The best gaming laptop performers for 2020: Alienware, Origin PC and more compared

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We’ve rounded up all the gaming laptops with discrete graphics hardware that we’ve tested over the past 18 months or so and ranked them based on 3D performance for this list of the best gaming laptop performers of 2020. If you’re hungry for more gaming laptop data, check out the entire list of game benchmark results.

In general, AMD and Nvidia are (still) duking it out for gaming dominance on the desktop, with products such as the AMD Radeon RX 5700 series and the Nvidia RTX Super line, as well as in laptops. Right now, the landscape can be confusing — but generally the best gaming laptops runs Nvidia’s RTX graphics, which first came to desktop PCs in late 2018, and to laptops in January 2019.

If you’re building a desktop gaming rig, start with our guide to desktop graphics. But if you’re in the market for the fastest gaming laptop options, these are the very best gaming laptops we’ve tested. All of these gaming laptops, in the price range from just under $1,000 to $5,000 or more, can easily support high-end virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, and many new designs fit top-tier graphics hardware into wafer-thin laptop bodies.

When reviewing a gaming laptop or desktop, we run preset gaming performance tests using several games, including Far Cry 5, Metro: Exodus and others, along with standard benchmarks like 3DMark, which is designed to test a computer’s 3D graphic rendering capabilities.

For this list, we’re ranking each best gaming laptop in descending order of 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra scores, but the real-world game scores (presented as the number of frames of animation per second the laptop can render) match those scores closely. Note that these scores are specifically for the exact configurations of each laptop we tested, and almost all can be configured with a wide range of options.

At the top of the best gaming laptop list are two high-end gaming PC options that use desktop-class processors and full-power Nvidia RTX 2080 graphics: the Alienware Area-51m and the Origin PC Eon-17X. These high-end gaming laptops are both at the top end of the price scale. But gaming laptops with decent performance at more reasonable prices, including systems from Asus, Dell, Origin PC, Lenovo, HP, MSI and Razer, among others, are all represented.

New and notable updates among the best gaming laptop list are the latest model of the Razer Blade 15 Advanced, equipped with a stunning OLED screen that’s good for creative work; HP’s novel dual-screen Omen X 2S; and the budget-friendly but powerful gaming laptop, Lenovo Legion Y545.

The exact scores and graphics hardware specs for all tested gaming laptops are located here.

Sarah Tew/CNET

On top of the satisfying visual refresh rate of Alienware’s highest-end laptop, the Area-51m offers an impressive 17.3-inch IPS display screen, an excellent keyboard, and plenty of processing overhead from PC gaming CPUs and the latest RTX GPUs. Plus, a modular processor and GPU design lets you get inside the case and replace both the processor and graphics card for terrific gaming performance.

Read the Alienware Area-51m review.

Sarah Tew/CNET

Like the Alienware Area-51m, the Origin PC Eon-17X features the desktop-class Intel Core i9-9900K processor and the new Nvidia RTX 2080 graphics card. This combination made these our two top-performing laptops so far from all of 2018-2019.