Gaming Laptops: The Last Budget PC Bargain?

Gaming laptops have quietly become the last refuge for anyone hunting a genuine budget PC bargain, and that is a sentence I never expected to write. Memory shortages have not killed off the concept of cheap gaming PCs outright, but they have at least beaten it into a coma. Desktop builds keep soaking up inflated RAM, SSD, and graphics card prices, handhelds are either jumping 40 percent or more in cost or launching above £1,000 from the off, and the poor, square Steam Machine sits somewhere in the middle of the wreckage. Every few weeks, possibly in denial, value hunters skim the shops to see what budget kit actually looks like. Across the last five or six rounds, little has changed.

The Entry Point Is Stuck in the Low Four Figures

For anyone new to PC ownership, the maths is brutal. Decent, more or less current-spec 1080p play still starts in the low quadruple figures once you factor in a monitor and peripherals. That is the real barrier. It is not just the box, it is everything around the box. The secondhand market exists as an escape hatch, but only if you fancy your luck. Otherwise, the floor holds firm.

There is one exception, and giving it a hands-on appraisal means confronting an ancient hardware foe. Research suggests that yes, this truly is the most gaming PC you can get for under £999. So, um. Here it goes. Maybe gaming laptops are not so bad after all.

Less Power, Less Quiet, More Compromise

Not as conceptually good as desktops or handhelds, obviously. Less powerful and modular than the former, less quiet and portable than the latter, laptops have never adequately balanced their compromises. They suit cramped desks and Welsh walking holidays, but historically it has almost always been more comfortable and cheaper for value-minded homebound players to set up a budget desktop rig.

That, however, is changing. Gaming laptops are absolutely not exempt from the pricing pressures exerted by RAM shortages. But entry-level models do appear to be weathering them more hardily than equivalent desktop components.

The RTX 5050 Test Case

If you want a latest-gen GPU on the cheap, you are probably looking at Nvidia's RTX 5050. A DIY build around that card, inclusive of a monitor, a Windows license, and even a relatively basic CPU, memory, and storage config, will set you back about £1,100. The RTX 5050-equipped laptop ordered in to test this new reality, a Medion Erazer Scout 15, is £850. Or £798 from a considerably dodgier-looking website.

There are deficiencies. They stop this from feeling like the bargain of the century. The CPU is an Intel Core i5-13420H, a three-year-old chip that was not exactly El Capitan when it was new, and that age shows up in ways you'll notice the moment you push it. Battery life is downright duff. Expect modern games to eat a full charge in an hour or less. Even when it's more happily plugged in, the fan noise can easily overpower its tinny speakers. And some of that saved cash will need putting aside for a sufficiently insulating headset.

As much as there are no true good deals in full PCs right now, even a clamshell sceptic must accept that for newcomers, they are the closest thing we have got.

What You Actually Get for £850

Otherwise, the Scout 15 looks and feels pretty nice for a cheapo notebook. And that's saying something. If, like me, you can recall the blocky, over-RGB'd horrors that comprised this end of the market a few years back, you'd understand why this one, white WASD keys aside, is commendably mature, offering a decent smattering of ports in a tasteful, slim-enough shell.

• 16GB of RAM, arguably the least you should get away with, but at least you still can
• A 1TB SSD, which avoids cut-price hard drive sluggishness
• A 144Hz IPS screen that plays well with less demanding games

The display is not badly specced either, though it will look dim next to a Steam Deck OLED. It covers only 62.7 percent of the sRGB colour gamut and peaks at a so-so 330cd/m2 brightness in testing. Its measured contrast ratio of 1,574:1 is good for an IPS panel, though.

Performance? The laptop-grade RTX 5050 sits in that same "High, maybe not Ultra" space as the Steam Machine, which is fine, and which you could even count in laptoppery's favour if you're keeping score. It's fine. A base 512GB Steam Machine costs about the same as this Erazer, but once you add the cost of a screen and a keyboard, the laptop comfortably delivers more frames per pound, and that's the math that matters when you're weighing what you actually get for your money.

The Desktop Card Still Wins on Raw Power

The desktop RTX 5050 is clearly more powerful than both. But it's got a big edge. It was benchmarked with a top-end Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU, which is a serious advantage that would be much narrower in a fully budget-spec PC where cheaper components hold everything back. The laptop 5050 also comes with all the same DLSS gubbins as the full-size original, including the latest, sharpest DLSS 4.5 upscaling, as well as Multi-Frame Generation if you're into that sort of thing.

Ray tracing works better here. It's better on this discrete GeForce GPU than on the Steam Machine's combined CPU and GPU, which is a difference that shows up clearly once you push the settings that actually stress the hardware. The Scout 15 averaged 50fps in Cyberpunk 2077 with ray-traced reflections, sub shadows, local shadows, Medium-quality RT lighting, and Quality DLSS. On the Machine, those same settings, save for FSR in place of DLSS, scored 37fps. That's the gap. But they're the same settings otherwise.

None of this fixes the real problems. The Scout 15 is loud. It's not that portable. It's not cheap. Maybe it doesn't need to be cheap, though. It only needs to cost less than everything else. With endless price hikes handed down from above, that alone makes it a far more appealing way into PC gaming than it used to be, and the same goes for other budget machines like the Acer Nitro V15.

The Clamshell Sceptic Concedes

The Steam Machine still makes a lot of sense as a living room PC specifically. But until desktop hardware prices in general can get their act together, sod it. Learning to live with gaming laptops as a serious alternative is the pragmatic move. As much as there are no true good deals in full PCs right now, even a clamshell sceptic must accept that for newcomers, they are the closest thing we have got.

• Desktop DIY with an RTX 5050, monitor, and Windows: roughly £1,100
• Medion Erazer Scout 15 with the same GPU tier: £850, or £798 from a dodgier site
• Base 512GB Steam Machine: about the same as the Erazer, before you buy a screen and keyboard

That is the whole argument in three lines. The gaming laptops sitting on shelves right now are not exciting. They are not elegant. They are loud, they run out of charge fast, and their screens will not win any colour accuracy awards. But when the alternative is paying more for less, the compromise starts to look less like a compromise and more like the only sensible door left open.