Gaming laptops 2025

[Anonymous Chicken]

So it is/was about time to acquire a gaming laptop. What a weird process to find something suitable in the consumer paradise that is the modern industrialized world.

Mostly I looked at things from Lenovo and XMG with a smattering of Asus/Acer/HP and the other usual suspects at a local retailer that has keen pricing. Been watching prices a while.

Cheap is good. Lets start at Lenovo LOQ. Kind of OK, but screens are 16:9, battery life is an afterthought, and pricing is the thin edge of the wedge. They start at maybe 9-cashola-units but thats with absurd-bad GPUs, it goes up to maybe 15-cashola-units for a 5060. But then then they pair the 5060 with 2560x1440 to make it suffer and the price already Lenovo Legion 5 territory. OK so consider those. Can get a 5060 with 1920x1200 (IMO the proper res for that card) but all the way down at 300nit, and then they refuse to offer any with a RGB keyboard. Its theoretically an option, but not available. Or it is available, but with a 2560x1600 OLED screen. Too many pixels for the GPU, too shiny. They had a fine Legion 5 with 8 cores of Zen4 and 5060 at a good sale price of 14-cashola-units but obviously they put in a single 16GB DIMM to annoy OCD customers (also no RGB keyboard). Ideally I want 32GB or even 24GB, and two DIMMs. OK so they also have Legion 5 Pro, but now all the screens are 2560x1600 but at least I can get matte options. Obviously those are all 13th- or 14th-gen Intel desktop silicon pushing 5060 graphics. Oh, one at 17-cashola-units with a 5070 and a presumably toasty 14900HX... and one 16GB DIMM. No option to customize it, of course. And thats is all the farther Lenovo would go on a matte screen, everything else is shiny. The price of a better GPU (i.e. 5070ti) was dunno 25-cashola-units. WTF.

Anyway over at XMG you can customize things better and I had some OK-ish stuff speced out at a bit under 20-cashola-units (XMG Core 16). Kinda pricy, but maybe OK. Probably too much screen for a 5060 GPU (and also kinda pricy, more so with a 5070). What I really wanted was a 5070ti (for example XMG Apex 16 Max) but that was over the magic 20-cashola-units by a good margin, and then they would only pair it with a 14900HX, 8945HX or 9955HX. So a huge machine with crap battery, certainly no big GPU from them. Apparently I could only choose something decidedly sub-optimal. Indecision continued for weeks.

Eventually I noticed an Acer Nitro 16S AI sporting a 5070ti, 32GB of RAM, 2560x1600 matte at 400nits, going under 20-cashola-units on sale. The CPU was an Ryzen AI 350 (8 cores, zen5, small die), unusually modest to pair with a 5070ti, and potentially a great idea. The issue (obviously there would be an issue) was that no reviews exist. It basically does not exist on the internet. There is a smaller version (with "V") that ships with an undersized power brick and got called out on that (
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IbB91AZ9wA
). Not the best chassis build quality either, but probably acceptable. After a day or two I discovered that this larger not-V model is apparently mostly(-ish) the same thing as the Acer Helios Neo 16S (
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgmL9hPDf00
) which is reviewed all over the place. So I guess thats just how it is? Cross my fingers and order the damn thing, un-reviewed, un-seen.

From the Helios Neo that did get reviewed, it seems that between the thin chassis and the 230W power brick, the GPU will not perform quite like it could. With luck, maybe the efficient little CPU is tuned to leave the watts for the GPU? Regardless, the less-thick and lighter build is good, 12GB of VRAM is good. The boxes are checked off, and that was the adventure.

I have hereby increased what the internet knows about the Acer Nitro 16S AI.

 

[Ardax]

So... There's kind of a reason that most of the Internet focuses on specific models.

They tend to suck in the least annoying ways.

The ones that few people know about? Tend to have some serious compromises.

But, I have a Nitro V 16 AI with a Ryzen 5 240 and an RTX 5050 on the way because it's dirt cheap and won't be asked for more than it can handle.

So I'll be finding out about those... After Christmas.

 

[Anonymous Chicken]

So far, so good here. Best of luck with yours.

It was actually a system much like you describe that got me doing searches and stumbling on the machine I chose. Then: <hobbit>It comes with 5070ti? I'm getting one.</hobbit>

 

[Anonymous Chicken]

I'd like to wrap up my public service with a tiny summary of the laptop. For the benefit of search engines: "Acer Nitro 16S AI" with 5070ti and Ryzen AI 350. Unreviewed until this moment!

Pleasant machine. I'm not a benchmarks and FPS kind of guy, so YMMV, but I find the trio of performance noise and heat very tolerable. So far its been running on "balanced" because it has the balls to do that, and its pleasant in that setting. IMO, a CPU suitable for some office machine or ultrabook was a great move, though I speculate this is one of the few applications of this chip where there is enough sustained wattage on hand to realistically notice that half the cores are actually C-cores.

Screen is good (matte 2560x1600), keyboard colorful and fine to use. Chassis gives the feel of thin and light much more than any feeling of cheap. (That comes from someone who has used big heavy Thinkpads at work forever.)

Seems a bit slow to wake from hibernate. Comes with annoying software that needs to be removed.

The cord that comes with the power brick was weirdly loose, so I swapped it (was just a standard power cord) and that seems to fix it. The laptop was sometimes deciding it was not plugged in while using the stock cord. One little bit too cheap there, Acer.

Would buy again.

 

[cepheid]

Just throwing in that the pricing for 2026 laptops is off the wall, so now is probably a pretty decent time to grab a 2025 laptop at a good price before the inventory is gone. $2500-3000+ for Asus's latest g14 and g16 offerings is bananas, and Lenovo and others aren't looking competitive either.

 

[Kyuu]

Yep. Just looking at what it would take to replace my laptop (this guy except with upgraded RAM and SSD -- when I got this, I configured it with 32GB of RAM because the cost difference was so small it didn't make sense not to, imagine that!) with something that's just a bit of an upgrade, it's like $2500 (as opposed to the roughly $1500 I spent on my current laptop). Thanks, Obama AI.