Budget Gaming Laptop Under $1000

Hey man. I'm an Aussie gamer. You can get lucky. I got my intel i7 4700MQ, Nvidia 740m, 8GB RAM, DVD drive gaming laptop for $600 back in November 2013 at Dick Smith. Just because the Windows 8 that came with my laptop left it with 1 star reviews! Every now and then they have mega sales. Sales are definitely your friend with laptops.

For the money you can get better performance with a desktop PC, but if you're travelling around with your computer I'll give you an idea of what you can get in that $800-$1000 price range, and what is the minimum graphics card I can recommend at that price. Just give me a few minutes to think about it. Good luck!

As far as gaming the best intel nvidia pairing for that budget tends to remain the i7 4700MQ and Nvidia 740m, 750m or 840m. If you see one for under $1000 with 750m and a quad core i7 then go for it right away.

The quad core 3Ghz i7 with 850m is also in the performance range I would normally recommend for serious gamers, but those laptops are hard to find for under $1200.


For AMD I reccommend a laptop thats at least a 3GHZ Quad core such as the A8 7200P quad core, with R7 M260 graphics or higher. Or 7770m, 8670m or higher.


Unfortunately I'm also going to recommend changing your resolution down to 1366x768 on all systems at that budget. These cards don't tend to handle 1080p gaming so well.

Unfortunately with laptop gaming you're going to have to learn to become comfortable with skipping some games like Assassin's Creed: Unity, Dead Rising 3 and the Witcher 3 that you can get on a console.

Best setup for gaming at home for under $600 is still a PS4. For $800 you can build a really nice desktop PC that can beat it.
For about $1300 you can buy a laptop with gaming on the go performance that can match that PC.

Ok I hear you man! Yeah the parts I mention above should suit you nicely then.

Newer laptops with better performance are due out in the middle of the year with new i7s and Nvidia 940m etc.
Hopefully that will mean clearance sales for old stock.

Good luck!

Yeah just keep an eye out. Mine was a freakish sale with new technology at the time so you might not get that lucky. Believe me, I tried to find another sale that good afterwards for my house mate. However if you keep an eye out on sales every now and then you should find something great for under $800.

Also here's a bit more advice as you enter the dangerous world of laptop gaming. Stay away from all games that need a Nvidia 670/760 or AMD 7870/R9 270 as a minimum. You need a high end laptop to play those games, but there's only a handful of them at the moment anyway.

Also if anything runs terribly I find 1200x720 medium settings is still pleasing enough to my eye (sometimes you have to change the desktop resolution down too when playing at lower resolution to avoid bugs).
Sometimes I turn it down to those settings just so my laptop runs a bit cooler and better on battery over long periods of time.