Prices on gaming laptops are out of control. The ongoing memory shortage has made laptops more expensive across the board, but it’s hit gaming laptops especially hard. Some manufacturers have even resorted to launching “new” gaming laptops in 2026 with the RTX 4050 as the starting configuration—and that graphics card is more than three years old.
Given this landscape, there’s really only one gaming laptop under $1,500 that I feel comfortable recommending. That’s the Lenovo LOQ 15. It’s not the thinnest or most powerful gaming laptop in the world, but for this price, there’s nothing else like it.
It’s not that the price of the LOQ 15 hasn’t gone up over the past year alongside its gaming-laptop brethren. (It certainly has.) For the first few months of 2026—the good old days—it was selling for less than $1,000. But even then, it was technologically ahead of its rivals in a number of ways, offering strong performance paired with a high-quality IPS display. So many cheap gaming laptops come with pitifully desaturated screens that put a damper on the gaming experience. That’s really what sets the LOQ 15 apart from the competition.
Also significant is the fact that, right now, you can buy the LOQ 15 with an RTX 5060 for just $1,300. That’s not any cheaper than it normally has been (at least not for the past few months). However, the RTX 5060 is a big upgrade over the RTX 5050, especially with the 100 watts of power that the system can throw at it. Every game I tested could play at well over 60 frames per second at the medium preset, including heavier games like Black Myth: Wukong and Monster Hunter Wilds. You can always push frame rates higher by adjusting settings further or by adding a dash of upscaling.
Amazon has the RTX 5060 configuration, which also comes with 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage, for $1,300, but Lenovo also has a killer deal on the RTX 5050 configuration that’s about as cheap as it gets: $999 for an RTX 5050 (and otherwise identical specs). I’ve tested a number of other gaming laptops that sell for around this price, such as the MSI Cyborg A16 and the Acer Nitro V 16, and none can compete with the LOQ 15. I’ve also tested the Alienware 15 and Lenovo LOQ Essential 15 recently, and both suffer from the same problem.
As much as I wish I could recommend a budget gaming laptop that’s newer, none I’ve tried have successfully dethroned the Lenovo LOQ 15. While you could wait until Black Friday to see if prices dip further, note that I haven’t seen much fluctuation over the past few months. For example, it wasn’t on a deeper sale during the October Amazon Prime Day—and yet, it was still the best gaming laptop deal you could get.
Power up with unlimited access to WIRED. Get best-in-class reporting and exclusive subscriber content that’s too important to ignore. Subscribe Today.
No Comment! Be the first one.