For gaming on the go, finding one of the best thin and light gaming laptops for your needs is vital. As both technology and competition improved over the years, laptops have evolved to be far more lightweight and portable. This is thanks to hardware shrinking in size and becoming more energy-efficient while increasing in power and speed.
In fact, these laptops can get so thin that they rival some of the best Ultrabooks, which are well-known for how thin and light they are. And you can easily pair these slim gaming laptops with the best mouse and the best gaming keyboards.
What also makes thin and light laptops so impressive is that they often have an excellent battery life, not just for a gaming laptop but for a laptop in general. You’ll be able to work and play all day with one of them and only need to charge it at night, even when it comes to more intense gaming sessions.
The costs for these laptops have also decreased over the years, so getting your hands on one of these top-of-the-line portable machines isn’t nearly out of your reach. We’ve made the search even easier by compiling some of the best thin and light gaming laptops on the market.
The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 may be missing a webcam and a Thunderbolt 3 port, but it’s damn near close to perfection, garnering our coveted yet rarely given five-star rating. This is an absolute beast of a gaming laptop, delivering an incredible performance with its AMD Ryzen 4000 processors and Nvidia RTX 2060 graphics card while touting best-in-class battery life that will last you all day long, a fast display with a 120Hz refresh rate and a lightweight, ultrathin design. This is definitely the best thin and light gaming laptop in 2022. For a laptop this impressive, we’re surprised Asus isn’t asking for more.
Read the full review: Asus ROG Zephyrus G14
At just .7 inches thick and featuring beefy Coffee Lake processors, the MSI GS65 Stealth isn't just one of the best thin and light gaming laptops ever made, it's one of the best devices you can currently game on full stop. It features an Intel Core i7-8750H CPU and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 graphics, which gives you plenty of power for playing the latest games with the graphical settings set to 'high', and it all comes in a brilliantly thin and gorgeously-designed body.
Read the full review: MSI GS65 Stealth
The latest Razer Blade Stealth is an absolutely brilliant thin and light gaming PC. It's a brilliant demonstration of just how far gaming laptop technology has come, with Razer fitting some seriously impressive components into the slimline body of the Blade Stealth. The 2018 version comes with some of the most up-to-date hardware money can buy, and it benefits from a brighter (and larger) display and a new, more subtle, design.
Read the full review: Razer Blade Stealth
Expensive though it may be – as is usual with the Razer Blade line – this installment of the Razer Blade 15 is staggeringly powerful, more than capable of annihilating any PC game you throw at it. With up to an RTX 2080 Super in the GPU department, there’s no doubt of its extra oomph, which makes it an excellent candidate for creative professionals as well, especially with that design that keeps things classy and a trackpad that’s among the best we’ve tested on a gaming laptop. If you’ve got deep pockets and you like to keep things stylish, this is the best thin and light gaming laptop for you.
Read the full review: Razer Blade 15 (2020)
The Gigabyte Aero 15 proves that you don't need to be big and bulky to be a brilliant gaming laptop. It packs a 6-core 8th-generation Intel Core i7 CPU and a GTX 1060 into a slimline body that you'd expect from an Ultrabook. And, thanks to that beefy processor, the Gigabyte Aero 15 isn’t just one of the best gaming laptops – it’s just as good when you need to get some work done.
Read the full review: Gigabyte Aero 15
Okay, so the Dell XPS 15 2-in-1 isn't billed as a gaming laptop, but within its thin and light frame are components that will give you a brilliant gaming experience. Packed with an Intel Kaby Lake G-series processor, this gaming laptop can keep up with its competitors. While you may not be able to play the very latest games at the highest graphical settings, with a bit of tweaking you'll find that this thin-and-light laptop is brilliant for gaming. Plus, it has a gorgeously-thin design from Dell that makes it stand out from the crowd.
Read the full review: Dell XPS 15 2-in-1
How does TechRadar review gaming laptops?
Much like our regular laptop reviews, we have a standard process of judging the price, design, performance, and battery life of gaming laptops. In this case performance is not only in reference to how well they perform standard benchmark tests, but also noting how fast it loads up the best PC games and how smoothly they run.
When it comes to thin and light gaming laptops, we made sure the laptops truly deliver on their promise of being slim and easy to transport. We also run the laptops all day to test their battery life to make sure you really can game throughout the day without issue. Price will vary per gaming laptop, but we don’t hesitate to let you know if an item is more expensive than its competition.
- Don't care about the size? Here's the best gaming laptops of 2022
