Gaming laptops come in various shapes and sizes, though many of the heavy hitters remain thick and beefy machines that maximize cooling to get the most out of their powerful chips. Most are awash in RGB lighting and edgy designs geared towards capital-G Gamers, but there are also thinner, lighter options that are more portable and less showy.
Our go-to recommendation that checks the boxes for most people is, and has been for a while, the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14. It’s a gaming laptop that doesn’t forget the “laptop” part. The G14 is a versatile machine for both play and work, and it travels exceptionally well.
The most important part of any gaming laptop, just like desktop PCs, is the graphics card. Laptop GPUs can’t stack up to full-size cards that reach much higher wattage in desktops, but that doesn’t stop the likes of Nvidia from making things a little confusing with the naming scheme on its RTX brand of GeForce cards. So keep in mind that, for example, an RTX 5090 laptop card doesn’t come anywhere near the performance of a desktop 5090. Desktops may always win out in raw performance, but gaming laptops are a simpler turnkey solution that can easily go places (yes, even the ones that feel like you’re toting around a cinderblock).
It now starts at $1,799.99 instead of $1,699.99. But you get a little more for your extra money since even the base Zephyrus G14 comes with a lovely, high-res OLED display capable of a 120Hz refresh rate, and it still has a great keyboard and trackpad. Games play well on high settings, though due to the thin chassis, the G14 — and even its 16-inch sibling, the Zephyrus G16 — are known to get a little hot to the touch, and their fans are quite noisy.