Any laptop with a GPU could be considered a gaming laptop, but it doesn’t start to feel like a “real” gaming laptop until it starts pushing the limits—and I’m not just talking about performance.
Gaming laptops have a reputation for going above and beyond, especially with regard to aesthetics: colorful lights, embellishments, and slick designs that borrow from sci-fi concepts. But all of that is icing on top of the desktop gaming experience in a laptop body.
In the history of over-the-top gaming laptops, a handful stand out as particularly iconic and/or innovative. Here are my picks for the best, most amazing, most ridiculous gaming laptops that guarantee gamer cred.
The best way to describe the Acer Predator 21 X? A single word: BIG! The screen was big, the chassis was big, and the price was very big. Launching with a price tag of $9,000 in 2017, this laptop was reserved for only the most committed gamers with deep pockets.
The 18.7-pound behemoth offered the best hardware available at the time, including an Intel Core i7-7820HK, 64GB of RAM, and two SLI-linked Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 GPUs. All of that hardware delivered the best possible gaming experience on the laptop’s 21-inch curved LCD.
Today’s gaming laptops might have more power, but they can’t hold a candle to the Predator 21 X’s bananas form factor.
The Asus ROG GX700 may look like your average gaming laptop at first glance, but that’s only true if you leave the dock at home.
This laptop came with a ludicrous liquid-cooling dock, which kept the internals frosty even when pushed to their limits. The dock plugged into the back of the laptop, linking the dock’s compressor and radiator to tubing inside the laptop chassis.
This allowed the Intel Core i7-6820HK and Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 to be overclocked for better performance. It wasn’t cheap—costing $5,000—and without the dock it was pretty boring otherwise.
3. HP Omen X 2S
Most gaming laptops have just one screen—that’s all you need to play a game, after all. But the HP Omen X 2S sports a second, built-in display above the keyboard.
A 6-inch 1080p touchscreen that can be used like a tiny secondary monitor, the cool thing about it is that you can also monitor system performance, control lighting, and more with it. Is it super useful in practice? At the end of the day, no. But it sure is distinctive.
The main 15-inch screen supports 240Hz refresh with Nvidia G-Sync, and the RTX 2080 GPU was the best you could get circa 2019. The $2,900 price tag is pretty hard to swallow, though.
In the mid-2000s, Dell released what may still be the least practical gaming laptop ever created. The Dell XPS m2010 was an absolutely gargantuan 21-pound desktop replacement, featuring an Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 processor, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, and a 120GB hard drive.
On the graphics side, this laptop packed an ATI Radeon X1800, which was good enough to run any game of the day on the laptop’s spacious 20.1-inch display that was fully adjustable. Plus, the keyboard could be removed. It was a portable all-in-one machine.
This device only survives today as a weird relic, but some people did spend $3,500 on the XPS m2010 back in 2006.
The 17-inch display has chunky bezels because it contains all the core components, including an Intel Core i9 CPU and Nvidia RTX 2080 GPU. The fully detachable keyboard can make it feel like a regular laptop, and it sports a trackpad that doubles as a number pad as well as a hinge that lets you fold it in half.
Due to the Mothership GZ700GX’s strange design, the whole thing is only marginally portable. Combine that with the $6,500 retail price tag and it’s just too much for all but the most serious gamers.
6. MSI Titan 18 HX
MSI has been making enormous gaming laptops for years, but the MSI Titan 18 HX sets a new standard for desktop replacements.
Inside is the fastest 14th Gen Intel Core i9 CPU, plus a Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU to drive the 4K Mini-LED display. The chassis is somewhat understated for a gaming laptop, but the keyboard and trackpad give it all the gaming cred it needs.
The keys have Cherry mechanical switches with RGB lighting, and that isn’t the only glow effect—the trackpad also has RGB backlighting, a flashy and unique feature among gaming laptops.
The good news? This gaming laptop is still relatively new as of this writing, so you could actually go out and buy one right now if you love RGB and have $5,400 to blow.
As you may have seen from the Mothership and GX700 above, Asus uses its ROG brand to try a lot of outlandish things. That’s certainly the case with the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16.
This laptop doesn’t come apart or plug into a liquid cooler, but it does have a second screen—and unlike the aforementioned HP Omen X 2S, this one is actually large enough to be useful.
The secondary screen’s 14-inch, 3840×1100 LCD runs edge-to-edge under the main screen, which is a 16-inch Mini-LED panel. The secondary screen is attached to a tilt mechanism, which raises and angles it while the laptop is open, lining it up with the bottom of the main screen.
It all looks pretty futuristic, but how useful is a compact ultrawide touchscreen below your monitor really? Well, if you want one, you can still get the Zephyrus Duo 16 for $3,200.
Gaming laptops tend to be large, especially ones with 18-inch screens. But the Alienware m18 R2 is gigantic even by those standards!
Tipping the scales at nearly 10 pounds, the m18 R2 is only portable in the strictest sense of the word. The display has substantial bezels, and there’s a large cooling shelf hanging off the back of the machine.
It’s an imposing laptop, and heaven help you if you have to actually put it on your lap—not only is it heavy, it runs hot with an Intel Core i9 CPU and RTX 4090 GPU. It’s also one of the few gaming laptops you can find with a Cherry mechanical keyboard, which is an optional upgrade.
The Alienware m18 R2 launched in 2024, so it’s still available if you don’t mind dropping $3,500 on a laptop.
The MSI GT80 Titan SLI launched in 2015, but it had a profile like a laptop from the 90s. It was a full two inches thick thanks to the SteelSeries mechanical keyboard.
Unlike the Alienware m18 R2 or MSI Titan 18 HX, the keycaps were full-height and connected to switches with much more travel. It looked and felt more like a “real” keyboard, sure, but it contributed to making this 10-pound laptop that much harder to transport.
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The rest of the hardware helped, of course. The GT80 had two GeForce GTX 980M GPUs linked via SLI, making it capable of maxing any game of the era on its 18.4-inch 1080p screen. It also had a Core i7 CPU and a 1TB spinning hard drive in addition to the smaller system SSD.
Acer has kept the promise of 3D gaming alive longer than anyone. In 2023, the company released the Acer Predator Helios 300 SpatialLabs Edition with SpatialLabs technology, allowing for stereoscopic 3D gaming on its 4K display without glasses.
It uses a feature called “TrueGame” to simulate a stereo image in select games, which works better than you’d expect. The machine packs more than a fancy 3D screen, too—there’s also an Intel Core i9 CPU, a GeForce RTX 3080 GPU, and 32GB of RAM.
Those are solid specs even a year later, but the $3,500 price tag is a lot to ask for a gimmicky display. That’s just the price you pay to stand out.
Ryan Whitwam is a freelance tech writer, a fan of all things electronic, a long-time skeptic and a former research scientist. At PCWorld, he covers computer hardware and software.
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