BUYING GUIDE FOR BEST GAMING LAPTOPS
Guide Overview
Whether it be military combats of COD (Call of Duty), strategy gaming like League of Legends, Warcraft, creation of virtual realities like Minecraft, or the sophisticated detective simulation like Disco Elysium — The Final Cut, best user experience is the mechanism that drives the investment in a high-end laptop performance that can handle all these games without hassle.
However, with the growing trend of computer gaming, it can be a very daunting task to survey the markets and narrow it down to a top-quality performing best gaming laptop, that is both convenient and a good exchange for your money.
Fortunately, we have compiled the essential hallmarks in this guide to assist you in what you should be looking for in getting yourself the best gaming laptop on the market. Before you start thinking of buying any branded gaming laptops on the market, here is a detailed list of a few, yet imperative attributes compiled to help you when considering eyeing the best gaming laptop.
Guide
Things to take into consideration:
Storage Capacity
Obviously, you have come across acronyms such as SSD, HDD, PCIe-NVMe, and NVMe M.2, however, you might be wondering how to decipher these terms. To state the obvious, these are all terms referring to storage drives of computers and technology used in enabling faster storage interface speeds.
The difference between these drives is based on their speed and performance in processing information and accessibility to data in the processor. Basically, as a gamer you’d want the choice of the best gaming laptop that has high-end storage like NVMe M.2 (Non-Volatile Memory (Express)) which can access more data in CPU especially when it comes to gaming, they are can have a high range of storage capacity while very small in terms of their physical stature and has longer life spans. The other storages such as SSD (Solid State Drive) and HDD (Hard Disk Drive), although might be budget-friendly, are big and weighty, and less efficient when it comes to handling gaming in Laptops.
Processor (CPU)
The brain of the computers is the core that regulates the data flow of every essential computer function. The best laptops for gaming must have a powerful Central Processing Unit that can convey and access information efficiently in less time.
A high-quality CPU that can efficiently run games and heavy applications are the ones with more than 4-cores (number of processors), 6–8 cores, or mostly known as hexa-core and octa-core processors. The two competing branded processor manufacturing companies today are Intel and AMD-Ryzen, although the choices in this are highly personal and based on user experience, there is no question that selecting a laptop with a low work-efficient core, will give you a nightmare of gaming experience. An ideal gaming laptop is the one. Remember that an efficient, multi-core processor facilitates the handling of the ultrafast computations of the input/output cycles of multiplayers in your laptop, especially with streaming games.
Random Access Memory (RAM)
This is key, and you should be looking out for this when choosing the most compatible laptop for gaming. The games are usually huge in terms of memory capacity and so they need to store a lot of Access memory in a form of what is known as ‘cache’ so that they can be retrieved once you log in or run the game application.
You can think of it this way, the greater the RAM capacity of the Laptop the faster the game, it helps you eliminate unnecessary lag time and freeze screens, and more significantly it maintains high-quality frame rates per second (fps). Laptops that are best in the gaming experience, especially the latest top-rated games come with RAM capacity of no less than 8GB-16GB and that’s the standard you wanna look for in buying the best gaming laptop.
GPU- Graphics Processing Unit (Graphics card)
The video animations, the colors, how realistic the characters are, are the key to the graphics interface in the PC games is powered by GPU. A high-performance GPU will enable and optimize the quality output of images on-screen during gaming.
When deciding to get the best gaming laptop, it will be expedient for you to look for a multi-core GPU that possesses A. I (Artificial Intelligence) powered technology such as the cutting-edge high-quality ray-tracing.
The ray-tracing technologies in graphic cards (GPU) mimics and simulates the real-world behavior of light thus enabling a realistic experience in gaming. The prominent high-quality GPU out in the markets today is the NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 30 series and beyond so you want to keep your eye out on those.
One of the most significant attributes of a GPU is its ability to control screen refresh rates (measured in hertz) and that coupled with the type of screen resolutions that comes with the laptop design will enable a laptop gaming experience that is more fluid and realistic.
Speaking of refresh rates, this is what it looks like when a high-end GPU regulates refresh rates in a gaming interface. The refresh rate just shows how many times a certain image appears on the screen in the span of 1 second. So, 144 hertz (Hz) would mean within 1 second, a total of 144 images appeared on the screen.
Therefore, the higher the refresh rate frequency, the clearer the image is in the game and the better the user experience. However, 144 Hz of refresh rates is considered to be the base spec so if you looking for a better gaming laptop you can go for the 240-hertz panel and above, in this case not only are you getting that high refresh rates, but also, you’ll be getting faster response times and better contrast and way better color accuracy.
Battery life performance and heat management
With both the hardware and software coupled with huge game applications an efficient power supply is definitely non-negotiable. In order to narrow your options to get that best gaming laptop, you can’t sacrifice your battery life performance for such.
A high-performance battery is the one that gives you a life span within the range of 10–13 hours of the gaming experience at least.
Also, as a side tip, don’t waste your time on laptops that don’t have proper heat management and cooling system. Check the fans before purchasing, there should at least be two or more with a good exhaust outlet for heat transfer. Unless you want your laptop to have momentary blackouts then don’t even bother about it.
Upgradeability
Finally, last but not the least, look for a laptop that has the ability for future upgrades in hardware. Usually, regarding laptops, there are basically three parts that can allow for upgrading, the WIFI card, the RAM, and the storage of course.
These are important because if you are pretty well-versed with the specs of gaming laptops, then it can allow you to purchase the lowest spec of the laptop of your choice and then upgrade things in the future when the need arises.
As you look for that optimum well-rounded laptop with either a budget-friendly goal or more so on the performance efficiency and longevity, the upgrading capacity is a better alternative to take into consideration.
