Best Cheap Gaming Laptops In 2022

gamespot.com:

Best Overall — Dell G15

Starts at $800

Best Intel Laptop — Acer Nitro 5

$815

Best Thin Laptop — MSI GF63 Thin

$750

Best Performance — MSI GF65

$1,100

Best Configurable — HP Pavillion Gaming 15

Starts at $630

Gaming laptops often come at a premium price, largely due to the costs associated with shrinking down all of that performance into a sleek, portable chassis. But that doesn't mean you have to spend thousands of dollars for a good gaming laptop, especially if you're fine with dialing down some settings and compromising on some build options for a solid, bang for your buck laptop. Here's some of the best cheap gaming laptop options available in 2022. Some of them are even on sale for less than retail price right now.

Before jumping into our picks, a few things to keep in mind. All of these options are selected because of their relative performance when taking price into account. That means you won't see the latest laptops here most likely, and definitely not any with recent RTX 3070 or RTX 3080 chips. That said, all of the laptops here will be capable of playing modern PC games, albeit at lower settings (think medium to low presets here).

As a rule, these are some of the specifications you should keep in consideration when looking for similarly performing laptops:

With that said, here are our picks for best cheap gaming laptop in 2022.

Editor's Note: Article updated on June 24, 2022

Dell makes some of the best laptops around, but it also knows how to strike a good balance between price and performance. The G15 is evidence of that, making the smart choice to go with AMD's highly efficient Ryzen 5 5600H CPU and pair it with an equally impressive RTX 3050 Ti (with 4GB of VRAM). You'll get 8GB of DDR4 RAM and a