Gaming is an expensive hobby between pricey games and the hardware to play it on. But you don’t necessarily need to spend thousands of dollars on a gaming notebook to get playing. There are a number of gaming laptops out there for under $1,000 that will get you a 1080p screen, a gaming-grade CPU and a discrete GPU.

Will you have to turn down the settings? Possibly, depending on the game. . There are going to be caveats in this price range. Some won’t have the latest-generation processors, GPUs won’t be the most powerful, you may get just 8GB of RAM and the storage space may not hold more than a few games at once. . . You’ll have to make sacrifices. But you should be able to find something to let you play some games, especially if you like esports and indie titles, which don’t use as much graphics power. 

As power users, we highly recommend that if you have the means to spend a bit more, that you consider it; we also maintain lists of the best gaming laptops under $1,500 and the best gaming laptops overall. A better GPU, SSD or screen will go a long way. But if your bank account is hurting like so many are right now, there still are options for you and, if you have more money later,  you can usually upgrade the RAM or storage on your own.

We run benchmarks on a wide variety of gaming laptops at different price points from a swath of different brands, so we know what to look for in a PC. With the best gaming laptops under $1,000, you should be able to run most games,…