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The best gaming laptops under $1,000: Best overall, best battery life, and more

www.pcworld.com
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These are the best gaming laptops under $1,000 including popular brands such as Acer, HP, and Asus.
If you're jonesing for a zippy gaming experience but you're really strapped for cash, there are a number of budget options to consider. You can actually get some pretty decent CPU and GPU performance out of a budget gaming laptop, though you may need to dial your gaming visuals back from their maximum settings to hit that hallowed 60 frames per second mark in the latest cutting-edge games.

If you're not sure where to begin, don't sweat it. We've done the hard work for you and curated a list of gaming laptops that fall under the $1,000 mark. We've also included a couple of other options for those that can stretch their budget a little bit further to crank up the eye candy. Whether you love first-person-shooter games or something more story-driven, all these machines should be more than capable.

Read on to learn more, or check out our roundup of the best gaming laptops overall if you want a glimpse of what's available with a higher budget. Additionally, you'll often find gaming laptops going for cheap in our roundup of the best laptop deals, which we update every weekday.

1. Acer Swift X (SFX14-41G-R1S6) – Best overall Pros Stellar ultraportable performance

Sneaky gaming laptop with RTX 3050 Ti graphics

Impressive battery life considering high-end parts Cons Display feels cramped for creative work

Fan gets loud during heavy workloads

Poorly placed Pg-Up and -Down buttons Best Prices Today: Don't judge a laptop by its chassis. The Swift X may not look all that threatening at first glance, but under the hood you'll find some seriously powerful components. This ultraportable is packing an AMD Ryzen 7 5800U processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU, and 512GB of PCIe NVMe SSD storage. In our review, the Swift managed "48 frames per second at the Highest preset" when running Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p, and you'll get even faster performance if you don't mind dialing visual settings down from the maximum in the latest games (that's likely to be needed on…
Ashley Biancuzzo
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