How to choose the right gaming laptop (2026): What you need to know

Used gaming laptops To be clear. It was strong but thick and unwieldy. These days, you have options. There are gaming laptops that prioritize performance at all costs, and others that focus on thinness, cost, or design. Heck, there are also gaming tablets and 2-in-1s.

This breadth of choice means that choosing a gaming laptop in 2026 is no easy feat. While choosing any option from our guides to the best gaming laptops , best cheap gaming laptops , and best netbooks is a good place to start, you may not end up with a gaming laptop that’s perfectly suited to your needs. Having tested many gaming laptops in over a decade of reviewing products, I’ll break down every element of these expensive machines to point you in the right direction, as well as explain what to expect from the major laptop brands.

Updated February 2026: We’ve added information about the latest gaming laptop announcements from CES, as well as new context on pricing and memory and CPU shortages.

What size gaming laptop should you get?

Razer Blade 14.

Photo: Luke Larsen

This is a great place to start when shopping for a gaming laptop. When we talk about the “sizes” of these devices, we usually compare the display sizes, measured diagonally. You often see three sizes across brands: 14 inches, 16 inches, and 18 inches.

16 inches It’s the happy medium. Even though they are large laptops, they give powerful gaming rigs enough room to breathe. Having a bigger screen certainly isn’t a bad thing either. These 16-inch gaming laptops replace the 15.6-inch gaming laptops of the past, which used a 16:9 aspect ratio screen. However, these 15-inch laptops haven’t completely disappeared, with some of our favorite gaming laptops like the Lenovo LOQ 15 with a 16:9 ratio still in use. With some exceptions, most modern displays use a 16:10 aspect ratio with thinner bezels. 16-inch laptops can be as thin as the Razer Blade 16 and Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 or as thick as the Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 10 or Asus ROG Strix G16.

14 inches 18-inch gaming laptops are more specialized, but still have specific use cases where they are good solutions. 14-inch laptops are a more recent development, and tend to be very portable and compact. The two main models are the Razer Blade 14 and Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, but there are others, such as the Acer Nitro 14, Asus TUF A14, and HP Omen Transcend 14.

18 inches Gaming laptops are the exact opposite. They are too big for suitcases, too heavy to travel comfortably with, and often too thick. These are gaming laptops that are primarily intended to be left on a desk or workstation. Why buy it? Well, if you plan to play mostly at home, you might not mind the extra heft. The 18-inch screen gives you plenty of real estate to play on. This is especially great if you’re not playing on an external monitor. Some notable options are the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 or MSI Titan 18 HX AI.

How to navigate performance

There’s a lot to consider when it comes to performance, but the place to start is with graphics cards. A gaming laptop needs a discrete GPU to be ready for 3D gaming, and that usually means choosing from something in Nvidia’s RTX lineup. The latest options, the RTX 50 series, launching throughout 2025, include the RTX 5090, 5080, 5070, 5070 Ti, 5060, and 5050. Nvidia would have you believe that multi-frame generation is the reason to buy a new laptop with one of these GPUs, although in my tests, that hasn’t always proven to be true. Either way, the feature is there for you to enjoy no matter what GPU your laptop has.

As you would expect, performance and price are measured step by step. I won’t list all the specifications for these graphics cards, but there are some important things to know when making a decision. The RTX 5090 (24GB), 5080 (16GB), and 5070 Ti (12GB) all received additional VRAM compared to their RTX 40-series predecessors, while the RTX 5070, 5060, and 5050 were all stuck with just 8GB. This means that for a given gaming performance, the upgrade from the RTX 5070 to 5070 Ti is greater than from the 5060 to 5070. It’s also important to remember that these laptop GPUs don’t match the desktop versions in terms of specifications.