Best gaming laptop under $1000 – Top 3

Generally, gaming laptops cost more than $1000, because they need the latest video cards, the fastest processors (all hail Intel!) and a lot of RAM power. Neither of these come cheap, and it’s always been like that. You’ll find that the best gaming laptop under $1000 can’t actually compare to the “monsters” you can get for $2000. No matter where you look, you won’t find any affordable gaming laptops that match the more expensive ones, unless a friend sells you his laptop for half the price, or something like that.

But if you don’t want to spend all that money on a gaming laptop, there are some very interesting choices out there. There are some brave little notebooks that can rise up and slap those expensive laptops right in the face, especially if you decide to tweak them a little after you buy them.

After searching high and low and talking to owners of such laptops, I came up with this short list of 3 laptops that cost less than $1000 and will be great for gaming. Here goes:

Best Gaming Laptop Under $1000

As I said on this website’s home page, in my point of view one of the best gaming laptops under $1000 is the Alienware AM11x. Why? First of all, Alienware is about the only brand that is focused exclusively on gaming laptops, so you know that every product they release is meant for gaming. But of course these are just words. Let’s take a look at what this laptop actually has: an Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 processor running at 1.30 Ghz with 3 Mb of Cache. Yes, it’s a lesser processor than others, but it’ll do the job nicely, as far as I’ve seen. With 4 Gb of DDR3 RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce GT 335M graphic board, you’ll be able to play games like Assassin’s Creed and Mass Effect at full resolution without any problem at all.

You can order the Alienware AM11x here and get free shipping

The second “contestant” in this price/quality race is, surprisingly maybe, the Sony Vaio VPC-EB11FX/T. Sure, it is not specifically renowned as a gaming laptop, but in some aspects it’s even better than the Alienware AM11x, because it has larger display (15.5”) and a great 2.1GHz Intel Core processor (not Duo, but hey, you can’t have everything you want in life). It’s about $100 more expensive, but you can buy it for just under $1000.

You can purchase through Amazon here

Last but not least, how about a round of applause for the little laptop that could, the one, the only, ASUS K42JC-A1! They say it’s a “versatile entertainment” laptop, so they thought about us gamers when they designed it. 2.26 Ghz Intel Core processor, a whopping 500 Gb hard drive (which is huge even for laptops double its price, and a good Nvidia G310M Graphics Engine. A very nice laptop for a very nice price: $875

Click here to order the ASUS K42JC-A1

Now, about the tweaking I mentioned earlier. You bought an affordable gaming laptop with less than perfect performance parameters, but you can squeeze all the juice it’s got by clocking the CPU. This can make it faster, and in turn it can make the gaming experience more enjoyable. Not only that, but you can overclock your RAM and even the video card. How you do that? Well, it’s pure science, but I don’t have the time to discuss it. Instead, you can visit this link and get details.

I hope this post will be useful for those of you who are looking for the best gaming laptop under 1000. Happy “under $1000” gaming, everyone!

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