It’s tough to find decent gaming laptops under $1,000. However, Best Buy has what I consider to be a good entry-level model for 1080p gaming in Lenovo’s 15.6-inch LOQ laptop, which is selling for $649.99 (usually $959.99) through today, April 9th. Even with its Nvidia’s RTX 4050 (its lowest-tier GPU of the series), the laptop is likely to be performant enough to play many titles at respectable frame rates if you adjust video settings per-game as needed.
A few things stand out to me about this laptop that make it worth considering. For one, I’ve always loved the typing experience of other Lenovo gaming laptops that I’ve used (impressively, this one stocks a full keyboard with a numpad). I also like that, despite being an entry-level machine, it has 16GB of speedy 4,800MHz DDR5 RAM, and you can go up to 32GB by opening up the chassis. Same goes for the SSD — it comes with a somewhat paltry 512GB M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, but there are two slots, and each tops out at 1TB.
