Best gaming laptop under $1,000: 5 mid-range gaming laptops for 2022

The MSI GF65 Thin 9SEXR-838 gives you a lot of oomph for your money, with an Intel i7-9750H processor and a Nvidia RTX 2060 GPU. The graphics card in particular gives you a degree of future proofing on new titles that comes with RTX or DLSS capability, and, as at the time of writing, you won’t find a more powerful graphics card in this price range.

Battery life does suffer due to this performance though, and you can expect to get around 5 hours max from demanding, non-gaming usage – then again this is better than many more expensive laptops can manage. The 1080p display has an impressively high 144Hz refresh rate, and although its color gamut is narrow by the standards of more expensive laptops, it certainly does the job when gaming.

Some models of this laptop come with a 256GB SSD, which we would not recommend as this would barely give you enough room for a few larger sized games once you’ve installed the operating system. 512GB is not ideal but it’s to be expected at this price point, and the storage can always be upgraded at a later date. The speakers on the laptop are rudimentary, and the same could be said for the keyboard and trackpad, but they all do the job.

Whilst not enormous we wouldn’t exactly say the MSI GF65 is ‘thin’ compared to some of the competition, though it is fairly light. Aesthetically the laptop isn’t great but it’s not bad either, and though its construction feels plasticy it is quite sturdy; for this price though, this is more than an acceptable trade-off considering the power this laptop brings to the table.

The ASUS TUF Gaming A15 Laptop comes in a variety of configurations, but the one we’ve chosen with the AMD Ryzen 7 4800H CPU and Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti GPU brings it just up to the $1,000 mark. The 1660 Ti is not the most powerful graphics card listed here, but this is the trade-off you pay for the other components – specifically the CPU, SSD size and the RAM.

A 144Hz screen at this price point is great and at 1080p resolution you can comfortably play even the most demanding games on at least medium settings and get between 60 – 100FPS. Less demanding games will definitely see you reach the 144FPS point. The AMD CPU also gives great multi-core performance meaning it is also good for low-level workstation tasks, although this does not stretch to any graphic or color work as the color gamut of the screen is quite narrow, as is the case with all laptops at this price point. The contrast ratio is good however.

The A15 is not the lightest of laptops, and its chunky design means it is not the most portable out there; the fans are also noisy (even by the standards of gaming laptops), all of which limits its use as a machine you could happily use on public transport. Importantly though the ASUS TUF Gaming A15 does have very good battery life when doing strenuous non-gaming tasks, which is often lacking in other gaming laptops, and should last you well over 8 hours.

The Acer Nitro 5 17.3 inch version is a uniquely good value for a screen this size. Although the price of this laptop may fluctuate slightly above the budget threshold of this guide, we’ve seen the machine come below the $1,000 mark during discounts and if you really desire a 17.3” screen it’s worth stretching that little bit further.

The laptop is powered by an Nvidia RTX 2060 GPU which is the most powerful you can hope to get at this ‘budget’ level, and it gives the laptop a degree of future-proofing for upcoming titles that may use Ray-tracing or DLSS. The Intel Core i7-9750H processor, whilst not as good as some of the AMD processors on this page for workstation tasks, definitely punches its weight in gaming.

Unsurprisingly the Acer Nitro 5 is not blessed with a particularly long battery life – larger screens tend to use more power for one. You can expect to get a few hours out of it from strenuous, but non-gameplay use. The speakers on the laptop also leave something to be desired: whilst laptop speakers generally are not great, these ones are slightly below the average. The biggest negative of this laptop however is the small 256GB SSD, which will fill up very fast and doesn’t allow space for many games to be installed at any one time. Thankfully the storage on this laptop is upgradeable and we would advise doing so should you purchase it.

Despite this though, 17.3” of display with this GPU and CPU is still a bargain, and we therefore very much recommend this laptop if a bigger screen is what you’re looking for.

The Acer Nitro 5 15.6 inch version is completely identical to its 17.3 inch brethren as reviewed above on this page, with the exception of the screen size (obviously). Battery life is slightly improved on the 15.6” version, given the smaller screen size it has to power, but don’t expect it to last beyond 4 hours of intensive, non-gaming use.

For some, the extra FPS performance you get from the same hardware powering games on a smaller screen might make this smaller version the preferred option, not to mention the extra portability it brings with it. The laptop comes with an Intel Core i7-9750H processor and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 GPU, as does the 17” one, giving it a fair amount of power for the price.

The specifications of this machine put it in direct competition with the MSI GF65 Thin 9SEXR-838, the two major differences being that the other machine comes with a 512GB SSD and 8GB of RAM, whereas this laptop only has 256GB of storage but 16GB of RAM. Such a small harddrive is really quite a big drawback if you are planning on having more than 2 games installed at any one time or for using your laptop for other purposes besides gaming, though the additional RAM is also important. Either way, if you pick the Acer Nitro 5 we’d advise upgrading the hard drive yourself or going with the MSI GF65 Thin 9SEXR-838 and upping the RAM.

The Lenovo Legion 5 Gaming Laptop, like the ASUS TUF Gaming A15, comes with a AMD Ryzen 7 4800H processor which makes it good for workstation tasks (outside of color accurate work, which would require a larger budget and a better screen). Again like the TUF Gaming A15 it also has an Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti graphics card, a 512GB SSD and 16GB or RAM.

The GPU is not the most powerful on this page, and again represents something of a tradeoff in having a superior CPU as well as solid RAM and storage specs. The 144Hz screen does the job, though its maximum brightness is a little low, so you’ll want to make sure you’re not in particularly brightly lit spaces when using it. Battery life is not the worst out there but it’s not the best either – it certainly doesn’t match up to the unusually good battery life of the ASUS TUF Gaming A15.

The laptop does have advantages over the TUF Gaming machine however in that its speakers are somewhat better, its reserved design makes it more suitable as an office use machine and the arrangement of ports in the back is more ergonomically friendly. Having said that this is the heaviest laptop on this page, so bear that in mind in terms of portability.

All-in-all though this is still a solid machine for the price, with great specs if you don’t mind going with a slightly weaker GPU.