Realistic expectations of gaming performance
The portability advantages of laptops, coupled with the engineering challenges of putting powerful components into a laptop’s chassis and effectively cooling them, mean you typically pay at least 50% more on a laptop compared to a desktop computer for the same Frames Per Second (FPS) in-game.
The unfortunate reality is that, when you reach as low a price as $700 for a gaming laptop, you cannot expect to get any sort of decent performance on the most demanding of games. Gaming laptops of this price range are generally limited to playing older games on higher settings, or newish games on the lower settings. You will generally have no problem playing undemanding strategy games like Crusader Kings III of course, even though they are new releases. If you need more than this from your machine then we would advise either spending more (take a look at our best gaming laptops for under $1,000 page) or alternatively consider a desktop PC you can build yourself for $700 or a prebuilt computer, for under $800.
Maximum refresh rate
Around the $700 mark, it becomes a bit harder to find gaming laptops with a 120Hz refresh rate, and 144Hz gaming laptops are rare indeed (though not unheard of). Although 120Hz+ displays can be found on laptops at this price point, they often make sacrifices in other areas such as the GPU or CPU. The most common refresh rate you will find under $700 is 60Hz, and this is not suitable for competitive, fast-paced shooters – the maximum 60FPS will put you at a considerable disadvantage.
Although at higher refresh rates (between 240Hz and 320Hz for instance) the subjective difference becomes less noticeable, the difference between 60Hz and 120Hz is night and day. 100Hz laptops, if you can find them (they tend to be rarer) are definitely an acceptable compromise, even for playing online shooters, but we cannot recommend you go with a 60Hz laptop if this is the genre of game you play. For single-player RPGs or strategy games however – 60Hz should suffice for laptop gaming on a budget.
Resolution
You won’t find a gaming laptop with a resolution above 1920 x 1080 for several hundred dollars more than this price point. 1080p remains the resolution most competitive gamers who play fast-paced online shooters use regardless though, so for many this won’t be much of a negative.
Hard drive and RAM
Besides the rare exception, 256Gb is the largest SSD you can hope for in a gaming laptop if your budget is limited to $700. Generally, we’d argue that 256GB for an SSD is too small a size to be practical: many games can need over 50GB to be installed on your computer, and this doesn’t leave a lot of room, particularly once you consider the space taken by the operating system. Consequently, we’d advise as a general rule upgrading your SSD to a larger one or adding an additional SSD or HDD.
The same is true for RAM – you won’t find higher than 8GB here and we’d strongly advise upgrading this to 16GB or higher.
Color replication
Although you can get a decent enough color gamut for playing games on in this price range, 100% sRGB replication is unlikely, as is much expectation for color accuracy. This means that none of the laptops below would really be suitable for color-accurate design work in addition to gaming, even if they have the CPU power to run the applications well enough.
