5 Affordable Gaming Laptops

Everyone loves gaming on the go, but not everyone can afford an Alienware or a Razer Blade gaming laptop. With that in mind, we bring you the first in a series of features on laptops purpose-built for you to take your gaming places. These five laptops are all priced under Rs 50,000, which isn’t exactly cheap, but these big boys can handle AAA games like Battlefield 4 and Titanfall easily, assuming you don't crank up the settings too high. Along with gaming, these laptops will also be easily able to run your PPT's and let you play HD movies on your TV.

Note: Hardware prices are more unstable than the political scenario in India, so keep in mind that they are subject to change.

HP Pavilion 15-n209TX - Rs 46,000

The Pavilion 15-n209TX is the Clark Kent of laptops, with sleek, professional Macbook-like lines that hide under it a powerful 4th generation Haswell Core i5 4200M at 1.6 Ghz, with a boost clock of up to 2.6 Ghz. It comes with 4 GB RAM (upgradeable to 12 GB), Windows 8.1, a nice juicy 1 TB drive, and a 15.6 inch screen
with a modest but manageable 1366x768 resolution. For gaming, there's a dedicated Nvidia Geforce GT 740M with 2 GB DDR3 dedicated RAM, and DTS Sound+. A pretty sweet deal when you weigh the price against these specs. It can run most games at moderate-to-high settings at native resolution. There are several variants of this laptop, some with Windows, and some with Ubuntu, and there is also a variant with AMD Quad Core APU if you prefer an AMD-ATI combo.

Asus X550LC-XX039D - Rs 41,000

The Asus X550LC is similar in look and specs to the HP Pavilion above, except with a dark grey spun aluminum look. It also has the same Intel Core i5 4th generation 4200M, except it comes with a 750 GB HDD, free DOS, and a Geforce 720M GPU with 2 GB DDR3 RAM. The screen is the same 15.6 inch with 1366x768 resolution. It is a bit cheaper than the HP though. You can run most games on this laptop, but you may have to make a few performance compromises.

Lenovo Essential G510 (59-398452) - Rs 40,500

The Essential G510 looks chunky and boring as compared to the sexy beasts above, but it's got a lot of power under the hood. The Intel Core i5 4th generation 4200M beats at a steady 2.5 Ghz, with a boost of 3.1 Ghz on tap, and it also packs in 4 GB RAM, expandable up to 16 GB. The G510 comes in two variants, one with the onboard Haswell 4600 Intel Graphics, and the other with a dedicated ATI Radeon 8570M, both quite capable solutions for gaming, though a dedicated GPU is better.

Toshiba Satellite C50-A - Rs 47,600

The C50-A is the most expensive one of the lot, and packs in the same Intel Core i5 4200M processor at a base clock of 2.5 Ghz and a boost of up to 3.1 Ghz. It’s 4 GB DDR3 RAM runs at a faster 1600Mhz frequency, and while the 500 GB HDD may seem less, graphics are powered by a very decent Geforce GT 710M dedicated chipset with 2GB DDR3 VRAM. The screen is once again the standard 15.6 inch size with 1366x768 resolution. It will run most games, but you will have to turn down the settings quite a bit.

Dell Inspiron 15 - 3537-i5 - Rs 47,000

Dell has several laptops under the Inspiron 15 3537 series with subtle differences. The one we prefer is powered by the same Core i5 4200M processor as above, but Dell has packed this one with 6 GB of RAM (with a max of 8 GB), a 1 TB HDD, and a 2 GB AMD Radeon HD 8670M as the dedicated graphics chip. This laptop also comes preloaded with Windows 8, and the display is a 15.6 inch HD LED screen with 1366x768 resolution. Again, this will be able to run most games decently at 768p.