(Image credit: MSI)

I've spent an awful lot of time testing, using, and benchmarking gaming laptops this year, and we've had a bumper crop, too. With Nvidia releasing a whole new generation of graphics chips (and you can bet I've been testing a ton of those as well...), the best gaming laptop manufacturers have been hard at work either respinning their old machines to make way for the new GPU silicon, or completely redesigning their laptop chassis for a new year.

If you'd have told me that an MSI gaming laptop would be a nominee in our best gaming laptop of the year listing, I would have thought you were struggling with reality. Mind, if you'd also told me you could bag an RTX 50-series notebook for the same price as a 64 GB DDR5 kit, I'd probably have the same reaction. And yet, both have come to pass. The MSI Vector 16 HX AI is at least deserving of its fate, as an endearingly anachronistic, but impressively affordable gaming machine.

Then we have the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i, another big ol' gaming laptop, but one with a neat trick up its sleeve: genuinely useful software. That is unprecedented, and even if it wasn't the quickest RTX 5080 gaming laptop we've tested, that alone would win it the nomination right here.

So, three great laptops stand before me. These are the nominees, and we'll announce the winner on New Year's Eve. Which is your favourite?

Best gaming laptop 2025: the nominees

The winner of the PC Gamer Hardware Award for the best gaming laptop will be announced on New Year's Eve. And while it seems obvious from the guide block below 👇, honestly, any of these three would be a worthy winner as they each offer something slightly different from each other and from any other gaming laptop on the market today.

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Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.