If you’re looking to get a new piece of gaming hardware, and you need to stay on a tight budget, you might want to focus on an affordable gaming laptop or mini PC. But few of those exist in the sub-$1000 category anymore, and the ones that do often compromise on price with an ancient CPU, old GPU, barely enough RAM, and a tiny SSD. And they’ll still be more expensive than they’re worth.
But before you give your gaming dreams up for a loss, there is one easy answer: buy a Steam Deck instead.
Affordable gaming laptops are a thing of the past
But how did we even get here anyway?
Gaming hardware has always been pricier than non-gaming hardware, and that’s always been true of laptops as well. But up until about two years ago, you could find gaming laptops for under $1000, and some of those affordable gaming laptops would have useful specs. Sure, they weren’t desktop replacement powerhouses or even mid-range beasts, but they’d get you solid 1080p or 1440p performance.
Most of these “cheap” gaming laptops would stay affordable by using slightly older GPUs and opting for 6-core CPUs rather than 8+ core models, but you’d still get enough RAM and SSD space to make them a viable gaming machine. After all, in many ways you still don’t need those extra CPU cores for gaming.
While there have been a few exceptions, like the Lenovo LOQ 15 or the Dell G16, the LOQ is perhaps the only quality budget gaming laptop that’s been updated with RTX 50-series graphics cards. But it’s just barely scraping under that $1000 threshold as the entry-level LOQ AMD configuration retails for $999 at full price, though LOQ models are often available at $799 on sale. Dell is no longer offering the G16 under the company’s new brand restructuring, which leaves us with very few affordable gaming laptop options on the market. Almost every new RTX 50-series laptop sells for well over $1000, with the majority priced above the $1500 mark. It’s hard to call that affordable. The ones that do exist, like the entry-level LOQ 15, all compromise in ways that can make your life pretty painful.
And if you’re looking at an RTX 5050 laptop with a previous-gen CPU, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, well, you’ve already made some compromises. And there’s one way to save even more and get a similar gaming experience.
The Steam Deck is a better compromise
It’s more versatile and significantly more affordable
The Steam Deck is a hardware compromise. It’s running a custom AMD “Van Gogh” APU that’s similar in specs to the Ryzen Z2 A. So it uses integrated graphics to play games. And it’s running a custom Linux distro rather than the traditional Windows operating system that’s been the dominant OS for gaming for decades.
However, the Steam Deck is such a tightly packaged device, it makes up for its shortcomings easily enough. That custom Linux distro has one of the best translation layers in the Linux lineup, and since Linux is a more lightweight OS than Windows, the Steam Deck gets better leverage of its minimalist hardware. And it’s cheaper than cheap in comparison to a gaming laptop. The current entry-level Steam Deck retails for just $399. The entry-level OLED model retails for $549, with the 1TB SSD OLED model priced at $649.
The Steam Deck is priced so competitively, Valve’s profits off the Steam Deck primarily come through increased traffic on the Steam storefront and Valve’s 20%-30% cut of all games sold through their platform. Despite all the attempts at breaking Valve’s storefront monopoly on digital game sales, only Epic Games has come close. And there’s good reason for that. Steam is both a storefront, a game library, a social network, and a trophy case at once. It’s also consumer friendly. That’s a hard act to follow.
Just get the Steam Deck
It’s guaranteed quality
The Steam Deck may be a handheld gaming PC and not a laptop, but it can run a keyboard and mouse just fine. It can also power a monitor so you can use it as a mini-PC or laptop if you want.
It’s a versatile little device that is incredibly hard to beat in terms of usability and affordability. And it’s well reviewed. The Steam Deck was loved at launch, and is still the standard of handheld gaming PCs even three years later.
While you might be able to find the occasional gaming laptop in the sub-$1000 category, there aren’t many. And the ones that do exist may not have been reviewed by any trustworthy sources. So for the sake of your sanity, your wallet, and your gaming future, just go ahead and get a Steam Deck. It’s not like the Steam Deck 2 is going to be released anytime soon. And even if it was, it probably won’t be as good of a deal as the OG.