://www.onlinecasinos.co.uk/blog/best-payout-slots.htm.
If you want to play light games, anything with an entry-level card like the GTX 2060, 2070, or 2080 will do. Anything with an RX 60 series card will work too. You should only start looking at higher-end cards if you absolutely need to play the game on top settings, have an ultra-high resolution screen with a high refresh rate, and want to play games that use ray tracing. Other than that, we don’t see the need to go crazy here.
The CPU
You might be wondering why the CPU is so low on this list. This is because very little work is done by the CPU when it comes to gaming. Only games like sandboxes with lots of AI characters and dialogue, like The Witcher, for instance, will be heavy on the CPU, and even then, most middle-of-the-road chips will do just fine. A 2 GHz-ish chip with four cores will handle most games comfortably, but if you want to make sure, go for something between 2.5ghz to 3ghz with four to eight cores. This should cover your needs now and in the near future.
You also have to look at whether you want to do CPU extensive tasks with the computer. If you want to do ultra-high-resolution editing or run 3D mapping and rendering applications, for instance, you’ll need to go with a more powerful chip. So, look at all the tasks you want to do and look at the recommended requirements on the programs you routinely use to get an idea of what kind of chip your laptop should have.
If you get all of these things down, you’re almost guaranteed to be happy with the machine you end up with. Shop around, take your time, and don’t overspend where you don’t need to unless you have the budget and need to play at the highest level possible.
