Best 14-inch gaming laptop: The top compact gaming laptops I've held in these hands
The 14-inch form factor is the perfect nexus point between performance and portability.

The best 14-inch gaming laptops represent the pinnacle of mobile gaming. Sure, your Steam Deck and ROG Ally X are great for certain games, and certain spaces, but if you truly want to take a gaming PC on the road then a gaming laptop is where it's at. And the absolute S Tier of the gaming laptop is the 14-inch form factor. Fight me.
You can get more cooling, beefier GPUs, and broader screen real estate in a 15- to 18-inch notebook, but the higher up the scale you go the less wieldy, the less portable they become as actual mobile devices. And you can, of course, get smaller laptops in the 13-inch scale, but as soon as you start down that road you're really limiting what you can do with your machine.
Okay, in our best gaming laptop guide we have a 16-inch machine as the top pick, but that's for PC gamers in general. You and I, we know better, right? We know that 14-inch is where it's at. The 14-inch gaming laptop, then, is the perfect fulcrum point for portability and performance. They will support proper discrete graphics chips, retain enough chassis space for a quality screen, and still have capacity enough for the sort of cooling a modern GPU requires to game successfully. And you will still have a laptop you can take around with you, use for office/school work on the go, and still have the gaming chops to play the latest titles with ease.
If I'm buying a new gaming laptop, then it's going to be a 14-inch notebook. We've been testing new machines for years, and these are our absolute favorite 14-inch gaming laptops and the ones we'd recommend to you.
It's worth noting that, whilst these laptops are the absolute best in the business right now, the RTX 50 series of graphics cards have started to roll out and laptops are next. However, if you're looking for a gaming laptop upgrade, all our choices are still worth considering as they're both powerful and light.
Dave has been testing PC gaming hardware professionally for the best part of twenty years. Back then a gaming laptop was the size of a briefcase, so you can probably see why he's been so keen to get his hands on every compact gaming-capable notebook of the past decade. He's been a 14-inch laptop Stan since he first got his hands on the original Gigabyte Aero and he's still going on about them.
The Quick List
The best overall
The Asus Zephyrus G14 is hands-down the best 14-inch gaming laptop you can buy today. The new chassis is premium, and simply gorgeous, pushing it ahead of the Blade 14 (our previous favorite), and making it the most desirable machine around.
The best budget
Asus has been working hard to make its gaming laptops more grown up in this generation, and the TUF A14—a machine from the more affordable end of the market—now looks far more premium than its price suggests.
The most powerful
If you want the most powerful, fastest 14-inch gaming laptop, the Razer Blade 14 is certainly that. It might be slightly chunkier than the rest, but that gives it the cooling to cope with high-performance PC hardware.
Recent updates
Updated 13 February 2025 to include mention of the 50 series card launch, and check over all of our choices.
The best 14-inch gaming laptop
Specifications
Reasons to buy
Reasons to avoid
Our favorite config:
Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 | Ryzen 9 8945HS | RTX 4070 | 32 GB LPDDR5X | 1 TB SSD
The RTX 4070 version our Jacob reviewed is the pinnacle of 14-inch gaming laptops, offering enough GPU power to deliver excellent frame rates in the latest games, and with effective cooling to keep it running at its 90 W power levels. You're also getting that gorgeous OLED panel, and a ton of fast memory, too.
✅ You're after a machine that can be a workhorse as well as a gaming device: The stylish design and eminently portable nature of the new G14 means that it's just as at home in the office as in your gaming space.
✅ You want a great screen: The high-resolution OLED panel on the G14 is a beautiful example of how good laptop displays can be.
❌ You after an upgradeable machine: The memory is completely soldered LPDDR5x, and that means what you get is what you're stuck with. You also only have a solitary SSD slot, which makes replacing the relatively small 1 TB drive a trickier upgrade down the line.
💻 The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 has finally overtaken Razer's Blade 14 as the most desirable, and absolute best 14-inch gaming laptop around. It's gorgeous and handles its gaming business with aplomb.
Asus' ROG Zephyrus G14 has been one of the best compact gaming laptops since the company brought its 14-inch machine to the world back in 2020. But it's not been the best 14-inch gaming laptop… until now. With the current 2024 generation of Zephyrus G14 Asus has really dialled into what people want from a premium compact laptop, and that has pushed it beyond Razer's Blade 14 for the best overall crown.
A big part of its success is that new chassis. Previously, this was the thing which had me leaning towards Razer's diminutive Blade: its unibody, super premium aluminum chassis. The slightly plasticky Zephyrus G14 surrounds, however, by comparison, made it cheaper from a bill of materials point of view, but also made it feel cheaper than the Razer.
That's all changed now, with Asus creating a full unibody chassis for the latest 2024 version… and it's gorgeous. It feels every inch the premium laptop now, and is really stealing the Blade 14's thunder as the PC notebook giving that proper gaming-MacBook aesthetic. It's slim, it feels great in the hands, and it has just the right amount of flair without being overly 'gamery'.
This might come as a surprise for people who haven't seen a recent Asus gaming laptop. Gone are the aggressive angles, extreme gamer text, and RGB LEDs plastered all over the chassis.
The Zephyrus G14 has always been one of Asus' key AMD-based gaming laptops and that has played right into the 14-inch notebook's hands given that the recent Ryzen chips have been fantastic mobile CPUs. The Ryzen 9 8945HS chip at its heart is a great eight-core, 16-thread chip, with the best of the last-gen iGPUs inside it. That's the integrated graphics powering the best handheld gaming PCs around right now and means you can save some battery, leave the discrete GPU off, and still get impressive 1080p gaming frame rates.
But with the option to have up to a discrete RTX 4070 GPU inside it means you can still get proper gaming performance at higher resolutions, too. There are RTX 4050 and RTX 4060 versions also available, which gives you some scope to pick up more affordable versions of this premium machine.
It's worth noting that the RTX 4070 is limited to 90 W TGP, where the Blade 14 is given 140 W to play with, which does