3 Best Cheap Gaming Laptops (2026): WIRED-Tested and Approved

Most cheap gaming laptops share a lot in common. They’re all usually between 0.8 and 1 inch thick and tend to have bare-bones gaming-capable hardware. Here are some of the key specs to look for:

Display: 15-inch or 16-inch display. Depending on the aspect ratio, they’ll have basic displays with a standard 1920 x 1080 or 1920 x 1200 resolution. You won’t find higher-resolution panels on gaming laptops under $1,000. Also, take a look at the refresh rate. 144 Hz is the standard, but the higher the better for less motion blur and smoother animation. While OLED and mini-LED are more common in higher-end gaming laptops, all budget-oriented options use LED IPS.

CPU: The latest processors from Intel and AMD will all be here, and in the budget tier, the differences aren’t as significant as in higher-end options. For AMD, that’s usually either the Ryzen 5 220 or Ryzen 7 250. Intel’s latest gaming chips in this price range are Intel Core Ultra 5 225H or Core Ultra 7 240H. While Intel has announced its next-gen Core Ultra Series 3 chips, these still haven’t come out just yet.

GPU: We’re currently in Nvidia’s RTX 50-series graphics cards, which came out at the beginning of 2025. In gaming laptops under $1,000, you’ll be stuck with either the RTX 5050 or 5060. These likely won’t be replaced until at least 2027, so it’s safe to buy these for now.

Memory: You want at least 16 GB of RAM, and that’s typically what you’ll be stuck with in budget gaming laptops. Many gaming laptops let you upgrade RAM yourself later, though with the price of stand-alone memory these days, it might not be a bad idea to configure it with 32 GB upfront.

Storage: Gaming laptops start at 512 GB, and that will be enough for most. Upgrading to 1 terabyte isn’t a bad idea, though, whether that’s configured up-front or doing it yourself later. You can always store games on an external hard drive, but with the size of games these days, the more storage you have the better.