Most gaming laptops are large, ostentatiously styled with massive vents and a fighter jet-like aesthetic — and they're heavy. They're not meant to be carried around everywhere like regular laptops, but rather from place to place for gaming sessions. Not everyone wants a massive laptop for their gaming needs, though, and that's where a new breed of thin and light gaming laptops comes into play.
The Lenovo Legion Slim 5 tops this list. It's not only a great gaming laptop, but it's one of the best laptops, period. It's not the only excellent thin and light laptop worth considering, though. These are our favorites.
Why you should buy this: It's an ultra portable, fast gaming machine with loads of great features.
Who's it for: Gamers of any kind will love this laptop.
Why we chose the Lenovo Legion 5:
There's very little to dislike about the Lenovo Legion 5. It's pretty lightweight at just 3.6 pounds, and yet it packs an AMD Ryzen 7 CPU and Nvidia RTX 4060 GPU with high-TDP into its compact chassis. It's not the absolute lightest of the thin and light laptops on this list, but it's close to it, and despite that offers some of the best performance and great battery life.
The display is beautiful, with a 1800P OLED panel that is detailed, crisp, and incredibly rich. It has great contrast and color representation, helping esports and AAA games pop off the screen, and with its high-refresh rate, you'll enjoy fast and responsive gaming no matter what you play.
There's no Thunderbolt 4, which is a shame, but you do get USB-C 3.2 Gen 2x2 and USB-A 3.2 ports, headphone jack, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, and a Wi-Fi 6e connection.
Why you should buy this: It's a powerful laptop with a reasonable weight.
Who's it for: Anyone who wants maximum gaming power in a somewhat-portable package.
Why we chose the Razer Blade 14:
The Razer Blade 14 epitomizes a high-end gaming laptop, with a few nods to portability along the way. It's relatively thin and light at 4.1 pounds. It's also elegantly designed with its all-black aluminum chassis and just a single green Razer logo on the lid. You get per-key RGB backlighting, which gamers want, and that's the most apparent visible nod to this being a gaming laptop.
Inside, you'll find a blazing-fast eight-core, 16-thread AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS CPU that makes it a powerhouse for CPU-intensive games, and you can configure up to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 GPU. Even the base RTX 3060 will let you play most games at 1440p and high settings. Razer designed the thermals to handle long-term gaming sessions while maintaining performance.
The Razer Blade 14 utilizes a 14-inch, 16:9, 1440p IPS display with up to a 240Hz refresh rate, providing both high resolution and a high refresh rate. There's arguably no better thin and light gaming machine available today.
Why you should buy this: It's one of the best thin and light gaming laptops.
Who's it for: Anyone who wants a thin and light gaming laptop with a bit more gaming aesthetic.
Why we chose the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14:
The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 is a truly thin and light gaming laptop, weighing just 3.6 pounds and packed full of the latest-generations of hardware, from graphics, to processors, and memory. It's just 0.73-inches thick, too, making it supremely portable, and with its long battery at over 10 hours of mixed use, this is a fantastic mobile gaming machine.
In this configuration it uses the AMD Ryzen 9 7940S processor, with eight cores and a boost clock over 5GHz. That makes it blazing fast at any tasks you throw at it. Paired with the Nvidia RTX 4060 it's more than up to the task of esports, indie, and AAA gaming – whatever your favorite game, it's ready to play it.
The Moonlight paint scheme looks pretty standout too, if you're bored of the standard black designs.
Why you should buy this: It's the best 13-inch thin and light gaming laptop.
Who's it for: Anyone who wants the most portable gaming laptop but doesn't want to give up the power.
Why we chose the Asus ROG Flow X13:
There aren't many 13-inch gaming laptops – and for good reason. It's hard to pack gaming-level performance into such a tiny package. Razer did it with its Stealth 13, but that's been superseded by the Asus ROG Flow X13. Not only is the ROG Flow X13 thin at 0.62 inches and light at 2.87 pounds, it's also a 360-degree convertible with active pen support. It's useful for more than just playing games.
It's also surprisingly powerful, despite its age. With an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS or 5980HS CPU and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU. That's if you buy the configuration that's not bundled with the XG Mobile expansion dock. If you buy a bundle, you'll get an RTX 3050 inside the chassis and up to an RTX 3080 in the dock. That makes the ROG Flow X13 not just fast enough for modern titles at 1080p and medium graphics, but also upgradable to handle 4K gaming at higher graphical settings.
We also love that the display is in the taller 16:10 aspect ratio, which is unusual for gaming laptops. The ROG Flow X13 can be purchased with either a 13.4-inch IPS Full HD+ (1920 x 1200) panel at 120Hz or a UHD+ (3840 x 2400) screen at 60Hz. And all of that can fit most comfortably in your backpack.
Why you should buy this: It's the thinnest 14-inch gaming laptop you can buy.
Who's it for: Anyone who wants a powerful, portable gaming machine.
Why we chose the Alienware X14 R2:
Powerful gaming laptops are rarely portable, but the Alienware X14 R2 is a gaming laptop that ticks those boxes in surprising fashion. Not only does it bring impressive performance to the table, with its Core i7 Intel 13th-generation CPU and Nvidia RTX 4060 graphics chip, but it has fast DDR5 memory, a terabyte of NVME SSD storage, and a beautiful, fast display. This is a gaming laptop with all the bells and whistles, and yet it's only 0.57-inches thick, and 4.22 pounds, making it easy to carry around all day.
This is a laptop that rivals Razer's Blade in build quality, performance, and looks, and does it far cheaper, too. It even has good battery life at up to 10 hours of mixes use. Sure, when you're gaming it'll only last a few hours on battery, and you won't get the best performance unless you plug it in, but still, that's impressive efficiency for a machine this powerful.
It also has a great keyboard (not so great a touchpad, but who cares, you're using a mouse anyway) and the screen looks great. What's not to love?
Mark Coppock is a Freelance Writer at Digital Trends covering primarily laptop and other computing technologies. He has significant experience in Windows, macOS, laptop hardware, and other technologies around mobile computing. He has been writing about technology since 2015, and has been a professional in the technology industry since 1995.
Mark graduated from Indiana University in 1991 with a degree in Marketing, which along with an interesting in PCs parlayed into a 25-year career in sales, marketing, and sales engineering across a number of companies in Indianapolis, Indiana and Chicago, Illinois. After stepping away from marketing, Mark entered into writing with a gig at the now-defunct Winbeta.org site. He has been writing for Digital Trends since 2016, and has reviewed almost 300 laptops. You can find many of his reviews in various Digital Trends best-of lists, such as the best laptops and best laptop 2-in-1s.
Generally speaking, Mark has been a geek since MS-DOS gave way to Windows and the PalmPilot was a thing. He’s translated his love for technology into a long career aimed at helping people use technology to enhance their lives.
When he’s not writing, you’ll find him in Southern California reading and watching science fiction, taking photos with his family, and obsessing over Indiana University basketball.
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