Good gaming laptops can range anywhere from $1200-$2000 so if you’re on a budget you’re probably looking to spend anywhere from $500-$1000. Honestly, at this price range you’re probably not going to be able to play the newest games at the highest graphical settings, that is, if you plan on buying a brand-new laptop. With that being said, you might be able to find a great deal on a refurbished or used budget gaming laptop that is powerful enough to play the latest games at the highest settings.
If all you’re interested in is mid range affordable gaming laptops that can play, say, World of Warcraft, then you can probably buy a five or $600 laptop that is brand-new. One situation you don’t want to find yourself in is having bought a very cheap laptop and end up not being able to play anything that you imagined that you might be able to play.
If you’re looking for a budget gaming laptop in the $300 range then you will definitely have to look for a refurbished or used laptop. This is simply the hard truth because a new laptop at this range will simply not have the CPU or video card power to play any graphically demanding game.
So, Where Can You Find a Good Budget Gaming Laptop
The first places I would go to look are: Newegg, Tiger Direct, and Amazon. Newegg and TigerDirect are the superstores of computer parts, refurbished computers, new computers and laptops. They also have other various electronics. I probably don’t need to explain what Amazon is, but in case you haven’t heard of it is the biggest online marketplace with just about anything you can imagine.
Simply go to any of these places by clicking on their links on this page and search for laptops and then sort by price. This obviously isn’t enough to simply find a budget gaming laptop, because you’re going to need to know what to look for in a gaming laptop. This brings us to the next section.
What Should You Look for in a Gaming Laptop
Dell's Alienware Laptop, Though, it is not quite a Budget Laptop
I’m going to list the features that you should look for in no particular order, just keep in mind that things like screen size and hard drive space can be left up to your preference, but read the sections anyway as you might find the information valuable.
Let’s start with screen size and resolution. I’m going to explain to you what resolution is, if you already know what it is and how it affects every game that you play then skip this part, if you don’t then read on. If you’re a gamer you’ve probably went into the video settings of many games that you’ve played and have seen an option to change the game’s resolution. This is often the most overlooked yet most important video setting that any gamer could change. You want to play all of your games at your monitor’s maximum resolution. For instance, my monitors maximum resolution is 1900 x 1200; therefore, I want to play every game at that resolution. If I don’t play games at that resolution they will not look nearly as good as they should. So, where am I going with this? Well, the higher your monitor’s maximum resolution is the harder your laptop’s video card will have to work to play a game. This is because there are more pixels for the video card to render. One could play the game at 800×600 and allow the video card to render less pixels but the graphics would simply look like crap compared to running it at the maximum resolution. So, my point is that you might have a better gaming experience on a computer with a 15.6″ screen then you would on a laptop with a 17 inch screen. This is because laptops with bigger screens often do not have a better video card to make up for the increased screen size and maximum resolution. However, it should be noted that just because a laptop has a bigger screen size does not mean it will have a higher maximum resolution, although this is often the case, so just watch for that.
Next, let’s take a look at the CPU. You will want to find a CPU with the highest gigahertz possible and the most cores possible. I would recommend at least getting a laptop with a dual core processor and it would be nice if you could find one with a quad core processor. Keep in mind that a quad core processor with lower gigahertz than a dual core processor will probably be faster than the dual core. As far as AMD or Intel goes, it’s probably not going to matter much when looking at a budget gaming laptop. Although, if you do end up spending quite a lot of laptop then keep in mind that currently, Intel CPUs do perform better.
The RAM, or random access memory, is another very important feature to look for in a budget gaming laptop. Try to find a laptop with at least 4 GB of RAM, eight would be even better. Simply keep in mind that higher is better. The best gaming laptops always have a decent amount of RAM.
Hard disk space is obviously up to user preference, just keep in mind what you want to use your laptop for and that games are currently getting bigger and bigger with some of the newer games taking up up to 30 GB of space. I would talk about solid-state drives, but our budget gaming laptop you’re probably never going to run into one.
The Most Important Thing to Look for in a Budget Gaming Laptop
All right, what is the most important thing to look for in a budget gaming laptop? If you answered “the video card” then you would be spot on. Subsequently, this will also end up being the most difficult feature to find in a budget gaming laptop. So, my recommendation is to look for this first and then the rest of the features later. What is nice about this is that laptops with a gaming video card tend to have all of these other features. This is because if they have a gaming video card it would be pointless to not have the rest on a gaming laptop.
So, What Are My Recommendations?
Honestly, I am not going to recommend anything specific, this is because you’ll probably end up buying a used or refurbished laptop and anything I recommend might be gone by the time you get to the webpage that I’ve recommended. However, as I said before I do recommend checking out either Tiger Direct, Newegg and Amazon, or all three. Go to their sites, search for laptops and then simply sort the list by price. Then look for the features I’ve mentioned above, starting with the video card.
If you can’t find a good new or refurbished budget gaming laptop at these places then might be worth checking out Dell and Dell’s gaming computers. If you’ve been a gamer for any length of time you’ve probably heard of Alienware computers, Alienware is now a part of Dell, so check them out as well.
A note about refurbished laptops- Keep in mind that refurbished laptops are often of the same quality as brand-new laptops. This is especially true when buying from places like Newegg and TigerDirect, because they are very reputable places to buy from and him actually refurbished the laptops into great quality pieces.
If you have any questions about buying a budget gaming laptop then I encourage you to leave a comment below, thanks for reading this.