If you're jonesing for a powerful gaming experience but you're really strapped for cash, there are a number of budget options to consider. You can actually get some pretty decent CPU and GPU performance out of a budget gaming laptop. You just may need to dial back your graphics settings to hit that hallowed 60 frames per second mark in the latest cutting-edge games. If you're not sure where to begin, don't sweat it. We've done the hard work for you and curated a list of the best gaming laptops that fall under the $1,000 mark.

If you're jonesing for a zippy gaming experience but you're really strapped for cash, there are a number of budget options to consider. You can actually get some pretty decent CPU and GPU performance out of a budget gaming laptop, though you may need to dial your gaming visuals back from their maximum settings to hit that hallowed 60 frames per second mark in the latest cutting-edge games. If you're not sure where to begin, don't sweat it. We've done the hard work for you and curated a list of gaming laptops that fall under the $1,000 mark. We've also included a couple of other options for those that can stretch their budget a little bit further to crank up the eye candy.

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3050 delivers great 1080p gaming performance with modern features, including capable ray tracing chops and DLSS. It has plenty of memory and doesn't make any unusual technical compromises, unlike AMD's rival Radeon RX 6500 XT, but that potentially makes it a target for GPU miners--which could mean bad things for price and availability. A year and a half into the latest generation of graphics cards--one plagued by chip shortages, logistics woes, tariffs, crypto demand, and scalpers--we're finally starting to see the first GPUs for PC gamers on a tighter budget. And as the GeForce RTX 3050 we're reviewing today shows, Nvidia and AMD couldn't be going about it any more differently. AMD landed the first strike. The Radeon RX 6500 XT arrived just last week, and AMD made some hard compromises to hit its low $199 price point.

Samsung's loose lips whispered the truth: On Tuesday, Nvidia announced new GeForce RTX 3050 and 3050 Ti laptop GPUs designed to bring ray tracing, performance-boosting DLSS technology, and supercharged creative capabilities to the mobile masses. Nvidia timed the announcement to coincide with Intel's reveal of its heavy-duty 11th-generation Core H-series processors, and the company says the RTX 3050 GPUs will appear in notebooks starting for as little as $799. Last generation's GeForce graphics cards introduced Nvidia's RTX technology, which added dedicated RT cores for real-time ray tracing and tensor cores for AI acceleration tasks. But the newfangled hardware never crept down to mainstream laptops. Instead, RTX 2060 laptops launched at $1,200 and up.