GAMING LAPTOPS

Powerful, portable machines-gaming laptops are better than ever today

- By Jacob Ridley

Once upon a time, not that long ago, you'd be laughed out of a meeting or seminar for opening up a gaming laptop.

I’ve had it happen to me, during my early days writing about hardware. I took a gaming laptop to an event filled with tech journos and was roundly made fun of when I had to desperately find a power outlet in a meeting room, of which there were none, to try and save my ailing battery and any semblance of my dignity. As gaming laptops have evolved, that’s no longer something to worry about, though.

TUF A14 (2025)

ASUS $1,700

Bit of everything

The Asus TUF A14 has been reformed for 2025. It's largely the same laptop we've come to appreciate over the past year—not much has changed with the latest model. But it needn't have. Asus got a lot right with the TUF design, and this year's model adds an RTX 5060 and AMD Ryzen Al chip to help sweeten the deal. Slim and understated—two words not often used in correlation with 'gaming laptop'. Yet here is such a device and it wears it well. The screen will run up to 1600p and 165Hz, which is only really in range of the RTX 5060 at its core with help from Nvidia's Frame Generation feature, or at the very least DLSS. Though it looks sharp, crisp and bright for an IPS panel.

The standout feature for the A14 has to be the battery life. We saw well over two hours in the PCMark 10 gaming test, which is really spectacular considering the 73Wh battery in the TUF A14. It manages plenty of time away from the outlet nonetheless, which really makes this laptop a top pick for gaming and work.

PCGAMER VERDICT

→ Sleek

→ All the essentials

→ Great battery life

16 Area-51

ALIENWARE $2,800

Somewhat otherworldly