Best gaming laptop under $1,500: the best mid range gaming laptops in 2022

This the first major release of AMD’s Advantage series of laptops, which come equipped with RDNA 2 core components and must reach an overall standard of power and performance efficiency. In most areas, the ASUS ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition does not disappoint. The AMD Radeon RX 6800M GPU, coupled with the Ryzen 9 5900HX CPU are the real highlights here, and for this price you won’t find gaming performance like this in any other laptop. Even with the RAM bottleneck issues (discussed below), the RX 6800M graphics card performs about as well as an RTX 3070 (laptop version).

The 1080p 300Hz display is a great feature at this price point, although a refresh rate this high on anything but the most powerful machine is considerable overkill and you’re unlikely to ever even get close to this ceiling in FPS terms. The reported 3ms response time is again very fast for a laptop of this MSRP – and a welcome feature for competitive gamers. In terms of color replication, contrast, and brightness the G15 Advantage Edition doesn’t match up to the likes of Razer and Alienware, but it does the job when gaming.

The laptop has a nice aesthetic overall – with some red ‘gamer’ details and different colored WASD keys but overall it wouldn’t look out of place in an office setting. The bezels around the display, with the exception of the chunky bottom one, are pleasingly thin. Ergonomically the laptop isn’t the lightest around, but this is the sacrifice one must make for a laptop of this power and battery longevity.

On to the battery life: expect around 9 hours doing non-graphically strenuous office tasks and web-browsing, which for a gaming laptop with components this powerful is very impressive, and speaks to the claimed power efficiencies of AMD Advantage machines. Battery life when gaming though is still about what you’d expect for most gaming laptops – i.e. around an hour.

You can tell that ASUS and AMD have really tried to push the gaming focus of these machines – cutting out the webcam and SD card reader to save on costs, which might put some people off. The 512GB SSD is also half as small as it should be in our opinion, and would benefit from an upgrade / supplementary HDD. One area that usually suffers but which actually is surprisingly good in this laptop however is the audio – whilst not matching the lofty heights of a MacBook Pro it actually has respectable bass tones and is suitable for watching Netflix and the like.

The biggest drawback of the ASUS ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition however, is the RAM. As has been found through various testers since the machine’s release, the stock RAM that comes with the laptop is clocked to fairly inferior speed, and has been reported to decrease performance by as much as 20% in some extreme cases, though typically up to 10% – an unacceptable bottleneck by anyone’s standard. Fortunately, the RAM can be upgraded to remove this issue, though obviously we’d rather not have to do that. Still, the ASUS ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition is a gamer changer in terms of what a gaming laptop for this price can do and we heartily recommend it.

We’ve all seen Alienware laptops around, and that’s because they’re impossible not to see. Historically, these things are huge beasts of computers, but the M15 R1 is a much more compact design. It’s still notably larger than standard thin-line laptops, but it’s certainly more portable than ever before. What the R1 one has carried over from previous iterations apart from the decidedly sci-fi aesthetics and the signature Alienware logo is the insane build quality. The chassis is all-metal construction, but they haven’t thinned anything out to reduce weight; that’s not Alienware’s style. This metal is thick, rigid, and built to last.

Inside the tank-like exterior, the M15 R1 is packing a 9th gen i7-9750H, which unfortunately means it will exhibit slightly diminished ICP facilities compared to the 10th gen i7 CPUs, but it’s probably pretty negligible in terms of just gaming. The RTX 2070 GPU, though of the previous generation also, still packs a punch roughly comparable to an RTX 3060, and is respectable for this price point.

This particular M15 R1 is specced with a 240Hz, 15.6” IPS, FHD display that’s as high a refresh rate as any competitive gamer will realistically need.

The M15 R1 comes with excellent thermal performance, though the downside of this is the fans run loud, as is typical with almost every Alienware. A 1TB SSD is what you would expect in this price range, as is the 16GB RAM. All things considered – a great mid-range gaming laptop.

The Asus ROG Strix is the perfect way to indulge in a larger display if that’s the route you wish to take for your gaming. At 17.3”, the IPS 144Hz 1080p resolution is very inviting at it also comes with solid color replication and decent contrast and brightness.

Other than the expansive display, the latest version of this laptop comes with an Nvidia RTX 3060 Max-Q GPU, which is about on par with the RTX 2070 of the previous generation in terms of performance but comes with the latest software support of the 30-series, including DLSS 2.1 and Ray Tracing. If you can find one of these laptops specced out in this setup for around $1,500 then we’d snap it up ASAP, though somewhat out of the price range of this guide at present, we’ve seen it reduced to around the 1500 USD level before.

With an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX at the helm, supported by 32GB of DDR4 RAM and 1x M.2 SSD, the ROG is ready to shoulder intensive parallel workloads, so if you’re a content creator or you like to stream while you game and have a few tabs on the go, this laptop is a solid choice.

The first thing you’ll notice upon flipping the Strix lid is that you’re blasted in the face with LED power. This thing has light coming out the wazoo, but if you like more of a lowkey design, you can switch them all off. Holding all those lights together is a rigid, brushed metal build, with little to no flex, kept cool by a liquid metal thermal compound.

Featuring Intel’s hyper-threaded 6-core i7-107050H CPU with a base clock speed of 2.6GHz and a boosted rate of 5GHz, this machine has the goods not just for gaming, but for seamless multitasking too.

The integrated RTX 2060 GPU is no less impressive. It may be the entry-level RTX card, but matched with the Razer’s 15.6” 1080p resolution with a 144Hz refresh rate, it’s still going to average well over the 100 frames per second mark across most titles.

We’ve all endured the infuriating ‘other’ content that seems to take up most of our storage, but Razer’s Zero Bloatware system helps to reduce unnecessary applications so you enjoy the full effect of your 16GB DDR4 storage and 512GB NVMe SSD.

In terms of cooling, you should rarely breach the 80° zone and the fans do a great job of keeping the keyboard cool without reaching obnoxiously loud volumes.

Perhaps even more impressive than any individual aspect of this Razer is that all these components are packed neatly into the single-piece, super-thin, 4.7lbs CNC aluminum enclosure, making it the perfect laptop for gaming on the go.

The Predator name is an absolute classic, and with a 300Hz 15.6” display and an RTX 2070 Super GPU, it’s the Triton that’s going to offer you the most visually stunning gaming experience of any of the laptops on our list, but the good news doesn’t start and end with visuals.

Featuring a 10th gen i7 10750H 6-core processor, and 16GB DDR4 memory, the Triton offers smooth performance for general computing, and thanks to the particularly rugged enclosure, it’s primed to handle the rigors of the commute.

The keyboard is of reasonable quality, but some might be put off by the single row enter key and the fact that the arrows are squashed in cheek to cheek with the other keys.

In terms of connectivity, you get a pretty impressive array with a single USB-C Thunderbolt port, three USB 3.2 ports, an HDMI 2.0 port, an ethernet port, and a mini display port.

This Acer Predator isn’t exactly cheap. Some would definitely rather forfeit some of the specs for a more affordable laptop. Things like the 300Hz refresh rate might be a little unnecessary for typical day-to-day gameplay, but that juiced refresh rate is the very thing that’s going to help you thrive in competitive gaming contexts.