I don’t know if the lack of memory permanently killed the concept of a “cheap” gaming PC, but they at least put it in a coma. On the desktop side, inflated prices for RAM, SSDs and graphics cards continue to inflict karmic pain during our years of “It’s cheaper to build it yourself” complacency, while once-affordable laptops suffer from 40%+ jackups or launch above £1,000 from the start. And the steam engine! The poor square steam engine.
Every few weeks, perhaps in denial, I scour the stores to see what budget gaming kit really looks like these days. Over the last five or six rounds, not much has changed: the entry point into decent 1080p gaming, more or less up to current specs, remains stuck in the low quadruple figures, particularly if you’re completely new to PC ownership and have a monitor and peripherals to consider. There’s one exception, assuming you don’t like your luck on the used market, but giving it a practical valuation means confronting an old hardware enemy of mine. And you all know how little I like having my prejudices challenged.
Yet research suggests that yes, this really is the most gaming PC you can get for under £999. So, uh. So. Maybe…maybe gaming laptops aren’t so bad.
Not as conceptually good as a desktop or handheld, obviously. Less powerful and modular than the former, less quiet and portable than the latter, laptops have never managed to adequately balance their compromises for my taste. They’re suitable for cramped offices and walking holidays in Wales, but historically it’s almost always been more comfortable (and cheaper) for value-conscious housebound gamers to put together a budget office rig.
But this is changing. While gaming laptops are by no means immune to the pricing pressures brought on by RAM shortages, entry-level models appear to be resisting them more harshly than equivalent desktop components. If you want, for example, a last-gen GPU on the cheap, you’re probably looking at Nvidia’s RTX 5050, a DIY version for which – including a monitor, a Windows license and even a relatively basic CPU/memory/storage setup – will cost you around £1,100. The RTX 5050-equipped laptop I ordered to test this new reality, a Medion Erazer Scout 15, is £850 – Or £798 from a considerably more questionable website.
Unsurprisingly, certain shortcomings prevent this project from looking like the deal of the century. The processor, for example, is an Intel Core i5-13420H, a three-year-old chip that wasn’t exactly The captain when it was new. Battery life is downright mediocre – expect modern games to consume a full charge in an hour or less – and even when more happily plugged in, fan noise can easily overpower its tiny speakers. Some of this money saved will have to be put aside for a sufficiently insulating helmet.
Otherwise, the Scout 15 is pretty nice for a cheap laptop. Especially if, like me, you remember the blocky, overly RGB horrors that made up this end of the market a few years ago. This one, WASD white keys aside, is commendably mature, offering a handful of decent ports in a tasteful and suitably slim shell.
Its 16GB of RAM is probably the minimum you should get away with, but at least you still can, and the 1TB SSD avoids the slowness of the budget hard drive. The 144Hz IPS display isn’t bad either: it will look dim next to a Steam Deck OLED, covering only 62.7% of the sRGB color gamut and peaking at an average brightness of 330 cd/m2 in my testing, but its measured contrast ratio of 1,574:1 is good for an IPS panel. This refresh rate also works well with less demanding games.
Speaking of which, the laptop-grade RTX 5050 appears to occupy the same “high, maybe not ultra” performance space as the Steam Machine. Which is nice, and perhaps something that counts in the laptop’s favor: a basic 512GB Steam costs about the same as this Erazer, but add the cost of a screen and keyboard, and the laptop comfortably offers more images per book.
The desktop RTX 5050 is clearly more powerful than both, although it has the advantage of being compared to the top-end Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor in the RPS Test Rig; in a fully budget PC, this advantage would be more limited.
The 5050 laptop also comes with all the same DLSS gubbins as the full-size original, including the latest and sharpest DLSS 4.5 upscaling, as well as multi-frame generation if you’re into that sort of thing. Ray tracing also performs better on this discrete GeForce GPU than on the Steam Machine’s combined CPU/GPU, the Scout 15 averaging 50 frames per second in Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing reflections, subshadows, local shadows, medium quality RT lighting, and quality DLSS. On the machine, these same settings – with the exception of FSR in place of DLSS – reached 37fps.
None of this really addresses my big complaints about gaming laptops. The Scout 15 is still noisy, still not portable in terms of realistic usage, and still not really that cheap. Although perhaps, at least on the latter, it’s not necessary – it just needs to be more affordable than the alternatives, which, in the modern environment of seemingly endless, top-down pricing, represents a massive improvement in its overall appeal as a PC gaming entry point. And, by extension, that of similar low-end computers like the Acer Nitro V15.
I still think the Steam Machine makes a lot of sense as a living room PC in particular, but until prices for desktop hardware in general can recover, damn it: I’ll learn to live with gaming laptops as a serious alternative. While there aren’t any real “bargains” on full-featured PCs right now, even a clamshell skeptic has to accept that for newcomers, they’re the closest thing we’ve got.
