Buying a gaming laptop is a journey. A journey which has to be undertaken mostly alone. So here we are in a quest to guide you to buy the best gaming laptop in India.
It is very hard to come up with a laptop considering the number of choices. Should I go for a better processor or a better graphics card, or should I have more RAM is a question everyone would have asked themselves at one point of time. So we have also provided a guide at the bottom for you to gather information on how to pick up the best laptop from the miriad of laptops that are available in the market today.
Gaming laptop provide a graphics card so that you can play all the latest titles with ease. The addition of a graphics card means that they tend to be bulkier due to the cooling requirements, and these are intented for gamers alone.
Best Gaming Laptops in India
Let's start with the most powerful, mightiest laptops available in the market today, and go down by scale for each gamer and each budget.
Alienware M15 R2: Best Gaming Laptop
Buy from AmazonProcessor: Intel Core i9-9980HK 9th Gen processor
RAM: 16GB DDR4 RAM
Graphics Card: NVIDIA 2080 8GB Graphics
Storage: 5400rpm hard drive
Display: 15.6-inch screen
There would rarely be a person who has not heard of Alienware. They manufacture gaming laptops and have been in the business for a long time. Later they got aquired by Dell, but they keep the right to make the laptop and Dell handles sales and services.
The laptop is powered by an 9th generation Intel Core i9-9980HK processor. It is rare to see laptops powerd by a processor so powerful. This hugely powerful processor ensures that you can go on for longer times gaming, at Ultra settings. The processor is an octa core processor (8cores), and each core has two threads taking the thread count to a total of 16. You can move mountains with this sort of performance.
It has a base speed of 2.40GHz and has a turbo clock speed of 5.00GHz. To improve performance, Intel has also added 16MB of Intel Smart Cache.
The most important part of a gaming laptop is its graphics card, and Alienware has equipped this laptop with the best in town. An RTX 2080. This is the top of the line graphics card that is available in the market today. The only way you can build a PC which performs better than this is to club two together. This is an 8GB graphics card. Based on the Turing architecture, this card can play all the latest titles like Witcher, F1 2020, Far Cry or Assassins' Creed at Ultra settings.
In terms of memory, the laptop has 16GB of DDR4 RAM. You can edit videos or watch the most demanding of games with this RAM. For storage, Alienware has provided a 1TB SSD. This can be upgraded easily in case you need more space. The SSD also adds to the boot speed.
The laptop comes with a feature called Eye Tracking which is provided by Tobii. With Tobii eye tracking, when you move your eyes, the camera follows it and makes aiming and shooting easier. This is next level brilliant stuff.
Display is another department where this laptop shines. The display is OLED and has richer black colours. The display has a response time of 1ms making it pretty fast and you experienceing no ghosting. The display is brilliant in every respect and is bezel less.
The keyboard is backlit and is one of the best we have seen in gaming laptops. This laptop comes with Alienware Command Center with which you can adjust the colour of the keys to whichever colour you want. You can also overclock the laptop to get more perfromance that what the company has provided you with. This means you can push the laptop to its ultimate limits.
HP Omen X 2S
Buy from AmazonProcessor: Intel Core i7-9750H 9th Gen processor
RAM: 16GB DDR4 RAM
Graphics Card: NVIDIA RTX 2080 8GB Graphics
Storage: 1TB SSD
Display: 15.6-inch screen
If you don't want to shell that much on a gaming laptop, HP has an alternative for you. The Omen also cost north of 2 lakhs, but it provides some more crazy features.
The laptop features dual screen. The keyboard has been moved down and a screen has been placed in its place. This is useful if you use Twitch, Spotify or other similar apps while gaming. One of the apps can be put on the second screen so that you don't have to switch between apps to change something.
Featuring the most powerful laptop in the Intel range, this laptop makes no compromises on perfromance. The laptop features a 9th generation Intel Core i7-9750H processor. The processor is extremely powerful and can do any task you throw at it with relative ease. The processor is a hexa core (6 cores) processor and has a base frequency of 2.60GHz.
The graphics card on the laptop is an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 graphics card. An extremely powerful card that was welcomed by the gaming community by game fanfare. The reason for this fanfare is that the graphics card features some technologies which has been unheard of; ray tracing. We will get onto what ray tracing in the section how to select the best gaming laptop.
The display in the laptop is a 15.6" diagonal FHD screen. It has a crazy refresh rate of 240Hz. A higher refresh rate helps the display to keep in pace with the graphics card. For example, even if your graphics card gives a frame rate of 100fps, if your monitor refresh rates are low, then tearing might occur. That is users might get to see two half frames on the screen at once bisected horizontally.
It comes with 16 GB of RAM. The RAM provides lots of space for your game to load and also for your video editing needs, if you do them. The large amount of RAM means you can open as many browser windows as you want without the laptop breaking a sweat. This laptop also features a 1 TB SSD for storage. SSDs are faster than HDD and helps in increasing performance of the laptop.
The display also has anti-glare technology to make working at high lighting conditions easy. The micro-edge of the display adds beauty to the laptop. The display is WLED-backlit and has a resolution of 1920x1080.
The laptop weights 2.3kg and that is expected of a gaming laptop.
Asus TUF Gaming FX505DV-AL110T
Buy from AmazonProcessor: AMD R7-3750H 2.3GHz processor
RAM: 16GB DDR4 RAM
Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 6 GB
Storage: 1TB HDD + 512GB SSD
Display: 15.6-inch screen
But what if you don't have that much money, but still want an RTX laptop? Asus has the solution for you. The solution is to get a laptop with RTX 2060. This is the lowest spec RTX graphics card that you can get, but don't let that deter you. It packs tons of power and can even play most of the new games at Max settings.
The laptop is powered by an AMD processor, AMD Ryzen R7-3750H. We can compare this to the i7 series processors that Intel makes. The processor has a base speed of 2.3 GHz and is a quad core processor. With turbo boost, the processor can attain speeds of upto 4.0GHz. That is plenty of power for gaming and other tasks that you do on a daily basis.
The laptop packs with it an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card. This is a 6GB graphics card and offers 6GB of video buffer so that frames can be stored and processed easily by the graphicscard. This also ensures that the RAM is not used exessively by the graphics card.
The graphics card is based on Turing architecture and gives almost 6x performance over the previous generation counterpart. It also brings with it real time ray tracing and AI enhanced graphics. The graphics card has a boost clock speed of 1680MHz making it extremely powerful.
The laptop comes with 16GB of DDR4 RAM which will suffice for all your daily needs. You can upgrade the RAM to upto 32 GB if need arises. For more permanant storage the laptop features a 512GB SSD and a 1TB HDD. This is a lot of space for a laptop at this price range.
The 512GB SSD is where the operating system is loaded from and helps in decreasing the boot times. This helps Windows to start faster. A study conducted has concluded that Windows boots in 10s in a laptop with SSD while it takes around 30s for a normal HDD. Putting your games on the SSD will also help in faster loading.
The laptop offers a battery life of around 5 hours of video watching. That is a lot considering the laptop is a gaming laptop. Most of the gaming laptop dies at around 2 hours.
The display has a refresh rate of 144Hz. It has an IPS level nano-edge display. This gives the laptop ultra wide viewing angles.
The laptop has passed a number of military grade tests so that the laptop can survive some of the harshest of conditions. It has passed the MIL-STD-810G tests, successfully surviving varying conditions including solar radiation exposure, high altitude, and temperature extremes. This means that it can handle minor bumps and accidental knocks.
The keyboard also offers brilliant performance and has large keys to assist in gaming. The keyboard has RGB lighting and you can change the colour at will.
The laptop also features anti-dust cooling fan and has dual fans for efficient cooling during long hours of gaming. The laptop is extremely well designed and is durable making it a great gaming laptop.
Lenovo Legion Y740
Buy from AmazonProcessor: 9th Generation Core Intel I7-9750H
RAM: 16GB DDR4 RAM
Graphics Card: 6GB NVIDIA RTX 2060 Graphics
Storage: 1 TB SSD
Display: 15.6-inch screen with (1920X1080) full HD display
Lenovo has its gaming series laptops under the title Legion. They are excellent for gaming and offers great value for money. The laptop costs a bit above a lakh and offers great performance.
The laptop is powered by a 9th generation Intel Core i7 processor (i7-9750H). The processor has a base speed of 2.6 GHz and a maximum clock speed of 4.5 GHz. The processor is a hexa core processor and has two threads per core. This laptop offers enough performance for every task you might encounter in your daily life. The processor has turbo boost technology, which means the processor with boost the speed for a short span to make the laptop perform tasks faster.
The operating system in this laptop is Windows 10 Home and comes with lifetime validity.
The graphics card featured in this laptop is an Nvidia RTX 2060. The graphics card is extremely powerful and can play all the latest AAA games at High graphics. The graphics card is a 6GB graphics card and offers unparalleled performance.
The laptop has a 15.6" Full HD display which has anti glare technology which lets you game or work in even high lighting conditions. It has a resolution of 1920x1080. The display has a brightness of 500 nits and a refresh rate of 144Hz.
The high refresh rate helps prevent tearing and ghosting. Tearing and ghosting are phenomenons seen while gaming. Tearing is when the display on the left side is slightly different from the right side due to low refresh rates. Ghosting is when the previous frame does not vanish even when a new frame comes, giving the feeling of a ghost.
For temporary storage, the laptop has 16GB of RAM. This should see you through all of your daily tasks easily. It comes with a 1TB SSD to offer unparalleled performance. This kind of performance helps the laptop to boot in under 10s. That is a great feat. Even the loading times of games are decreased due to the high speed SSD and high amount of RAM.
The laptop weighs 2.2kg which is normal for a gaming laptop. It has a great build and has aluminium chasis giving a premium feel. The laptop comes with a 5hr battery life, which is long enough for a gaming laptop.
Another great feature is that the laptop comes with 1 year of onsite domestic warranty, which means, if something goes wrong they'll come to your house and fix the laptop for free. How cool is that?
Acer Nitro 7
Buy from AmazonProcessor: Intel Core i7 9750H Processor 9th Gen processor
RAM: 8GB DDR4 RAM
Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660Ti 6GB 6GB Graphics
Storage: 1TB SSD
Display: 15.6-inch screen
Perfect except for the lack of ray tracing graphics card. Would have easily moved up the chain if it had ray tracing.
The laptop has excellent build quality and is a battle station. The laptop has great build quality and excellent thermals for long hours of gaming. The laptop also comes with expansion slots so that you can easily upgrade RAM or storage.
The laptop is powered by Intel Core i7-9750H, a 9th generation processor. The laptop has great performance owing to a base clock speed of 2.60GHz offered by the processor. Accessing word documents, or web browsing is a breeze. Gaming is awesome with this processor, since it doesn't bottleneck the graphics card in any way.
The heart of gaming, its graphics card is an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660Ti. These are new processors that has been made along with the RTX series. They do not offer Ray Tracing but offers a performance greater than the outgoing GTX 1070 graphics card. The graphics card is excellent at processing today's most popular games and is optimised for playing all the latest titles. The graphics card is a 6GB graphics card.
For storage the laptop has a 1 TB SSD, which gives more than enough storage for all your games and offers performance that is great. The SSD performance gives increased performance to the gaming laptop since it has faster data access speeds and therefore the laptop can fully utilise its CPU.
For RAM, the laptop has just 8GB of DDR4 RAM. The RAM should suffice for most users but in case you find that you need more RAM, you can easily upgrade it.
This 2.5kg laptop has a battery life of 7 hrs. This battery life is great considering this is a gaming laptop and has a brilliant graphics card.
The laptop comes with a 15.6" screen. The screen is a Full HD display with IPS (in-plane switching) technology. It has a resolution of 1920x1080. The display has a brightness of 300 nits and has a refresh rate of 144Hz to make the viewing experience perfect. The display has extremely thin bezels to make the laptop look more appealing.
Overall this is a great laptop with unparalleled performance and has great build quality.
Guide to Buying the Best Gaming Laptop
Let's start with the very basics, screen size, build quality, battery life and so on, and then get onto technical things like CPU, graphics card, RAM and so on.
Display
The display is one of the main components of a gaming laptop. This is with what you're going to see your game for most of the time, unless of course if you have an external screen. Let's look at what are the factors that need to be considered while looking at the display of the screen.
Screen size
Laptops come with a screen size ranging from 13" (13 inch) to 17", but gaming laptops mostly start at 15" size. The bigger the screen the better experience you'll have. A larger screen will give you a more immersive experience as it will cover most of the area you see.
The disadvantage of having a large screen is that it becomes hard to carry it around. If you don't plan to carry around your laptop too much, we strongly recommend that you get a huge laptop, but if you want to take it to your office or college regularly, the better choice would be to go for a smaller screen.
Resolution
tldr: higher the resolution, better the clarity
Resolution is basically the number of pixels that a screen has. For example if someone says a screen has a resolution of 1920x1080, that means that there are 1920 pixels in the horizontal direction and 1080 pixels in the vertical direction giving a total of 2073600 pixels.
So what are pixels? Pixels are the smallest physical points on a screen. If you look at a low resolution screen or a tv, you can see individual dots or squares, these are the pixels. So if you have a large screen, and if the resolution is 1920x1080, the size of the pixels will be larger and you'll be able to see them.
Even if you have a larger screen, then 1920x1080 might become a bit low resolution.
So what is more important here is PPI.
PPI
tldr: larger the screen size the better
PPI stands for pixels per inch and this is the number of pixels that are there in each inch.
Let's say you have a 60" monitor and a 32" monitor. In this case even if you have 1920x1080 resolution for both, the 32" monitor will have better clarity. In short, when you go for bigger screens always ensure that you have a larger resolution.
Refresh rates
tldr: get a laptop with high refresh rates.
Refresh rate is the rate at which the screen refreshes. How a monitor works is that at each intervals a new image is drawn on the screen. Since the rate is very fast, we feel like it is a video.
If the rate at which the screen refreshes is extremely low, you'll feel like the video is getting stuck and is lagging. This is more noticeable during gaming. If the new frames are not drawn quicker then the opponent is at an advantage. Because if he has an extra frame, he'll be able to see you before you see him.
If the refresh rates are low, you might also experience phenomenons such as ghosting. Ghosting is when the previous frame is not cleared and that gives a feeling of a ghost.
Processor
Choose a processor that doesn't bottleneck your graphics card. For gaming, CPU is not much used. It is used while loading and to do small AI related things. This means, the CPU is not as important as the GPU. You just need to ensure that it meets the requirements of the GPU.
We would prefer getting a processor which is above i5 for all purposes gaming. So does all i5 processors make the cut? Sadly no. CPUs are made almost every alternate year with new technologies. And the older generation i5 processor might not work as good as a newer generation processor. So get a CPU which is at least 8th generation.
So how do you find the generation? Let's say the full name of the processor is Intel Core i7-9700K. This processor is a 9th generation processor. We can identify that from the first one or two digits of the number after the - symbol. Similarly Intel Core i5-10210U would be a tenth generation processor. Two digits are considered only for 10th generation and they are the latest generation available today.
RAM
While selecting RAM get at least 8GB of RAM. 8 GB suffices for most needs. Only if you find yourself lacking RAM do you need to upgrade to 16 or even 32 GB RAM.
