by CT |
Last Updated: April 18, 2021 Looking for the best gaming laptops under $600 gaming?
Gaming laptops are a great way to enjoy your favorite games while on the go. A lot of laptops can even be more powerful than desktops at this point, so you need to consider all options when looking for a new gaming laptop.
We’ve put together some of the best gaming laptops under $600 and give you all the information that you need to make an informed decision.
Best Gaming Laptops Under $600
1. Acer Aspire 5
“Powerful Battery Life”
- 15.6 inches Full HD IPS Display
- AMD Ryzen 3 3200U
- Vega 3 Graphics
- 4GB DDR4, 128GB SSD
- Backlit Keyboard
- Windows 10 in S Mode
Pros:
- Powerful Battery Life
- Awesome Gaming Performance
- Comfy View LED-backlit Display
Cons:
- Large bezel surrounding the screen
Acer did a great job on this laptop, and it will continue to be the gold standard among other laptops in its category for the new edition of the Aspire 5.
It is loaded with many great features, comes with huge improvements in the overall performance, and it comes at a very reasonable price. It remains our top pick in quality and performance as the best gaming laptop under the $600 category with no closer competitor.
Design
This model is just 1.19″ inches thick, which. Its body is mostly made of plastic, and it is ideal for daily use, and it doesn’t seem weak like other cheap laptops. It weighs 5.27 lbs. and the body thickness helps to manage noise and heat efficiently.
Ports & Connectivity
- 1 x USB 3.1 type C port which offers faster data transfer speeds (up to 5 Gbps) which provides more flexibility
- 1 x HDMI with HDCP support
- 2 x USB 3.0
- 1 x USB 2.0 (for your mouse or something quite similar)
- 1 x Ethernet port in Gigabit speed and SD card port
Performance and Gaming Firepower
This version comes with the 7th Generation Intel Core i7-7500 Processor.
It is packed with a hard drive of 1TB SSD (Solid State Drive) which is faster than the HDD. Although it has a low storage capacity, the SSD has lots of advantages over the HDD. With the SSD, it will be able to boot the Windows 10 in just 10 seconds.
Thanks to the Lithium-ion battery, this gaming laptop can run for up to 15 hours even with its high performance, which is optimum for people who would love to work outside without concerns for a power outlet
Display
Acer Aspire 5 boasts of a 15.6 full HD widescreen LED-lit (non-glossy) display with a wide color gamut and IPS Technology for better viewing angles. The 1920 x 1080-pixel screen resolution offers clear, bright, sharper text, good contrast that allows seeing more details with media and HD movies.
Keyboard & Touchpad
This gaming laptop comes with the standard island keyboard layout full size with numeric keypad, aluminum deck and free from shallowness or flex. It is simple and pretty cool to touch. It is comfortable to use the keyboards as it provides 1.4mm key travel and feels pretty awesome. It is also shipped with attractive keyboard backlight but with a single brightness level. The keys are backlit by white LEDs, and the light shines through the key itself, which is perfect for professional typing experience.
The touchpad provides a smooth surface with dimensions of 4.2 x 3-inch (button-less). It feels a little slippery to touch and provide easy and responsive cursor control. However, using a mouse will come in handy.
2. Acer Nitro 5
“Comfortable Keyboard”
- 9th Gen Intel Core i5-9300H
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650
- 15.6" Full HD IPS Display
- 8GB DDR4
- 256GB NVMe SSD
- Wi-Fi 6, Backlit Keyboard
Pros:
- Comfortable keyboard
- Lots of ports
Cons:
- Sluggish performance and graphics
- Below average battery life
The Acer Nitro 5 is a great gaming laptop for an excellent price, but it is severely underpowered compared with its Intel counterpart. Even if you ignore its subpar performance, the Nitro 5’s battery life is a short, and the speakers leave a lot to be desired.
It features a comfortable keyboard and a collection of ports, but that’s not enough for us to fully recommend the AMD Nitro 5.
Design
The Acer Nitro 5 cover comes with a sleek faux-aluminum finish over its curved, car-like plastic hood, which carries a black, glossy Acer logo and a red-accented hinge with an engraved Nitro logo. The lid is well flexed and very strong to withstand pressure when rested on. The interior of Acer Nitro 5 confers an awesome gaming outfit. It features red backlighting combined with red keyboard font, a red hinge, and a red-accented touchpad.
It comes with a weight of 5.2 lbs. at 15.4 x 10.5 x 1.1 inches which is the same size as its Intel counterpart but a bit heavier. It also features quite a number of ports. On the left side, there is one USB 3.0 port, a Kensington lock slot, one USB Type-C port, an RJ45 Ethernet port, an SD card slot, and an HDMI 2.0 port while on the right side, the power jack, a headphone jack, and two USB 2.0 ports.
Display
Acer Nitro 5 features a 15.6-inch and 1920 x 1080 displays which provides a relatively bright color for your gaming experience. This gaming laptops panel covered 61% of the sRGB color gamut when measured against the colorimeter, which falls under a 69% average of the low budget laptop. Its 261-nit of brightness display surpasses the 247-nit category average as well as the Intel Nitro 5 (257-nit), the TUF Gaming FX504 (220-nit) and the G3 15 (231-nit).
The Nitro 5 isn’t built with the most attractive keyboard for a gaming laptop, but its red-on-red color palette is manageable. Although the keys do not satisfy the clicking for premium gaming laptops, the keyboard is comfortable to type on. The 4.1 x 3.1-inch touchpad comes in a decent size and offers a soft surface and the Windows 10 gestures like three-finger tabbing and two-finger scrolling work as intended.
Performance and Gaming Firepower
Packed with an AMD Ryzen 5 2500U and 8GB of RAM, the laptop slowed down after opening one 1080p YouTube video and 20 Google Chrome tabs while Hitman 2 ran in the background.
This gaming laptop is armed with an AMD Radeon RX 560X GPU with 4GB of VRAM, which will deliver a great gaming experience as expected.
The 17 fps from Acer Nitro 5 made Grand Theft Auto V unplayable at very high, 1080p. It scored nearly half of the budget gaming laptop average (32 fps), and couldn’t make it to the playable frame rates that the Intel Nitro 5 (31 fps) and the G3 15 (33 fps) displayed.
The Acer Nitro 5 1TB HDD copied 4.97GB of data in an exhausting 1 minute and 39 seconds, translating to a measly 51 megabytes per second, which is about three times less than the budget gaming laptop average (163 MBps). The Intel Nitro 5’s counterpart with 256GB SSD nailed 318 MBps.
This laptop features a battery life that lasted 4 hours and 7 minutes after it was continuously used to surf the web over Wi-Fi at 150-nit of brightness, which isn’t uncommon for gaming laptops. Nitro 5 doesn’t produce too much heat under pressure because of its plastic shell. It doesn’t get too hot compared to other gaming laptops in the same price category.
3. HP 15 Inch Laptop
“Decent Battery Life”
- 11th Gen Intel Core i5-1135G7 Processor
- 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD Storage
- 15.6” Full HD IPS Display
- Windows 10 Home
- HP Fast Charge
- Lightweight Design (15-dy2021nr, 2020)
Pros:
- Excellent keyboard
- Decent battery life and quick charge
Cons:
- Comes with a lot of bloatware
- Inconsistent touchpad
This entry-level gaming laptop features many improvements in terms of looks, performance, design, and can only handle low-end games. This lightweight and high-performance laptop sports a 15.6-inch HD touch screen, decent battery, and a super snappy keyboard.
Design
Coming with a weight of 4.8 lbs. and 0.97 inches thin, it offers a lightweight when compared to other laptops in its category. The exterior is beautifully textured. Its blue aesthetic is stunning by some attractively rounded black edges which house the laptop’s HDMI port, Ethernet port, and USB inputs on the left, as well as an optical drive, an SD card and an additional USB port on the right.
The laptop’s touchpad is borderless and has a small indent with its two click buttons to separate it from the rest of the plastic deck. This provides a unique and seamless look for the laptop, including its glossy makeup, which is highly susceptible to fingerprints.
Performance and gaming firepower
This entry gaming laptop is powered by a 7th Gen Intel Core i5-7200U 2.5GHz Up to 3.1GHz 3MB cache, Intel HD Graphics 620 and 8GB DDR4 Memory, 1 TB HDD 5400RPM Hard Drive. It offers a decent performance provided the load on it is not too much. It worked well while working on a Google Doc or while surfing web pages, but while streaming video from YouTube and Twitch and loading dozens of chrome tabs, we experienced an occasional moment of lag.
This laptop loads data faster, and it performed a fantastic job of matching 20,000 names to their addresses in Open-Office. The HP 15.6 got the job done in just 7 minutes and 59 seconds, beating out the Satellite (15minutes:04 seconds) and our 9-minute average. It gives a decent battery performance of 5 hours and 24 minutes test (Web surfing over Wi-Fi) outlasting the Satellite (4:47) and the Inspiron (4:46) even though it can’t be used all through the day without you going with your power cable. Also, it doesn’t dispense much heat to make you uncomfortable. Its keyboard, touch, ad and laptop’s underside registered 88, 86 and 85 degrees after streaming HD video for 15 minutes.
Display
The HP 15″ HD display (1366 x 768), HD TruBrite technology amps up color and clarity which will give you a very bright and sharp gaming experience for your everyday entertainment. The notebook did a fine job handling the Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer — while some extra-bright scenes looked blown out, many key details, such as Captain Phasma’s shiny Stormtrooper armor and Finn’s debris-covered face, were preserved well. The screen did come in handy for playing touch-friendly games, such as Cut the Rope.
4. Acer Aspire A315
“Solid & Attractive Design”
- 15.6" HD Flagship Laptop
- 7th Gen Intel Core i5-7200U
- 6GB DDR4 RAM
- 256GB SSD
- Windows 10 Home
Pros:
- Attractive design
- Good connectivity options
- Comfortable typing experience
The 8th-generation Acer Aspire 315 laptop seems to offer quite a more than just its rather slender asking price. It comes with a well-sized 15.6-inch Windows 10 laptop, packed with a Full HD display and Intel Core i3 chipset. It doesn’t come with a bad set of specs for a budget notebook. It’s certainly an option worth considering for entry gamers without breaking the bank.
Design
This budget laptop features an attractive gunmetal grey chassis which sports a textured finish, both on the lid and the interior. Its neat finish complements the durable construction nicely. Plenty of prodding and poking leave no weak spots in that frame, though the lid does bend somewhat under duress. It’s not something to worry about though. It is quite portable with a weight of over 2 kg with a generous selection of ports lining the edges. It boasts of 3 USB connections, SD card reader, an HDMI connection and an Ethernet port that flips open on demand.
Performance and gaming Firepower
Running in this laptop is the Intel’s Core i5-7200U 2.5 GHz Dual-core Processor, with a 2GHz clock speed which is backed by 6 GB DDR SDRAM. The 256 GB Solid drive and Intel HD Graphics 620 equipped in this device make it load games faster without lagging behind while you multitask. It handles low demanding games perfectly and you’ll enjoy browsing the web, stream HD media from the web, without too much of a struggle. It is also backed up with a 2-cell 4810 mAh Li-ion which powered browsing the web and bashing out documents (all while streaming music in the background) for over seven hours in total.
Display
The 15.6-inch displays a vivid detail from a superb HD display. It comes with a Full HD screen, which means images are at least pleasingly crisp. Peer close enough and you’ll still spot individual pixels, but that 1920 x 1080 resolution means sharp results, whether you’re browsing your photo collection or kicking back with a flick.
5. Lenovo Flex 14
“Good Battery Life”
- 14.0" FHD (1920 x 1080) Touch Display
- AMD Ryzen 5 4500U Processor
- 16GB DDR4
- 256GB SSD
- AMD Radeon Graphics
- Digital Pen Included
- Windows 10
Pros:
- Webcam slider shutter for privacy
- Good battery life
- Fingerprint reader
Cons:
- Dim screen
- Few ounces heavier than it’s competitors
Design
Lenovo Flex 14 Convertible touch screen laptop can help make your ideas happen. It is entirely made out of aluminum, and it looks and feels premium. This multi-mode PC also has a physical Webcam Shutter for better privacy, while its digital pen support (active Pen included) enables you to write or sketch directly onto the full HD 14″ Display.
Performance and Gaming Firepower
This gaming laptop is powered by an AMD Ryzen 5 processor and has 8GB of RAM for smooth multitasking and heavy gaming capabilities. The storage on the laptop is also very well managed with 256GB of solid-state drive which is faster than the HDD and provides a decent amount of storage space for all your files. The battery is pretty decent and comes with rapid recharging that can restore your battery charge up to 80% in just an hour.
Display
The Lenovo Flex 14 has a 14-inch touch screen display with full HD resolution, and the hinges provided to convert this laptop into different modes are tough enough to give you the confidence of using this laptop in harsh conditions. It has got a standard 720p webcam and also a microphone built-in which makes this convertible laptop very handy for video calling on Skype.
6. Dell Inspiron 15 5000
“LED Backlit Display”
- 15.6" Full HD Display
- 10th Gen Intel Core i3-1005G1 Processor
- 8GB DDR4 Memory
- 256GB PCIe NVMe SSD
- HDMI, Webcam, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Windows 10 Home
Pros:
- LED Backlit display
- Very fast laptop
Cons:
- HDD Disk storage is slower than SSD
- No dedicated graphics card
Dell has always been a front runner of gaming laptops. They do a great job whether you’re looking for one of the best gaming laptop or a budget gaming laptop. There are many specific features that you’d expect from Dell, like audio speakers quality, battery backup, and multitasking.
Although this varies from gaming laptop to gaming laptop, the Dell Inspiron 15 5000 comes with a powerful integrated graphics card. It is one of the best durable gaming laptops that are packed with powerful hardware specifications at its price.
Design
Dell Inspiron 15 5000 without any single shadow of doubt beats this list and stands heads and shoulder above the other laptops listed. It is a matt black chassis with its red logo on its lid.
Performance and Gaming Firepower
With the packed hardware specifications, it has Intel fastest 7th generation i5-7300HQ Quad-core processor clocked speed up to 3.5GHz. This laptop is capable of running average video games as it has Intel UHD Graphics 620 with 8GB of RAM. The massive 1TB storage provides you more than enough space to store all your data, AA series video games, professional and personal files without any storage issue.
Display
This gaming laptop comes with a 15.6 inches full HD Anti-Glare Backlist display which makes you watch anything with detailed information and clearest visuals. It sports Windows 10 installed and has almost all necessary ports for your connectivity ease. The battery backup is not too worthy of a gaming laptop and it is not up to the Dell criteria.
It features a battery that can only bear 3-5 hours of the normal day-to-day task before injecting the charger. The laptop looks too good for a gaming laptop and you’d enjoy a stunning gaming experience playing your favorite video games, plus multitasking which is impressive. The only negative point to this laptop would be its battery and its absence of a dedicated graphics card.
7. Lenovo IdeaPad 330
“Sleek Design”
- 15.6" Screen
- Great Business Laptop
- Intel Dual-Core i3-8130U Up to 3.4GHz (Beat i5-7200U)
- 8GB DDR4
- 1TB HDD
- 802.11ac, Bluetooth, HDMI
- Windows 10
Pros:
- Sleek design
- 1TB Hard disk gives you a lot of options
Cons:
- Not impressed with the speaker
- No SSD Hard drive
- Dull Display
This Lenovo gaming laptop has something unique to offer. Lenovo has put in lots of effort into Lenovo IdeaPad 330S and Lenovo IdeaPad 330. They both have the same design but different configuration. If you are a budget-conscious gamer and you’d love to roll your hands on a perfect average video game while playing, Lenovo IdeaPad 330 is your best bet.
Design
From first glance, you would love this smart, sleek, and stylish designed gaming laptop. The laptop is relatively light in weight and does not weigh more than 3.2 KG – so traveling with this laptop won’t break your back. The Ideapad 330 laptop offers a very sensitive touchpad and with just a light press, the job is done, but some find the keyboard a little hard to get used to.
Performance and Gaming Firepower
This laptop features the Intel Core i5-8200U processor and 8GB DDR4 RAM with clock speed 3.40GHz. Although the laptop is not packed with a dedicated graphics card, the UHD 620 integrated graphics card offers you a better FPS rate and smooth visual displaying.
Display
The 15.6 inches full HD backlit display offers you an amazing experience while you play video games and watch movies with utter smoothness. The speakers’ quality is not outstanding, and it does not even fill an average size room when in full volume. You’d have to get headphones to enjoy the audio quality of your movies.
8. HP PAVILION 15
“Cool Core Temperatures”