Buy 17 Inch Laptop
Modern 17-inch laptops aren't like the absolute monsters of the past either. They might still have big screens and big power under the hood, but they're much lighter too. And battery life can last for hours and hours, especially in models without a dedicated GPU, making sure that whether you're looking to work or play, you'll be able to do it without constantly pecking around for a power socket. Here are the best 17-inch laptops you can buy today within a range of differing prices.
buy 17 inch laptop
One of the few decent sub-$500 Windows laptops, the Asus VivoBook gives you so much laptop for its price. Along with its big 1080p IPS display, it enjoys a capable (if entry-level) dual-core AMD Ryzen 3 3250U CPU with onboard Vega graphics which gives you just about enough power for older esports games like League of Legends and DotA 2.
More realistically, though, this laptop lets you watch Netflix at 1080p on a decent size screen while offering USB-C connectivity and a microSD card slot. Its battery life isn't great and the keyboard is a bit mushy, but if you only have $500 to buy a laptop and simply have to have a big one, the Asus VivoBook is one of the best 17-inch laptops.
Brand new for 2021, the latest Aspire 3 continues to be a great value pick at 17 inches, packing 8GB of RAM and a 256GB NVMe SSD alongside its Intel Pentium Silver CPU. That's a true quad core too; a rarity at this price point.
It only offers USB-A connectors for external devices, but it does manage to fit a Gigabit Ethernet port in the relatively trim chassis, making it one of the few modern laptops to do so at all, let alone at this price. It also supports Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 for some additional wireless connection options. Battery life is said to run as long as 7.5 hours if you're careful with the screen brightness, though expect less in real world use.
It's not sleek, it's not sexy, but the Dell Inspiron 17 3000 is a capable laptop with a big screen that would be perfectly suited to handling spreadsheets, Word documents, and PDFs in the day, and doing a little big-screen binging in the evening.
The 17-inch display is full 1080p and has reasonable color accuracy and saturation, and it even gets quite bright considering it's not targeted at gamers or heavy media consumers. That doesn't mean it can't do those, though. The Intel Core i7 1065G7 is one of the better Intel Ice Lake processors, featuring some not-incapable 11th-generation Iris Plus graphics for basic Esports and indie gaming if you want.
Despite its affordable price tag, the Acer Aspire has a surprising array of modern laptop features and doesn't cut too many corners to maintain them in such a big-screen machine. It comes with USB-C and Gigabit Ethernet, plenty of USB-A ports, half a terabyte of high-speed NVMe storage and Wi-Fi 6 connectivity.
Its 17.3-inch screen isn't particularly bright or high contrast, but its colors are handled well enough, and the 1080p resolution makes it a decent option for watching movies or TV shows in your downtime. The Core i5 1135G7 isn't powerful enough to play games outside of older Esports titles, but that also helps this laptop sip power, so expect a good 6-8 hours per charge.
It also packs 512GB of fast NVMe storage, 8GB of RAM (upgradeable down the line if you need more) and the option of adding an additional 2.5-inch SSD. Other pleasantries include USB-A and USB-C connections, a Gigabit Ethernet port and a headphone jack.
With graphics shortages hitting every segment of the PC and laptop market, it's hard to find real gaming power without spending a lot. The HP Omen 17 is an exception that delivers on every front, with a capable CPU and GPU combo (10th generation Intel i7 paired with an RTX 2060) that makes it an excellent gaming machine and a powerful all-round laptop no matter what else you want to use it for.
The big 1080p screen looks great and supports refresh rates up to 144Hz for smooth mouse pointers and in-game animations. It's not light at over seven pounds, and its battery won't last more than a few hours if you're doing anything more intensive than staring at the desktop, but it's a powerful laptop with great build quality at a reasonable price, making it one of the best 17-inch laptops you can buy today.
As sleek and sexy as a modern 17-inch laptop can get, the LG Gram comes with a fantastically detailed and colorful 1440p display, a powerful array of internal components, and a precise and comfortable keyboard. And it packs it all inside a chassis that weighs less than three pounds.
There's no dedicated GPU, so it's not much for gaming outside of older Esports games, but the Core i5-1165G7 CPU is a six-core powerhouse, giving you all the performance you need for basic office and more intensive tasks, like light video editing. Despite that, this Intel Evo certified design has some of the best battery life of any laptop out there, offering up to 20 hours in the right circumstances. If you're not looking to play games, this could be the best 17-inch laptop money can buy.
The only downside is the price. This is already an expensive laptop, but due to a shortage of high-end laptops, you have to pay a scalpers price. Only pay it if you need the best 17-inch laptop now and can't afford to wait. If you can want to save a little and are happy with last-gen performance, the 2020 RTX 2070 option is still a great choice.
The smaller Razer Blade Advanced models are arguably the best gaming laptops around. The 17-inch cranks things up to 11, and though the price tag and lower battery life make it a little harder to recommend, it's still an amazing laptop and easily one of the best 17-inch laptops you can buy.
With an Intel Core i7-10875H CPU, an Nvidia RTX 3080 mobile GPU, and 32GB of high-speed memory, it's an absolute beast, easily able to handle any game you can throw at it at 4K. The laptop itself is also gorgeously designed, with a well built chassis, smooth edges, and a near bezel-less display that helps immerse you in your games and movies like little else at this screen size.
This hardware array also makes the Blade an awesome laptop for creative work too. Its display is gorgeous, bright and detailed, and the hardware is just perfect for video or photo editing without compromise.
Not all laptops are designed for play. The Thinkpad range of laptops is iconic for its business-centric performance and build quality, and the latest-generation Thinkpad 17 is no exception. It doesn't quite have the cutting edge hardware of its consumer-facing contemporaries, but it still packs a powerful eight-core processor alongside 32GB of fast memory, plus a terabyte of NVMe SSD storage.
The Quadro T2000 enterprise GPU is all the power you need for 3D work and video transcoding, and the 1080p display is bright and colorful enough for most tasks, whether you're working through documents, 3D design programs or photo editing. The ThinkPad is also super strong, tested in extreme temperatures and conditions that other laptops wouldn't stand up to, and the built-in fingerprint reader helps keep all your data safe no matter where you go.
The best gaming laptops are varied, ranging from thick machines with the most powerful components to slim, efficient machines, to cheaper laptops made of plastic. Sure, a high-end PC over $5,000 might have the highest-end graphics and a great display for best gaming laptop experience, most of us can't afford a rig like that. Our picks here are often high-end models (we're an enthusiast site, after all), but most come in various configurations at various price points. For those on a tight gaming budget, we've have dedicated pages for the best gaming laptops under $1,500 and the best gaming laptops under $1,000.Thankfully, there are more gaming laptop options now than ever, from budget-friendly to desktop replacements. Some come with full-size Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics cards, while others go for the more efficient Max-Q designs that enable thinner chassis and (sometimes) quieter fans.
While many of the best gaming laptops come with a 1080p display and high refresh rates, some include 4K screens, so you can pick between fidelity and resolution. Several gaming laptop go as fast as 360 Hz. There are also an increasing number of 2560 x 1440 display options, giving you an option other than 1080p or 4K. Additionally, some more expensive, premium options include OLED for deeper blacks and more vivid colors.
There is more choice than ever in components, too. While Intel is still a popular option, AMD's Ryzen processors are becoming more common. On the GPU side, Nvidia's RTX GPUs are in most laptops, though AMD is slowly starting to pair its own graphics cards with hits CPUs for what it calls an "AMD Advantage." (We're not seeing AMD GPUs with Intel CPUs).The latest technologies in processors include Intel's 13th Gen "Raptor Lake" processors, which use a hybrid design with Performance and Efficient cores, and AMD's Ryzen 7000 CPUs. We should see a bunch of laptops with both of these sets of chips as the year progresses. Other trends we expect to see are more laptops with a 16:10 aspect ratio, which also means larger screens in some cases.Nvidia's RTX 40-series has started to hit desktops, and were announced for laptops in January. They'll range from the RTX 4050 all the way up to the RTX 4090 (the first time a xx90 has been on mobile).
While many gamers may go to desktops to get the most performance for their money, try lugging a tower, monitor and keyboard around in your backpack. When you need a powerful rig you can take with you, there's no substitute for a gaming laptop.The picks on this list should be ready to run Windows 11 if it didn't come preinstalled already.
MSI may not have adopted an 18-inch display on its flagship laptop, but in our testing, we were still enamored. A mix of powerful performance from the Intel Core i9-13950HX and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 provided for one of the most powerful gaming laptops we've seen to date.And that 17-inch, 16:9 display is no slouch. MSI has added Mini-LED technology, so the 4K 144 Hz display looks incredible. It's not OLED, but in our tests, it often looked almost as good, with extremely high scores on both our light meter (511 nits) and our colorimeter (161.6% sRGB, 114.5% DCI-P3).Add in a Cherry MX mechanical keyboard that's an absolute pleasure to use (alongside per-key RGB backlighting to keep it looking good), and you get some luxury you don't see in most gaming laptops (even if MSI doesn't use the mechanical switches for the number keys or arrow keys).The battery life, at under 4 hours on our tests, makes the Titan a true desktop replacement. But if you're willing to bear the expense of these top-end components and don't plan on unplugging too much, you have one heck of a system in the Titan.Read: MSI Titan GT77 HX review 041b061a72