Best Gaming Laptop for 2025

Best Gaming Laptop for 2025

Best Gaming Laptop for 2025: If you’re already on the lookout for the best gaming laptop to buy this year, the question is: Buy now or wait? The new models — and the chips they’ll ride in on– launched at CES 2025.

The biggest from Intel, AMD, Nvidia. But the refreshed laptops don’t usually ship until between March and June, so you may want to pause buying or take advantage of dropping prices on older models as retailers try to make room for the upgraded ones.

And it will be some time after that until we’ve got a decent number of them tested, reviewed and ready for recommending on this list. You cal also check out the best laptops overall and our favorite laptops from CES.

What is the best laptop overall?

My favorite model that has a good balance of price, weight, performance, screen and design at the moment is the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16. The model we tested is relatively pricey at $2,700 for an upscale configuration with a 16-inch OLED screen, RTX 4080, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD and an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H.

Solid configurations start at $2,000. I consider it the best general choice for gaming, but its little sibling. the G14 is a little more highly rated because of its more general-use advantages, like size, weight and lower price.

Best Gaming Laptop for 2025: The best of the budget gaming models is the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16. Acer knows how to wring performance out of ever component, and this one is fast for its low-end RTX 4050 graphics, which is sufficient for 1080 gaming and a bright display.

My recommendations for the best laptops are based on our benchmark-based and hands on testing (we play games,too). We continually test laptops, so we’ll be updating our recommendations as we review the latest models.

Best gaming laptops 2025

Best overall gaming laptop

Asus ROG Zyphrus G16 (2025)

Both the G16 and its smaller 14-inch sibling are excellent gaming laptops and very similar, but i chose the 16-inch, mostly for the larger screen, more powerful GPU and broader port selection. Best Gaming Laptop for 2025: It’s a good pick for creative work, thanks to the calibrated OLED display.

Pros

Excellent fast, calibratedt OLED screen

Well designed

Performance vs size reasonable balanced

Good port selection

Cons

Battery life is just okay

Big power brick

Bottom and hinge area can get hot

Setting is Armoury Crate can get confusing

Another laptop of the creative-slash-gaming genre based on Intel’s Core Ultra processors, the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 does stand out in some ways, including its well-designed chassis, huge touchpad, comfortable keyboard and good performance given its trade-offs. The Core Ultra can’t match the performance of the HX processors, but it’s thinner and has better battery life than you’ll get with those.

Best Gaming Laptop for 2025: Like its smaller sibling, the Zephyrus ROG G14, its technically considered an Nvidia Studio model and chips with Nvidia’s studio driver rather than the more common Game Ready version. You can switch to the latter if you want the more frequent and game-optimized updates.

Unlike the G14, there are a ton of configurations of the G16, even if you don’t count the imminent model, which will incorporate AMD’s forthcoming Ryzen AI 300 series chips, slated to ship in mid-July. You can get the Intel models with 16GB or 32GB RAM. A GeForce RTX 4050,4060,4070,4080 or 4090. an HDR OLED or 500-nit IPS display, both with a maximum refresh rate of 240Hz and 100%P3 gamut coverage. Up to 2TB RAM and in dark gray or white. White adds $200 to the price is more complicated.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 GU605MZ

Price as reviewed: $2,700

Display: 16-inch, 240Hz/60Hz, 2,560 x 1,600 OLED, 100% P3, Vesa Display HDR True Black 500

CPU: 2.5GHz Intel Core Ultra 9 185H

Memory: 32GB LPDDR x 7467 (soldered)

Graphics: 12GB GDDR6 Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080, up to 115w

Storage: 1TB SSD, SD card slot

Ports: 2 x USB-C with 100w PD( 1 x Thunderbolt 4 with DP 2.1 on iGPU, 1 x DP 1.4 with G-Sync), 1 x HDMI 2.1b. combo audio

Networking: Intel AX211Wi-Fi 6E. Bluetooth 5.3

Operating system: Windows 11 Home (23H2)

Weight: 4.3 lbs/2kg

Best Gaming Laptop for 2025: You can’t get every combination, though. For instance, I wish the $2,000 model with the RTX 4070 came with 32GB RAM instead of just 16GB, for 32GB, you have to bump up to our $2,700 RTX 4080-equipped test configuration, which is larger, heavier (by about 3.5 ounces/100g) and comes with a bigger AC adapter. It’s likely less powerful but would still have good everyday performance and a lower price.

Design and features

Best Gaming Laptop for 2025

In fact, the design and display have a ton in common with the G14, it’s just bigger and beefier, for the most part. Similarly well designed, but it has more ports because it’s bigger. The membrance–switch keyboard feels great for typing — it feels like there’s more travel than there is, with a nice bounce, a pleasant soft-touch surface and big, hard-to-miss keycaps. (For gaming, you migh want to attach an external keyboard, though).

Like the G14, it has a diagonal set of white LEDs on the top that flashes in patterns , for example, to sync with audio or for notifications. You can turn it off and adjust the brightness, and when it’s off, it just looks reflective. I hate to say it, i keep it off, because the flashing gets really annoying in a way i can’t ignore.

The Ceraluminum shell — Asus branded aluminum and ceramic curface — seems pretty hardy and smudge resistant, at least the grey version. It even allowed for easy cleaning when i dripped some coffee on the wrist rest area. Oops.

The secondly functions aren’t brightly backlit — you can tell the LED is in the center beneath the key — but they are lit well enough to make them out, which is important if you work in the dark. They also stay cool when the laptop heats up. As you’d expect there’s per-key RGB lighting.

Because it’s larger than the G14 and is Intel-based, it has a different set of ports and more of them, including a Thunderbolt 4/USB-C as well as a slower USB-C port, a couple of USB-A ports, HDMI and combo audio. There’s also a full-size SD card slot.

It’s relatively thin for a 16-inch model with a discrete GPU, about the same as a MacBook Pro 16 and Razer Blade 16. Overall, if you turn off the slash lighting on the cover it gives off a more serious vibe than you get from a gaming laptop but a little less stuffy than a business slab. That includes the decent business-quality 1080 webcam.

Best Gaming Laptop for 2025: It supports Nvidia’s Advanced Optimus, Which means you can force it to exclusively use the discrete GPU without rebooting via the Nvidia driver. And there are definitely times when you want to force it, there’s the occasional app or game that confuses Optimus and you end up in a bad cycle of switching between the dGPU-only, but that uses the traditional must-reboot MUX switch. Like a lot of the options in Armouny Crate, which have seemingly been replaced elsewhere within the app or don’t apply to a particular system, you shouldn’t use it.

The 1080p webcam is sufficient and supports windows hello but isn’t great. It has meh low-light quality, the white balance is off in controlled light, it’s too high contrast and the Studio Effects are light if the horrible masking — blurred hair and the background constantly peeking through — don’t bother you. You can probably improve it a bit with some tweaking or using another virtual camera ( like Nvidia Broadcast). But most webcams are still pretty limited and the automatic/default setting are already optimal.

The mic has decent pickup, and Armoury Crate has bunch of different software noise-canceling choices, but many of them sound really processed (as opposed to natural) when compensating for ambient noise. If your only concern is clarity, then it shouldn’t be an issue. The laptop’s sound is better than usual, with a little more bass and broad soundstage, and it serves well for video and music. As long as your game doesn’t require locational cues, it’s fine for gaming vocals and ambient sound as well.

Fast OLED moderate CPU

Asus brand its flagship ROG laptop screens as Nebula HDR. Our review unit came with the new Nebula HDR OLED display. It supports the mid tier of VESA’s OLED DisplayHDR certification, Display HDR True Black 500 and gets relatively bright for an OLED laptop display at just under 400 nits in everyday use and just over 600 nits in a 10% window in HDR. As you’d expect from a display with its specs and Dolby Vision support, video looks really good.

It didn’t clip blacks too much in gaming, but you’ll want to use in-game adjustments for more visible dark areas if important things lurk there. It’s got the same gaming modes as the G14 if you want a real boost in the deeps shadows and don’t mind seriously low contrast, like 300,1 In fact, the Game Visual presents inArmouny Crate don’t seem optimized for OLED at all, it feels like Asus never goes back to optimize them for new display technologies — or remove them so you shouldn’t use them.

Color measurements

The laptop comes calibrated for sRGB, D65 P3 and DCI P3. While it’s quite accurate for all of them, the gray scale is inconsistent and gets worse as you lower brightness. Nor are the profiles constrained to any particular brightness level, so you may need some trial and error if you need color-critical accuracy.

It comes with a setting in Armouny Crate, OLED Flicker-Free Dimming, which ostensibly helps prevent flicker at low brightness levels. But you can’t pin it anywhere, so if you want to use it you have to fire up Armouny Crate. And you can still use the system brightness slider. It’s kind of old, though, all it seemed to do was does is lower the brightness gradually compared with the system control, which i find really annoying.