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3 reasons why you should buy a gaming laptop in 2023

It’s assumed that with every new year, our tech will improve. But in 2023, gaming laptops aren’t just inching forward — they’re making a big leap.

Regardless of what brand of gaming laptop you prefer, you’ll likely see major improvements in key areas like performance, battery life, and display quality — and that’s great news if you’re looking to buy in 2023. While it may be a few months before some of these models are available to purchase, they’ll be worth the wait. Here are three reasons to but a gaming laptop in 2023.

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RTX 4090s everywhere

The Razer Blade 18 on a table in front of a window.
Digital Trends

Nvidia announced its RTX 40-series mobile graphics at CES 2023, and that includes a new highest tier for laptops in the RTX 4090. Names of GPUs are just names, but clearly, Nvidia thinks its can deliver enough performance to justify calling this laptop card an “RTX 4090.”

But beyond the raw performance and new features of this new GPU, it’s going to be more widespread than a top-end card has ever been before. Most notably, the RTX 4090 is going to end up in more compact gaming laptops than ever, including 14-inchers. In the past, the Razer Blade 14 was the only 14-inch gaming laptop that could be configured up to the most powerful graphics (the RTX 3080 Ti at the time). Other 14-inch laptops (whether gaming or not) were often capped at an RTX 3050 Ti or RTX 3060.

Now, though, that’s all going to change. Plenty of compact 14-inch laptops will be coming out in 2023 and will have an RTX 4090. The updated ROG Zephyrus G14 is a great example. This popular little gaming laptop is now offering configurations up to an RTX 4090, which should greatly expand the kind of performance you can expect out of it. Just how powerful these systems will be is to be determined (and will likely vary from laptop to laptop), but we can expect small laptops get a big boost in 2023.

HDR galore

The ROG Zephyrus M16 on a white table.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

HDR has long been a sore spot in PC gaming. The transition to more advanced backlighting like mini-LED or OLED in the world of PCs has been painfully slow. And that means proper HDR performance has been inaccessible to PC gamers, outside of plugging your PC into a television.

But now, many high-end gaming laptops are finally offering mini-LED as a configuration option. That includes the Razer Blade 16, ROG Zephyrus M16, and many more. With over 1,000 local dimming zones and 1,100 nits of peak brightness, these new gaming laptops should provide some solid HDR performance in games. These new mini-LED panels are high resolution and high refresh rate too — in terms of visuals, there’s really no downside.

Last year, we saw just a couple of high-end gaming laptops embrace high-refresh rate OLED, limited to only the Razer Blade 15 and MSI Raider GE67 HX. The rate of adoption for mini-LED is already much larger, and considering how much brighter these panels are, there’s finally reason to get excited about HDR gaming on laptops.

MUX Switches and Advanced Optimus

A visual graphic of how Nvidia's Advanced Optimus works.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

There are a couple of other features you’ll see in almost every gaming laptop in 2023, and they should help with battery life. MUX switches are nothing new — and neither is Nvidia’s Advanced Optimus. But in 2023, these two features are more widespread than ever, and they work in tandem to improve battery life by helping laptops switch between integrated and discrete graphics.

The MUX switch is the hardware component that physically toggles the adapter that connects the display from the integrated graphics and the discrete graphics. Nvidia’s Advanced Optimus is the software side of the equation — it automatically (and hopefully intelligently) detects which graphics the application you’re running needs. The point is to optimize battery life, since you really don’t want to be running your heavy RTX GPU while you’re writing in Microsoft Word.

These technologies will be even more important if you do opt for one these more advanced displays and high refresh rates, which hurt can battery life on gaming laptops that already don’t last very long. And in 2023, it’s no longer a premium feature reserved for the most expensive gaming laptops — and that’s really great to see.

Luke Larsen
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Luke Larsen is the Senior Editor of Computing, managing all content covering laptops, monitors, PC hardware, Macs, and more.
You can preorder a GeForce RTX 50 series laptop on February 25
RTX 50 Series gaming laptop.

Nvidia revealed the next generation of gaming laptops powered by RTX 50 series GPUs at CES this year, and now we have a date. On February 25, manufacturers will open up preorders for laptops powered by RTX 5070, RTX 5070 Ti, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090 GPUs.

https://x.com/NVIDIAGeForce/status/1889313443032736200

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The RTX 5080 might prove its worth on upcoming gaming laptops
RTX 50 laptop prices.

With only a month to go before Nvidia’s new RTX 50-series equipped laptops go on sale, recent leaks have provided an early look at the performance of the RTX 5080 laptop GPU. According to a 3DMark Time Spy listing on Bilibili, the GPU seemingly offers a notable uplift in synthetic benchmarks compared to its predecessor, the RTX 4080.

The RTX 5080 scored 21,948 points in the 3DMark Time Spy graphics test, surpassing the RTX 4080’s average score of 17,601 points (as pointed out by Notebookcheck)—a 24% performance increase. Considering that the desktop variant of the RTX 5080 is about 10-15% more powerful than the desktop RTX 4080, the laptop variant seems to offer a considerably better uplift. At least, from what the early benchmark suggests. It also puts the RTX 5080 laptop in the same league as the RTX 4090 laptop.

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Nvidia’s RTX 5090 isn’t melting power cables, but it sure looks that way
Damaged 12VHPWR cables due to improper seating

Hong Kong-based tech outlet PCM raised alarms after testing Nvidia’s RTX 5090D and RTX 5080, where it encountered two melted 16-pin power cables and a failed 1,200W power supply unit (PSU). With GPU power demands already a hot topic, fingers were quickly pointed at Nvidia’s newest graphics cards. However, a deeper investigation revealed that an old RTX 4090 Founders Edition (FE) was actually responsible for the meltdown.

Social media posts by PCM, spotted by UNIKO's Hardware, suggest that its testing likely involved an RTX 4090 Founders Edition (FE) before evaluating the RTX 50-series GPUs. While Nvidia has already updated the RTX 4090 FE’s power connector to the newer and safer 12V-2x6 standard, it’s possible that the unit still had the original, more failure-prone 12VHPWR connector.

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