The Steam Summer Sale is underway, and there are a lot of great games with big discounts.
This year's sale could arguably be considered the first sale where a gamer could buy a title that can be played on their home computer or laptop, a portable consoles such as a Steam Deck or ROG Ally, and thanks to cloud gaming services like GeForce Now, it can also be played on their phone, tablet, or directly on their TV with no cables or console needed.
Still, when it comes to PC gaming, a laptop is the best choice all-around as you can hook it up to a monitor to feel like you're at a desktop or take it with you on the go without losing graphics fidelity or needing good Wi-Fi.
Picking the right gaming laptop really comes down to what you're looking to play on the laptop. Do you want a machine that will play practically every game out there just fine, or do you want a monster of a computer to run any title at the highest settings without a single frame dropped? For me, I would pick these three laptops, but for different reasons.
For power and portability at a low price, there's the Asus TUF Gaming A14
The Asus TUF Gaming A14 is the laptop to go with if I wanted to play a lot of games well, that's easy to carry and comes with great battery life.
It has solid gaming performance, a decently colorful display that can reach high nits of brightness, and a satisfying keyboard. With its portable 14-inch size, light weight at around 3 pounds, durable military grade toughness, and the best battery life we’ve seen on a gaming laptop in years.
Some of the games the Asus TUF Gaming A14 is able to play at the highest settings that are currently on sale in the Steam Summer Sale are Baldur's Gate 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, and all those games with deep discounts dropping them below $10.
If I didn't worry much about price but want portability then I would need to buy the Razer Blade 16
Razer continues to offer a lot of power in a small package. The Razer Blade 16 (2025) is an expensive laptop with various options, and the RTX 5090 gaming performance being very smooth. There is an option to go with an RTX 4090 or RTX 5080 to save on money while still being able to play games on the highest settings.
The Razer Blade 16 (2025) features a stunning OLED display, Razer’s superb build quality, over 7 hours of web surfing battery life, and almost 2.5 hours of gaming battery life. It’s incredibly portable at just 4.6 pounds and 0.59 inches thick.
Games like Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy, and Forza Horizon 5 at the highest graphics settings could bring most computers to their knees, but the Razer Blade 16 can handle them with ease.
The MSI Raider 18 HX AI is the gaming laptop to buy if price is not a concern
Saying the MSI Raider 18 HX AI is expensive is an understatement. This laptop's price is approximately the same as the two previous laptops combined at $4,000.
Still, the Raider has strong general performance, fluid gaming performance, a bright MiniLED display, a comfortable keyboard, powerful audio, and more ports than needed even with a multi-monitor setup. It has a powerful Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 GPU with 16GB of VRAM, which offers the gaming performance one might expect from such a high-end spec. Its 18-inch MiniLED display is bright and vivid, and its 6-speaker sound system is powerful with high-quality audio. But this machine is staying home, as it weighs as much as the Asus TUF Gaming A14 and Razer Blade 16 combined.
The MSI Raider 18 HX AI is more than enough machine to take on the most graphically intense games, such as Monster Hunter Wilds and Alan Wake 2 at their highest settings.
