All posts tagged: windows pcs

Best Gaming Laptops (2026): Razer, Asus, Dell, and More

Best Gaming Laptops (2026): Razer, Asus, Dell, and More

Published by skeptic

Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 10 (16 Inch, Intel) Now, there’s another class of high-end gaming laptop that focuses more on performance than being thin or portable. The Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 10 is one of my favorites in this class, featuring a beautiful white chassis and glossy OLED display. Unlike some OLED displays, the Legion 7i’s screen can be cranked up to over 1,000 nits of brightness. The result is some really splendid HDR performance that brings games to life. HDR is a powerful way of improving the visuals of your games without a performance cost. The Legion 7i Gen 10 is one of the very best in this regard. It’s still fairly thin at 0.7 inches thick too, while a lot of the ports are found on the back. It’s the definition of a “clean” gaming laptop. It’s no slouch when it comes to performance either, offering either the RTX 5070 Ti or RTX 5080 for graphics. Cheap Gaming Laptops That Are Worth It No gaming laptops worth buying are actually cheap. High-refresh rate …

9 Best Windows Laptops (2026): WIRED-Tested Laptops to Buy

9 Best Windows Laptops (2026): WIRED-Tested Laptops to Buy

Published by skeptic

You’ll want to read our extensive guide on How to Choose the Right Laptop, but for the basics, you’ll want to decide what category of laptop you need. Most people should buy a 13-inch or 14-inch laptop, and spending around $750-$1,000 is a good place to start. You should expect a laptop around this price to get good battery life, have a decent screen, perform well enough for basic tasks, and have a comfortable keyboard and touchpad. You should also expect at least 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage. Anything more than that gets into premium territory where you’re paying for higher specs, more performance, or extra features. If you want something with a discrete GPU for either gaming or creative workflows, you’ll need to spend more than this. A laptop like the Dell 14 Plus is the ideal example of what you can get while shopping in this price range. You can even find laptops with OLED panels, up to one terabyte of storage, depending on how good the discounts happen …

How to Choose the Right Gaming Laptop (2026): What You Need to Know

How to Choose the Right Gaming Laptop (2026): What You Need to Know

Published by skeptic

Gaming laptops used to be straightforward. They were powerful but thick and unwieldy. These days, you have options. There are gaming laptops that prioritize performance at all costs and others that home in on thinness, cost, or design. Heck, there are even gaming tablets and 2-in-1s. That breadth of choice means choosing a gaming laptop in 2026 isn’t simple. While picking any option from our Best Gaming Laptops, Best Cheap Gaming Laptops, and Best Laptops guides is a good place to start, you still might not end up with a gaming laptop perfectly suited for your needs. Having tested many gaming laptops in over a decade of reviewing products, I’ll break down each element of these spendy machines to lead you in the right direction, as well as explain what to expect from the major laptop brands. Updated February 2026: We’ve added information on the latest gaming laptop announcements from CES, as well as the new context on pricing, the memory shortage, and CPUs. Table of Contents AccordionItemContainerButton What Size Gaming Laptop Should You Get? …

9 Best Cheap Laptops (2026), Tested and Reviewed

9 Best Cheap Laptops (2026), Tested and Reviewed

Published by skeptic

Compare Top 9 Budget Laptops Other Budget Laptops to Consider HP OmniBook 5 16 for $630: The HP OmniBook 5 16 shares a lot in common with the Lenovo IdeaPad 5i 2-in-1 16. It has right around the same size chassis and comes with the same Intel processor. It’s also dinged by a similar budget display that isn’t very color-accurate. It’s decent, but the discount on the $550 IdeaPad 5i above makes it the better option. I haven’t tested the Snapdragon X Plus version of the OmniBook 5 16, but based on my other reviews, I have a feeling that its current selling price of $550 is a crazy-good deal. Lenovo LOQ 15. Photograph: Luke Larsen Lenovo LOQ 15 for $779: I tested the RTX 5060 model of the LOQ 15, which is an incredible deal. The RTX 5050 model is also a solid option. It’s not quite as cheap as the Acer Nitro V 16, but it doesn’t have the power adapter issue and has a better design. The LOQ 15 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) …

6 Best Gaming Laptops (2026): Tested and Reviewed

6 Best Gaming Laptops (2026): Tested and Reviewed

Published by skeptic

Top 6 Gaming Laptops Compared Other Gaming Laptops to Consider Photograph: Luke Larsen Alienware 16X Aurora for $1,970: Alienware has lost some focus with its gaming laptops recently, but its latest refresh feels like a return to form. The Alienware 16X Aurora (7/10, WIRED Recommends) sits in the middle of the lineup, attempting to offer the right balance of performance, premium features, and price. At its current price, it nails that walk across the tightrope. Though it isn’t flashy, the design is understated yet refined. And while there are cheaper ways to get RTX 5060-level performance, the bright, color-accurate IPS display is a great upgrade, as is the premium touchpad. All in all, the Alienware 16X Aurora ended up being my favorite Alienware gaming laptop in years. It’s too expensive at retail price, so wait for a discount on this one. MSI Titan 18 HX for $5,200: Power. It’s what PC gamers want most, right? Well, if that’s you, and you don’t have a budget, get the MSI Titan 18 HX (7/10, WIRED Recommends). It …

8 Best Laptops (2026), WIRED-Tested and Approved

8 Best Laptops (2026), WIRED-Tested and Approved

Published by skeptic

Compare Top 8 Laptops How Much Should You Spend on a Laptop? AccordionItemContainerButton If you’re shopping for a laptop, you probably have an idea of how much you want to spend. But some context might help put things in perspective. The cheapest laptops cost around $200, but they can range up to $5,000. Meanwhile, the average amount people spend, according to the best data we have, is around $750. That lands decidedly in the midrange, spitting between the more expensive devices that are over $1,000 and the budget-tier machines you find below $700. When we talk about pricing, it’s often the “starting” price of the laptop, meaning the lowest-priced configuration. This is really important to consider, as you want to compare devices apples-to-apples as much as possible. For example, a cheaper laptop might start at $750 with 256 GB of storage, while a more premium laptop might start at this same price but come with 512 GB or even 1 TB of storage. Increasingly, you can find some really decent laptops around this price, some …

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

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

Published by skeptic

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 …

Alienware Aurora Gaming Desktop Review: Great Value

Alienware Aurora Gaming Desktop Review: Great Value

Published by skeptic

It also came with two sticks of Kingston Fury 16-GB RAM and a Wi-Fi 7 card. All that for $1,550 is a really solid deal. There are cheaper ways to get RTX 5070-level performance, such as this iBuyPower system, but the Alienware Aurora is also far from the most expensive either. The Asus ROG G700, for example, is hundreds of dollars more, even when similarly configured. I haven’t tested these yet myself, so I don’t know how equivalent the performance or fan noise is. But the Alienware Aurora Gaming Desktop is a great deal, especially if you catch it on sale. The Alienware Aurora Gaming Desktop performs fine enough. It’s about 5 percent behind the typical RTX 5070 scores in 3DMark Steel Nomad, a standard benchmark for measuring gaming PCs. The RTX 5070 is considered primarily a 1080p video card that can occasionally jump up to 1440p, depending on the game. You can see the frame rates in the chart below, all of which were tested at max settings without ray tracing, frame generation, or …