Please, don't fall for these terrible gaming laptops — use these three golden rules before you buy anything

Thinking about buying a gaming laptop? I can tell you what not to do. Don't buy a super-cheap third-party listing at Amazon or another major retailer.

At any one time, even these reputable retailers' sites are absolutely full of listings from murky companies looking to sell off their cheap 'gaming laptops'. I put gaming laptops in quotes there because the machines in question are really only suited for playing the most basic or most ancient games. The issue is particularly acute right now because retailers are ramping up discounts ahead of Presidents' Day.

For those who don't already know, these machines are usually older office or productivity laptops that have been repurposed by third-party sellers. The images and branding are usually geared towards gamers, but these machines are standard Ultrabooks. They often don't even have dedicated graphics cards - in some cases, listing an integrated GPU instead.

Integrated cards aren't inherently bad - they're just designed for rendering standard windows rather than games. They've even improved a lot in recent years, but the truth is, you'll still get better performance from a machine with a dedicated graphics card.

Gaming laptops with dedicated graphics cards usually start at around $600 to $700, so that's where I usually recommend readers start their shopping. That's rule number one, and it's pretty hard to escape that if you want a gaming laptop specifically. I rarely see a machine under $600 that I'd actually recommend buying.

Rule number two is: do your research beforehand, but actually buy around major retail events. The Presidents' Day discounts that are happening right now are a good example. From what I can see, there aren't many true record-low price cuts, but nearly every decent gaming laptop I've price checked is at the same price as back in November. Outside of one-off clearance sales, prices tend to be the best around these national holiday sales.

Finally, rule number three is to make sure your machine is upgradable. Most gaming laptops these days are still fully upgradable with more RAM and storage, but some machines - particularly this with more premium lightweight designs - tend to come with soldered RAM. That means you're basically locked in with that configuration for the entire life cycle of the laptop. If you're going cheap, then the chances are your machine will only come with 16GB of RAM - which, you may want to upgrade once RAM prices have settled down (hopefully they will).

Alex Whitelock

As TechRadar's retail editor, I've tracked gaming laptop prices for a few years now - including both super-cheap options and higher-end picks. I've also been a PC gamer and PC builder for over twenty years now, so I have plenty of practical experience to share. If you're interested, just below are the gaming laptops that I'd actually recommend today.

These 9 gaming laptops are the ones I'd buy today

Good discounts on peripherals today