The 10 Best Gaming Laptops for Late 2017

Winner: The 14-inch Razer Blade 2017 (Score: 89%) takes the top spot here for its svelte dimensions (18 x 345 x 236 mm / 0.71 x 13.58 x 9.29 inches H x W x D) and weight (1.84 kg / 4.06 pounds). The inclusion of a full 45-watt i7-7700HQ and GTX 1060 is impressive when you consider that the internal dimensions are only 1.47 Liters. Unfortunately, there are problems with fitting components that produce this much heat into such a small chassis. While there was no thermal throttling detected during our gaming benchmarks, we did find that the Blade 2017 scored slightly lower than other models with the same graphics card — although we’re nit-picking with the difference only really being around 2-6%.

The cooling fans, which are thankfully idle during most office workloads, got to an obtrusive 51 dB during gaming — a comfortable pair of headphones is highly recommended. In the same testing period, the center of the keyboard climbed to around 44 C.

Runner-up: The Aorus x3 Plus v7 (Score: 82%) gets second place here, despite the marginally smaller 13.9-inch screen and slightly lighter 1.80 kg (3.97 pounds) weight. We decided to put it in second place because of the larger body dimensions (22.9 x 327 x 263.5 mm / 0.9 x 12.87 x 10.37 inches H x W x D) caused by the cooling setup in the rear and a little extra thickness. The 1.97-liter body is still impressively compact for the performance parts that it contains and it only got relegated to second place because of small differences.

The Aorus x3 Plus v7 handled gaming with aplomb, posting good frame rates while also managing to keep the processor running at the overclocked speeds. In a stress test scenario, the clock speeds for both CPU and GPU dropped (but not as significantly as the Razer Blade). The main weakness of the X3 became apparent to us during our gaming testing and stress testing — in both scenarios the fans hit a whopping 53.6 dB.

Winner: The Alienware 13 R3 (Score: 88%) can be configured with a beautiful 13.3-inch 1440p OLED display that is stunning to look at. When deciding between TN or IPS panels on gaming laptops, there are positives and negatives for each that must be considered, but the newer OLED technology is better suited for gaming with their fast response and punchy colors. Those who like fast-paced games will drool over the 2.8 ms (1.2 ms rise, 1.6 ms fall) black-to-white response time, which makes pixel ghosting a thing of the past.

The 310-nit brightness is decent and is enough to overcome the glossy surface on the screen when indoors, but it struggles outdoors. This screen produced rich, pleasing colors with true inky blacks and an sRGB rating of 97% and AdobeRGB of 78%. The only real downside of this OLED screen is the presence of PWM at 240 Hz through all brightness levels, which is low enough that those who are sensitive to PWM flicker are likely to be affected. This flickering is similar to competing laptops such as the Razer Blade 2017 and Aorus X3 Plus V7, but those two don’t have the lightning fast response time to redeem themselves.

Runner-up: The MSI GT75VR 7RF Titan Pro (Score 87%) is a hulking beast of a notebook that is equipped with a 17.3-inch 1080p 120 Hz TN panel with G-Sync support. The black-to-white response time of 6.8 ms isn’t actually the second fastest after the Alienware 13, but it is close. Additionally, the grey-to-grey time of 11.6 ms is suitably low, and together these two figures combine to make it difficult to detect any slow-to-change pixels. The inbuilt support for Nvidia’s G-Sync technology will help reduce visual tearing as the framerate fluctuates, and this 120 Hz display will also provide smooth movement in fast-paced scenes. 

The screen is surprisingly color accurate for a TN panel, with a low black level, excellent DeltaE of 0.64 for grey and 1.36 for colors, and sRGB/AdobeRGB ratings of 100%/77% that bests many IPS panels. PWM is present at brightness levels below 15%, but at 25000 Hz the rate of flickering is high enough that only the most sensitive will notice any side effects. Those who are affected should just keep the screen brightness above 15%, something which should be reasonably easy given the disappointing 262-nit maximum brightness.

Winner: The MSI GT83VR 7RF Titan SLI (Score: 84%) squeaks slightly ahead of its closest competitor with a massive Fire Strike score of 22192. It achieves this score with two Pascal based GTX 1080s in SLI configuration, which posts results 75 - 90% higher than competitors with a single GTX 1080. Unfortunately, gaming performance doesn’t scale as well as synthetic benchmarks. Some supported titles, such as The Witcher 3, scored 35% (1080p) to 43% (4k) better than the single card Schenker XMG U727 2017, while other games provide near identical performance between the two models e.g., Resident Evil 7. When adding external displays into the equation, nearly every game we tested showed a significant improvement in frame rates at 4K.

While this section is all about the graphics cards, it is worth noting that the processor is a slight weakness in the GT83VR. The i7-7920HQ is one of the fastest mobile chips available right now, but it comes up short by up to 10 – 13% in CPU benchmarks when compared against overclockable HK-series mobile processors.

Runner-up: The Asus GX800VH makes its way onto the list via a technicality. Back in 2016, Asus provided us with a prototype of the Skylake version for testing, but as a pre-release unit, we didn't perform a full review or assign a score. Being tested more than a year ago, and running an older Skylake CPU would also have put it outside the criteria of this guide.

However, in late 2017 this water-cooled behemoth and its dual GTX 1080 SLI setup is still the second fastest notebook we’ve ever run through Fire Strike with a score of 22020 points. Since the graphics card configuration is identical to the GT83VR above, the same comments regarding gaming abilities apply here, except that the GX800VH comes with a 4K G-Sync display from the factory. Asus now has a Kaby Lake version with an overclocking-capable i7-7820HK, creating an incredibly potent gaming machine that could post an even higher score than the prototype we tested.

Runner-up: The Dell Inspiron 15 7577 (Score: currently under review) is the GTX 1060 Max-Q upgrade to the popular GTX 1050 Ti equipped Inspiron 7567. Retail prices are similar to the Helios 300, but our test model is rocking the slower i5-7300HQ (131 / 514, Single / Multi-core in Cinebench R15), fortunately for gamers the i5 compared to the i7 doesn’t result in as large of a difference in gaming as it does in CPU heavy workloads.

Where we do see a more substantial performance gap is with the use of the more power-efficient Max-Q variant of the GTX 1060, but we are still only talking about a difference of around 8 – 14% lower than several different GTX 1060 based laptops in Fire Strike Graphics benchmark (10263). The Inspiron 15 7577 was still able to play our test games on 1080p Ultra between 45 – 98 fps.

Our review is still in progress, so it is too early to talk about many aspects of this laptop. However, our measurements found that the screen brightness is low with a maximum of just 223 nits, and the color reproduction is among the least accurate with 55% sRGB.