Best Cheap Laptop Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (2024) Asus' Zenbook 14 ( 7/10, WIRED Recommends ) offers good performance, great battery life, and an OLED display—all for under $1,000. This model has an AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS with 16 GB of RAM and a 512-GB SSD. We were impressed with the performance, especially given the price, though the fan can get a bit loud.
Graphics and gaming aren’t entirely workable, with rather pitiful frame rates throughout, but battery life is outstanding, clocking in at 15 hours (measured by looping a YouTube video at full brightness). This is a small, portable machine and it manages to pack in plenty of ports despite its slim form. There are two USB-C ports (one of which is needed for charging), a USB-A port, and a full-size HDMI output.
The keyboard is thoughtfully laid out and very nice to type on. It's worth noting that this model is frequently out of stock at Walmart but you can usually snag it directly from Asus at a higher price. Best Cheap Gaming Laptop Acer Nitro V The Acer Nitro V ( 8/10, WIRED Recommends ) may not be the most powerful gaming laptop, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find better value in a gaming laptop around $700.
The 144-Hz display provides enough headroom to keep up with the frame rates the hardware can put out. With the GeForce RTX 3050 included in the cheapest model, you can achieve decent performance at low to medium settings in more intense games. For a little extra cash, you can boost performance with an upgrade to an RTX .