The Steam Summer Sale is live and these are the 3 laptops I can buy
The Steam Summer Sale is going on, and there are a lot of great games with big discounts.
This year’s sale can be considered the first sale where a gamer can buy a title that can be played on their home computer or laptop, portable consoles like Steam Deck or ROG Ally, and thanks to cloud gaming services like GeForce Now, can be played on their phone, tablet, or directly on their television without cables or a console needed.
However, when it comes to PC gaming, a laptop is the best choice around since you can connect it to a monitor to feel like you’re on a desktop or take it on the go without losing visual fidelity or needing good Wi-Fi.
Choosing the right laptop comes down to what you are looking to play on the laptop. Do you want a machine that will play almost every game out there just fine, or do you want a beast of a computer to run any title at the highest settings without a single dropped frame? For me, I would choose these three laptops, but for different reasons.
For power and portability at a low price, there’s the Asus TUF Gaming A14
The Asus TUF Gaming A14 is my go-to laptop if I want to play a lot of games well, it’s easy to handle and comes with good battery life.
It has solid gaming performance, a decent color display that can reach high brightness, and a satisfying keyboard. With its portable 14-inch size, light weight of about 3 pounds, durable military-grade durability, and the best battery life we’ve seen in a gaming laptop in years.
Some of the games that the Asus TUF Gaming A14 can play at the highest settings currently on sale in the Steam Summer sale are. Baldur’s Gate 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, and all those deeply discounted games drop below $10.
If I wasn’t too concerned about the price but wanted portability I would need to buy the Razer Blade 16
Razer continues to offer a lot of power in a small package. Razer Blade 16 (2025) is an expensive laptop with various options, and RTX 5090 gaming performance is very smooth. There is an option to go with RTX 4090 or RTX 5080 to save money while still being able to play games at higher settings.
The Razer Blade 16 (2025) features a stunning OLED display, excellent Razer build quality, over 7 hours of battery life for web surfing, and nearly 2.5 hours of battery life for gaming. It is incredibly portable at only 4.6 pounds and 0.59 inches in size.
Games like Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacyagain Forza Horizon 5 at the highest graphics settings can bring most computers to their knees, but the Razer Blade 16 can easily handle them.
The MSI Raider 18 HX AI is a gaming laptop to buy if price is not a concern
To say the MSI Raider 18 HX AI is expensive is an understatement. The price of this laptop is almost the same as the previous two laptops combined at $4,000.
Still, the Raider has solid general performance, fluid gaming performance, a bright MiniLED display, a comfortable keyboard, powerful audio, and more ports than even a multi-monitor setup needs. It has a powerful Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 GPU with 16GB of VRAM, providing the gaming performance one might expect from a high-end spec. Its 18-inch MiniLED display is bright and clear, and its 6-speaker sound system is powerful with high-quality sound. But this machine stays at home, as it weighs the same as the Asus TUF Gaming A14 and Razer Blade 16 combined.
MSI Raider 18 HX AI is more than enough machine to take on the most intense games, like Monster Hunter Wilds again Alan Wake 2 at their maximum settings.
