Gaming Laptops Under $1000
If you’re doing a little digging to find a decent gaming laptop under $1000, you might run across several options out there. Your best bet would be to create a list of features you want from the laptop and search according to that list.
A good gaming laptop must first be configured to carry a powerful processor. Now for this limited budget, some good suggestions would be dual-core processors, since these are both powerful and affordable at the same time. Single core processors are great for simple tasks, but since games demand more from the gaming system, it’s a lot better if you start with a dual-core processor just to make sure everything runs fine.
In terms of system memory a good target to start at would be 3GB. Extreme gaming laptops might carry up to 16GB, but for a modest gaming laptop, 3 or 4GB of RAM is a good start, since most modern games don’t even go beyond 3GB in their system requirements list. This amount will allow you to also do some editing work, graphic design and even a bit of multitasking.
The video card that comes with a gaming laptop has to be dedicated. What this means is that it has to have its own dedicated memory, so it doesn’t take from your available RAM in order to run. For this budget you’ll probably get away with a decent model from either nVidia or ATI with about 512MB to 1GB of dedicated memory. This is fine if you don’t mind running games in medium to high quality settings, but for extreme graphics you’ll definitely need to do better than this.
Games are better played when they’re viewed properly and you don’t have to strain your eyes to keep the crosshair on your target. This means that the screen size on your gaming laptop should not go under 15 inches, since then all the targets you’re hunting will be mere pixels. Average laptop screen sizes are in the 15.4 inch range, but you might also find 16 inch screen laptops in this budget range and they’re quite capable of displaying decent resolutions too.
The hard drive is often an overlooked feature in gaming laptops, since all it does is store information. You should not overlook one aspect of HDD though, and that is their rpm. More is better in this case, so don’t settle for an average laptop hard drive with 5400rpm, but try to go for a 7200 rpm model, or, if you’re willing to spend a bit, go for an SSD drive.