The 10 Best Gaming Laptops Under $800

Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about rock’n’roll – Shigeru Miyamoto

If someone had told Alan Alcorn when he first released ‘Pong’ on an unsuspecting world that his simple two-player machine would start a global revolution that would change the way people played games forever, he’d almost certainly have thought they were crazy.

But as soon as people tasted Alcorn’s offering, they were hooked and in an effort to keep up with the public’s insatiable demand for more, the video gaming industry was born and was subjected to a tumultuous childhood, which resulted in it being forced to grow up far too fast.

A lot has changed in the five decades since ‘Pong’ first materialized, arcades rose and fell, gaming consoles have come and gone and the home computer revolution provided designers and gamers alike with all of the tools that they need to push video gaming far beyond the limits of what was considered to be and thought possible.

But just because games have become faster and far more advanced, it doesn’t mean that gamers can’t find an affordable way to keep up with and carry on playing the games they love, they can.

That’s why we’ve put together a list of the best gaming laptops you can buy for under eight hundred dollars so that you can carry on playing the games you love at a price that you can afford.

As a famous computer once intoned, “Would you like to play a game?” You would? Then, let’s begin…

Best Gaming Laptops Under $800

1. Dell G3 Gaming Laptop

Built by Del’s Gaming division to ensure that you’ll never fall or falter while in the throes of gaming, the G3’s quad-core eighth-generation Intel processors have been purposely designed to maximize performance and ensure smooth video streaming and responsive gameplay.

With its two hundred and fifty-six solid state-drive Dell has increased the G3’s reliability and made it faster so that it keeps up with whatever demands you, and your games make of it.

It’s built-in NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 graphic card and four gigabytes of devoted graphics memory mean that you’ll be plunged into a world of crystal clear and incredibly detailed graphics that will bring your game to life on the backlit fifteen-inch, anti-glare, wide-angle screen.

And as you’re submerged in the life-like graphics, you’ll be drowned in the completely immersive sound that the two front-facing speakers, which are powered by Wave MaxxAudio Pro, pump out.

It’s a lightning-quick machine that caught us, and will almost certainly catch you, by surprise and make your gaming experience infinitely better.

While it’s immersive and responsive, the G3 isn’t without its problems, the biggest being how cheap it feels.

The housing that Dell has used to pack the latest gaming technology in feels slightly substandard and almost as if it was an afterthought, and the keyboard is a little clunky and difficult to get to grips with too.

Those minor quibbles aside, it’s an incredible piece of gaming kit that’ll bring all of your big guns to glorious life.

2. Acer Aspire 7

Another fast machine thanks to its latest generation RYzen 5 quad-core processor, the Acer is equipped with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 graphics card and dedicated four gigabytes of graphics friendly RAM that faultlessly work together to bring your gaming world to life on its fifteen and a half-inch, high definition screen.

It’ll start and shut down on a dime and it’s WiFi 5 connectivity, packs enough punch to make the most out of any signal that you can pick up, no matter how weak it is.

Weighing in just under four pounds, it’s also light enough to game on the go, but if you are going to go down that road, make sure that you pack a pair of headphones as the sound that the Aspire 7 kicks out will make you the center of attention wherever you go.

It also feels like it’s been engineered for life on the go, as even though it’s a slimline machine, it’s chassis seems like it could take all the knocks that you’ll need it to and still boot up in record time.

Given that it was made to be portable and, almost certainly secretly designed with gaming in mind, it’s a shame that the Aspire 7 is dragged down by its relatively weak battery life.

Acer advertises it as lasting for around seven hours on a full charge, but when you start pushing the CPU a little harder, the battery drains far faster than we liked, and most gamers will be comfortable with, especially if you’re nowhere near a charging point.

3. Acer Nitro 5

Okay, we’ll admit it, we’re Acer fans, especially when they’re equipped with a blink and you’ll miss it CPU like the Nitro 5 is.

Powered by a ninth-generation Intel quad-processor, this machine isn’t just fast, it’s Millenium Falcon Kessel Run fast and when that speed is paired with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 and four gigabytes of dedicated RAM, it challenges you to try and keep up with it.

The keyboard feels intuitive and the placement of the arrow keys made response time faster and smoother, which given how alive the screen made gaming feel, we were grateful for.

If you’re going to play a fast game, you need to be fast to keep up with it and the Nitro’s keyboard places you smack bang in the middle of the action and gives you every fighting chance you’ll need to keep up.

Again, as it’s an Acer machine it’s light and at just five pounds, it’s incredibly easy to take with you wherever you go and as it’s equipped with up to minute WiFi 6 connectivity, it’ll let you make the absolute most of any signal that you can pick up.

It’s just a shame that it’s hampered by the same sort of battery life as Aspire 7 is and when the CPU is going full tilt and helping you to hard charge your way through a game, you can almost see the battery icon fading right in front of you.

Still, for all of that performance, a less than ideal battery life is a small price to pay

4. HP Pavilion 15

One of the last names we expected to see, let alone include on a gaming-friendly laptop list, was Hewlitt-Packard.

But they made the cut with a couple of machines and the Pavillion 15 is the first to come charging out of the stable door, mainly thanks to it’s incredible, tenth generation Intel quad-core processor and astonishingly fast five hundred and twelve-gigabyte solid-state drive.

It’s a rapid-fire machine that has enough connectivity and processing power to keep pace with whatever moves you make and whatever whichever game you’re playing throws at you.

The screen is sharp enough, even if, every now and then, the graphics card feels as though it is having a hard time keeping up with the flow of play, and the speakers could definitely do with an upgrade, which isn’t really an issue if you’re wired in with headphones.

But when you’re not, the sound quality definitely lacks the power you’d expect it to have. It’s light, incredibly portable, looks great and the battery was definitely designed to power whatever you need it to no matter how hard you’re pushing the machine.

It’s a pretty good little laptop for plowing into the gaming world with, but with a couple of much-needed upgrades, it could have been great. It’s just a shame that greatness is slightly beyond its reach.

5. Lenovo Ideapad L340 Gaming Laptop

Lenovo might be the workhorses of the laptop world, but they’ve earned their place on every gamer list a thousand times over. This wolf in sheep’s clothing is an ideal machine to carry around the office without letting anyone stumble across your secret gaming life.

Powered by a ninth-generation Intel quad-core processor, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card, eight gigabytes of dedicated RAM, and a five hundred and sixty-gigabyte solid-state drive, this is a gaming machine that likes to pretend that it enjoys spending time in the office.

With next to no lag time, a performance-enhanced sound system and a backlit screen and keyboard that’ll help you to make the most out of any gaming environment and comes loaded with moire gaming extras than we head time to discover, the Ideapad is a machine that flipped us upside down and knocked us for six.

It’s fast, responsive, the keyboard is intuitive and feels comfortable and when we thought we were going to overload it and were pushing it too hard, the fan kicked in to cool the CPU down.

Even pushing at full tilt with all guns blazing it didn’t lose a beat of its impressive performance or power and even though some users have complained that the backlighting is prone to failure, we didn’t find anything that would dissuade us from employing this machine as our daily gamer.

6. Acer Aspire 5

We realized after starting the list that the price point we fixed might be a little too rich for some gamers’ blood, so we thought that maybe it would be prudent to include an even more budget-friendly machine, hence the appearance of one of our old favorites, the Aspire 5.

Driven by a Ryzen 3 quad-core processor and a one hundred and twenty-eight-gigabyte solid-state drive with four gigabytes of dedicated RAM that serves the AMD Radeon Vega 3 graphic card, the Aspire 5 is far from being a slouch when it comes to fast, smooth, gaming responsiveness.

It’s fifteen and half-inch screen and Acer TrueHarmony speaker system provide an ideal backdrop for gaming action and the Inspire 5’s impressive eight-hour battery life should be enough to see even the most dedicated gamer reach their goals with this machine.

It might not be the most impressive gaming laptop on the market, but it still punches way above its weight and at the price that you’ll be able to pick it up at, you’d be doing yourself a disservice if it didn’t make your list of possible machines.

With the money that you’d have left over from the original budget, you could buy a lot of upgrades and invest in some new games to try out on your new machine. Sometimes the best tunes are played on a slightly older fiddle.

7. HP Pavilion Gaming Laptop

And we’re back to Hewlett-Packard with this purpose-built and designed gaming laptop that, despite the brand name, has more than enough processing power to please even the most ardent gamer.

Powered by the latest generation Intel quad-core processor, the HP uses an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 graphics card with a dedicated eight gigabytes of RAM.

Its backlit keyboard is a nice touch and adds a whole extra dimension in the looks department and the fifteen-inch screen is crystal clear and doesn’t let you miss a moment of the action.

While the sound system that this HP employs isn’t exactly brilliant, it isn’t exactly bad either, and when boosted with a good set of headphones will hurtle you headlong into the action.

Our only problem with this machine is that in terms of the technology that it uses versus the damage that it’ll do to your pocketbook, in all honesty, there are better machines for a similar price that we’d be far more comfortable spending our budget on.

And if we’re more comfortable looking elsewhere, then we’re pretty sure you will be too.

8. MSI GV62

Whenever anyone talks about gaming laptops, one name always comes up.

It’s impossible to discuss purpose-made gaming machines unless you drag MSI into the conversation and it’s pretty much impossible to buy an MSI laptop at the budget point that we set for ourselves and you. Unless that is, you choose a refurbished machine.

Certified and guaranteed to run like new, the GV62 has a two hundred and fifty-six-gigabyte solid-state drive, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 graphics card, and eight gigabytes of dedicated RAM.

It’s backlight wide-angle fifteen-inch screen and purpose-designed audio set-up make it an ideal machine for any gamer who is well and truly committed to immersing themselves in their gaming world.

With the budget that we set, the only way we were ever going to lay our hands on an MSI machine was if we took a backdoor way into the system, and while it may not be brand new, it still has all the processing power that MSI provide themselves on, and the gameplay is fast, sleek and sure and once you’ve used this machines keyboard, you’ll never want to game using any other.

There’s a reason gamers love MSI, and the GV62 is that reason wrapped in an incredibly attractive chassis.

9. Asus Vivobook S

Another home computing industry workhorse, the Asus Vivobook is one of those machines that most gamers don’t even give a second glance, but it’s that sort of narrow thinking that can ultimately result in you missing out on a bargain.

A dual-purpose machine that’s just as at home traversing the gaming highways as it is powering your office, the Vivobook has an eighth-generation Intel quad-core processor, a two hundred and fifty-six-gigabyte solid-state drive, and eight gigabytes of dedicated RAM.

Thanks to the NanoEdge technology that it uses, the screen to chassis ratio is around eighty percent which means that you get to see all of the action play out on a huge screen that combined with the ASUS Sonic Master sound system delivers an incredible amount of gaming performance.

Or it would if the machine had a dedicated graphics card, which it doesn’t, so gameplay can often seem a little clunky and slow and the graphics can lag behind the sound.

It isn’t ideal, but if you’re looking for a laptop that’s every bit as functional in the office, as it is in the hands of a cold-blooded gamer, then this might be the machine for you.

10. Asus TUF FX505DT

It’s a shame about the Vivobook but fear not as Asus has a dedicated gaming division and the TUF is the machine that they’ve supercharged and transformed into a gaming leviathan.

Driven by a Ryzen 5 quad-core processor and a two hundred and fifty-six-gigabyte solid-state drive, the TUF uses a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card with four gigabytes of dedicated RAM to perfectly capture all of the instantaneous and fast-flowing gameplay on its fifteen and half-inch crisp, clear screen.

Even when things hot up, which they will as the intuitive and incredibly responsive keyboard will help you to make sure that it does, the dual-fan system will kick in to keep the CPU cool, so you’ll never lose a second of gameplay.

We tried to find something that we didn’t like about this machine, but we couldn’t find anything. It’s fast, it looks good, it’s incredibly sharp, is packed with every bell and whistle that any gamer could ever want or need, and to top it all off, has the sort of battery life that we’ve spent a decade searching for.

If you want our advice, as one bunch of die-hard gamers to another, your quest to find a new gaming laptop should begin, and end, with the Asus TUF. Ours did, and the Asus TUF is where we draw our line in the gaming sand.

Buying guide for gaming laptops under $800

For an excellent overview of features to look for when shopping for a gaming laptop, watch this video:

Related Articles

• XLR Microphone for Streaming
• Gaming Laptop Under $600
• Budget Gaming Chair
• WiFi Card for Gaming
• Gaming Mouse Bungee