The best gaming laptops for 2017

Your guide to the latest and best gaming laptops of 2017. Check out our latest reviews and buying advice on the top gaming laptops for this year.

What’s the best gaming laptop you can buy in the UK?

  1. Asus RoG G752VM

The Asus ROG G752VM is a terrific gaming laptop for those who want top performance in a form designed to handle that power with ease. It doesn’t get overly hot or loud, even under a good amount of pressure, making us confident that even the step-up model with the Nvidia GTX 1070 GPU will also be a joy to use. As the prices of top-end style laptops like the MacBook Pro and HP Spectre 13 increase, the Asus ROG G752VM starts to look like an even better buy than last year’s models. And, as hoped, the latest 10-series Nvidia graphics cards blow away what came before. Despite being two rungs lower, gaming performance is not all that far off the former top dog GTX 980M, and similar to that of the desktop-grade GTX 970. In other words, it’s perfect for 1080p gaming. There are just a few issues. A textured glass (rather than plastic) trackpad would have been appreciated and we’d like to see Asus put a little more work into the sound quality of the speakers, rather than just trying to make them as loud as possible.

  1. Asus ROG Strix GL702VM

We have just one issue with the Asus ROG Strix GL702V: its trackpad does some strange things, most likely because of driver issues. Operating under the assumption this can or will be fixed, this is a great gaming laptop. It’s not incredibly expensive by today’s standards but still gets you desktop-grade gaming power, a good display, solid build and fair battery life. Thanks to the great power of Nvidia’s latest laptops graphics cards, this could well be the only gaming machine you need. And this particular one is hundreds cheaper than some others using the same GPU.

  1. Alienware 15 R3

The Alienware 15 R3 is a gaming laptop that is hard to beat. It has as much power as any of its mainstream rivals, and has lighting that is both eye-catching and customisable, but can also be switched off when you’d rather let you laptop slip into the background. It’s very well-made, the keyboard is great and the frame has some connections you sometimes only see in a laptop dock. However, its omission of a memory card slot is odd, the fan system is fairly loud and while hardcore gamers may appreciate the use of (in some models) a TN display it doesn’t do pure image quality many favours. As usual with an Alienware machine, you can find similar specs for less money from value-driven alternatives from, for example, PC Specialist and the HP Omen range. Its price is competitive with its direct rivals, the Acer Predator and Asus RoG series, and this is easily the slimmest and classiest-looking of the trio.

  1. Alienware 17 R4

There’s no doubt that the Alienware 17 R4 is one of the most capable gaming laptops we’ve seen, making easy work of our CPU and GPU benchmark tests and providing generally smooth gameplay. The design is eye-catching too, sporting a flurry of customisable LEDs across the body of the laptop, although it’ll never look as sleek and attractive as a MacBook Pro.

But while the Alienware 17 R4 is a powerful beast, it’s not perfect; it gets hot and loud fairly quickly, it’s heavy at over 4kg and we feel like it should feature one or two more USB ports, especially when boasting VR compatibility. And while it is incredibly powerful, our build was incredibly expensive too.

  1. MSI GL62-6QC 065UK

The MSI GL62 looks like a pretty plain entry-level gaming laptop at first, but it has a few neat tricks up its sleeve. Not everyone’s going to love the SteelSeries keyboard, but its mechanical key-inspired feel is something different, and its display colour saturation is impressive at the price, even if the screen won’t blow you away in other respects.

This isn’t a laptop for hardcore gamers or performance snobs, but it is a solid machine with the right level of future-proofing and a display that makes a punchy first impression. Plus, it’s much more affordable than the latest gaming laptops with the fastest graphics cards.