You don’t have to sacrifice power for portability anymore with the best thin and light gaming laptops 2021 has to offer. With all the competition between Intel and AMD, and Nvidia and AMD, internals have been getting more powerful and more energy efficient while also getting tinier, making the way for such portable gaming machines.
You no longer have to carry around a gaming behemoth that will hurt your back just to game on the go. Quite a few of these gaming laptops are just as portable as the best laptops and, in some cases, even the best Ultrabooks.
You’ll find surprisingly decent battery life among these thin and light gaming laptops, making them even more portable since you can leave the charger at home. On top of that, they’ve never been more affordable. For instance, Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 costs less than much of the competition yet is as portable as the rest of them and just as powerful, too.
The best thin and gaming laptops will get even cheaper this holiday season, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals starting to pop up. You should keep an eye here as well as our Black Friday gaming laptop deals guide to score your next gaming notebook.
- On the budget? A Chromebook might be a better fit.
- Complete your rig with the best gaming mouse.
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 2021. 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
- Don't care about the size? Here's the best gaming laptops of 2021
