Laptop gaming is predominantly more expensive than desktop gaming as manufacturers try to stuff as many components as possible into a tiny laptop chassis, while also trying to take heat and battery life into account. It's certainly not a replacement for desktop gaming, but gaming laptops' compact size does offer the ability to easily move your setup with a built-in screen included, which is space-saving if you do not have the room that's needed for a large gaming rig.
If you want to enter the gaming laptop scene, Lenovo's Legion Slim 5 is an absolute bargain at only $849. It combines Nvidia's RTX 4060 mobile gaming graphics with the Ryzen 5 7640HS processor to power a 144Hz FHD 16-inch screen. It's a competent machine for the price, and with the RTX 4060, it can run most games on sensible graphics settings.
For a rough idea of how this gaming laptop performs, you can take a peek at our review of the Lenovo Legion Slim 5. However, do bear in mind that the review unit we tested was a different model and had some alternate components. Still, even with more powerful components in our review laptop, we were impressed with how long the battery lasted and how affordable the Lenovo Legion Slim 5 was at launch, with a respectable MSRP. This is the lowest price I've seen this gaming laptop on sale for.
The Lenovo Legion Slim 5 comes armed with enough power to play any game that's currently released, with its RTX 4060 GPU able to take advantage of graphical enhancements like DLSS 3 to enhance framerates in resource-heavy games. The 16GB of 5600MHz DDR5 RAM is ample for most current gaming needs and also fine for general browsing and applications. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the 512GB SSD, which is the bare minimum size for operating an OS and a small games library. For example, the latest Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 title needs around 300GB of space for a full install. But for just $849, it's still great value for what you get.
