Cheap gaming laptops with discounts – best picks and tips

It is widely believed that a laptop built for gaming is the perfect combination between a lot of RAM and a powerful CPU, plus some powerful graphics. Such devices can face every modern game,  but with current financial insecurity and component prices going higher every day, many potential buyers are trying to find a good price/performance ratio in the laptop they are acquiring. Thus, they are turning more and more towards the cheaper gaming notebooks available on the market.

Many producers, including Asus, HP or Dell offer top of the line laptops with Intel processors in excess of 2 GHz and some even over 4GB of RAM, thus making them able to run more than the Solitaire game Windows comes preloaded with.

Furthermore, the best gaming laptop attribute is given by the graphical card it comes equipped with and its price. Ranging from a couple of hundreds of bucks to a couple of thousands, manufacturers offer video performances from Ati or NVidia in single unit or crossfire configuration.  Also, for budget configuration there are integrated video cards from manufacturers such as Intel. The graphical card gives the computer the rendering speed it needs in games and multimedia activities, but is a big battery consumer, so autonomy will be affected by this component.

Gaming laptops can be affordable

Thus, if you’re looking for a good gaming netbook, here’s what is should have inside it:

• at least a dual core processor, and try not to pick something with ULV CPUs (low voltage ones built for autonomy and not for performance). Top notch options even come with quad-core processors, and those are a good options if you can afford them
• at least 4 GB of memory
• at least a 250 GB hard-drive, because games these days get bigger and bigger. If you can get a 7200 rpm one, it should be even better, as it’s known that the slowest component of a laptop is the HDD
• dedicated graphic card is a must. The more powerful the better. And you shouldn’t care too much about autonomy, you’re looking for a gaming notebook not a travel companion with huge battery life
• good ergonomic keyboard is a must
• try to read reviews of the laptops you’re looking at and see if it doesn’t have temperature problems. Because gaming laptops have powerful components and you might even want to overclock them, some might have problems with heat.

In the end, from such machines you should expect performance, but, in compensation, you’ll have to deal with the bulky body, extra weight and reduced autonomy.

The Alienware M11x is definitely cool

Many powerful laptops are not only bought by gamers, but also by graphical designers which need power at a decent price and more than often opt for a good performance but do not go for expensive devices such as the Alienware. Most of the time they pick Asus or Acer devices, which are have good components but with lower price tags.

All in all, cheap gaming laptops can easily be found on the market. And by cheap I mean devices around the 1000 bucks mark, although the cheapest can go to around $500 and less.

One of the best options is the small Alienware M11x, a portable gaming rig with decent performances and prices starting from 800 bucks. You get a dual-core processor, 4 GB of memory, fast 7200 rpm storage drive and hybrid graphics (as in an integrated GMA 4500 from Intel and a dedicated Nvidia card). All these in a compact and light (for the gaming laptops standards) 11.6 inch mini laptop. See the video for how it performs in Napoleon: Total war, which is a pretty resources hungry strategy game.

Another good one that runs for less than 500 bucks, making it perhaps the cheapest gaming laptops available right now, is the Asus 1201N EEE PC. A 12 incher with dual core ATOM processor, 2 GB of memory and Nvidia ION graphics, this one can play titles like WOW. Call of Duty, NFS, etc. However, graphic performances are limited. But, if you need an affordable solution for light gaming, this is definitely one you should count. See the clips below for some gaming performances of the 1201N.

I will update this post with some of the models i would recommend, so stay tuned .

Also, it is important to get a proper gaming mouse for your laptop if you want to benefit of a pleasant gaming experience.

In the end though, final choice is made by you, the buyer. Gaming notebooks with affordable prices can run most of the recent games decently and won’t have any problems with all types of multimedia content. However, if you want to run the latest titles on full details and in native resolution, well, then you’ll have to go for something more expensive than the devices presented in this post.

Tags: gaming laptop, gaming notebook