How to Choose a Gaming Laptop Screen and Battery Life

When it comes to gaming laptops, the screen is everything. The built-in display is how you’ll see all of your in-game action, so it’s important that the panel you choose offers the right combination of brightness, contrast, and color accuracy. You also want to make sure that the resolution is high enough to support your games without scaling them down, and that it supports HDR for richer colors and deeper blacks.

A good gaming laptop will also have a high refresh rate, which helps to eliminate blurring and stuttering caused by the video card having to render frames multiple times a second to maintain a smooth image on the screen. Many of the top gaming laptops also feature NVIDIA G-SYNC technology, which further reduces these issues by synchronizing the display with the GPU to prevent tearing or input lag.

The best gaming laptops will have an impressive battery life, and the latest models are making significant strides in this regard. The Qualcomm Snapdragon X chips used in some new laptops offer much longer battery life than their Intel or AMD counterparts, which can be helpful if you plan to use your laptop for work and play.

The new Asus ROG Ally X, for example, has an 8-core Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus chip and a 4K touchscreen that can deliver up to 6.5 hours of battery life in mixed usage. That’s more than enough for most people who only need a laptop for gaming on the go, and it puts the Ally X in direct competition with traditional desktop PCs that use AMD or Intel processors.

Other laptops are also getting improved battery life thanks to the new Intel Kaby Lake processors and NVIDIA’s RTX laptop graphics. The Dell XPS 13 with an Intel Core i7-8550U processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 laptop GPU, for example, can last up to 27 hours when used in the balanced mode that balances performance and battery life.

You can further increase the battery life of some gaming laptops by using features like the ECO mode that automatically switches between the discrete and integrated graphics to maximize efficiency and by pairing your laptop with a portable power bank or external USB-C dock when you’re not playing. Some of the newest gaming laptops will even let you swap out the barrel charger for an AC adapter to further improve the battery.

The only real downside to the Ally X is that its keyboard is slightly too cramped, and the D-Pad is positioned so close to the display that I’ve accidentally tapped it while adjusting settings or recording gameplay. Fortunately, the issue is easy to resolve by grabbing an ergonomic keycap and moving it farther up the keyboard. Otherwise, this is a great new gaming handheld with an excellent price/performance ratio.