How To Find Your Perfect Gaming Laptop

Laptop Finder is a free, data-driven recommendation tool for gaming laptops. Instead of trawling through 20 tabs and spec sheets, you answer three quick questions and get a short list of laptops that actually fit your budget, performance needs, and portability preferences.

Unfortunately, no. We specialize in reviewing gaming laptops on the Jarrod's Tech laptop review YouTube channel, so these are the only models we have data for. Our data and quiz are designed for picking a gaming laptop, though you can of course use that for more than just gaming.

Each laptop has 7 key scores: Performance, Cooling System, Build Quality, Screen Quality, Battery Life, Portability, and Upgradability. Higher scores mean better performance in that category. The Overall Score combines all these factors based on your selected usage type.

The Overall Score shows how highly a laptop rates based on our real-world testing data and your selected usage. The Value Score also considers its current price, showing you the best price-to-performance ratio.

Some of our scores are weighted differently based on what you'll be using the laptop for. For example, if you select 'Competitive Gaming', the 'Screen Quality' score will put more weight on things that matter for competitive gamers, such as faster response time and higher refresh rate. But if you select 'Content Creation', then color gamut and brightness will contribute more to the screen score, and a laptop with an SD card reader gets a small bonus on its Overall Score, with a full-size SD slot counting double a microSD slot.

Scores may change as we constantly add newly scored laptops into our database. The performance score, for example, automatically scales based on the laptops we've tested. For example, if a next gen GPU comes out and beats everything else, it will have the highest performance score, causing existing results to automatically shift down.

No, all scores are based on objective test data from the Jarrod's Tech laptop review YouTube channel. We let the data do the talking. Our goal is simple: turn deep, independent testing into quick, confident choices. Scores combine Jarrod's Tech testing with clearly marked estimates where direct measurements are unavailable. Overall rankings also depend on your selected use and our scoring weights.

You don't have to take our word for it. Every score comes from measurements taken in our reviews on the Jarrod's Tech YouTube channel, where Jarrod has reviewed more than 300 gaming laptops since 2015. Each laptop shown on the quiz results page has a score breakdown showing the figures behind the scores, such as frame rates in games, temperatures and fan noise under load, screen brightness and color coverage, battery life, and weight with the charger. Results also link to the review video their scores come from, and any score we couldn't measure directly is clearly marked as estimated. Brands and retailers can't pay to change a score or a ranking. Links to purchase a laptop may earn us a commission, but that has no effect on how laptops are scored or ordered.

Prices come from the site's own tracked retailer prices. We check laptop prices at different retailers automatically throughout the day. Most retailers are checked hourly, but many are manually updated by our team and may take longer to update. When prices change, value scores are automatically recalculated to reflect the new price.

Prices come from the site's own tracked retailer prices in the regional currency for the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, India, or the Philippines. Use the region selector at the top of the page to switch region and currency. We share the prices found on the retailer's website. For the United States and Canada, our listed prices do not include tax, as this is normal in those countries. But for the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, the Philippines and India, taxes are included in our listed prices.

Because a hard edge would hide a good laptop that misses your range by a few dollars. Laptop Finder allows a small tolerance of five percent of the budget range's own edge, so a laptop just under or just over it is shown in your results and tagged "Slightly Under Budget" or "Slightly Over Budget" so you can see why it is there. Slightly-under laptops are ranked alongside the exact matches; slightly-over ones are listed after them.

All laptop models listed have been reviewed by us on the Jarrod's Tech YouTube channel. Unfortunately, we can only review so many models and specific configurations. When next generation laptops launch, this can mean that newer models take time to appear, while conversely we will have more data later into a hardware release cycle. We may also remove older laptops from our database if they're no longer available or relevant.

New laptops are added as soon as we've finished reviewing them and have the necessary scoring data to rank them. There's no specific date or time for this site to get updated.

A fully reviewed laptop is one where we've fully reviewed that exact configuration with the specified specs, down to the same CPU, GPU and screen. For example, if we've tested a Lenovo Legion 5 with RTX 5070 graphics in-depth, but you're after an RTX 5060. There is a lot of crossover between those two models, with only a GPU difference. This is where a partial review comes in. Things like the screen, upgrade options and portability will be the same as our full review data, but some scores that would be affected by the GPU difference, like performance, will be estimated based on an average of other laptops with the same tier of hardware and an offset specified based on what we know about that laptop. This allows us to list more laptops at different price ranges on the quiz results, as we're not able to review and test all possible variations.

The results are ordered by the top 3 laptops based on your selections. By default, this is sorted by Highest Rated and the results may change if you switch the toggle to Best Value. Clicking on Show More Recommendations shows the next three best in-stock options. Out of stock laptops are shown at the end.

If no laptops we track match your usage and screen size at any budget, you will be linked to our search page where you can browse through hundreds of laptops that we monitor.

Click the Buy button to go to the retailer the site tracks for that laptop. These are affiliate links, which may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you.

The quiz does not ask for personal information. We track anonymous quiz answers, such as budget range, usage type, and screen size preference, to understand popular choices. You do not need an account to use the Finder.

The results URL carries your three answers, so bookmarking or sharing the link reopens the same results.

You can reach out to us via email at [email protected], we're always happy to hear your feedback and suggestions!