The best laptop for League of Legends isn’t too hard to find. Look at the ads and spam…you think they’d make a laptop to run it difficult to afford?

Heck this thing even targets countries where the computers aren’t even there yet.

So yeah almost any laptop can run LoL and at decent framerates. 

This is even more true if don’t mind playing at the lowest settings .

You just need to avoid cheap laptops (those below 300$) and a few bad ones if you want 60fps at low to medium.

More important than fps however is to know how to pick a machine that can keep your framerates consistent throughout the entire match.

Why?

High video settings, cool effects and +100fps are all nice  but they’re useless when you’re entangled in a crazy teamfight where all heroes are popping out their ULTS at the same time.

The severe framedrops will make your laptop temporarily freeze and you’ll get killed before you even have the chance to use yours.

Luckily…

The game won’t fluctuate much in terms of framedrops and as long as you know a thing or two about computers this will never happen to you.

And even if you want to play at the highest highest settings with crazy framerates…

I don’t think you need to spend over 750$…

My old laptop has no issues whatsoever to play the game (and I bought mine 3 years ago),Looking back now it was actually the amount afkers and rage quitters during ranked games that made it so painful to reach lvl 25.

Anyways…

Whether you’re willing to play at medium settings or very high settings, I’ll go through the best laptops for League of Legends as of 2020.

In the section after that, I’ll also dsicuss in detail what you need to know to pick up a computer that will let you play the game without lag, horrible framedrops and at the settings you want.

Top 5 Best Laptops for League Of Legends (LoL)

League of Legends didn’t become the biggest PC game in the world with punishing system requirements. Millions of kids play the game on budget laptops.  

Look at the official site’s hardware requirements (when translated to laptops)…

Minimum: 2GHz processor, Intel HD 5XXX graphics card and 2GB RAM

Recommended: 3GHz Dual Core Processor,  NVIDIA 930MGTX and 4GB RAM

If you get anything close to the minimum requirements you’ll be getting 30 fps at the most and we both know that’s no good.

Laptops here will go beyond that without emptying your wallet (w/ at least 60FPs ). So something like:

Our Recommendations:

• 3.5GHz+ CPU (multicore doesn’t matter), see list below
• 2GB-4GB vRAM recent GPU, see list below (4GB is a bit too much but they’re cheap now so why not buy them to play other high end games)
• If taking the integrated route only go for: Intel HD 620/AMD Radeon Vega 3 GPUs.

1. HP 14 TouchScreen
Best Cheap Laptop For League of Legends

  AMD Ryzen 3 3200U

  8GB RAM DDR4

  AMD Radeon Vega 

  256GB PCIe NVMe SSD

  14” IPS full HD 1080p

  3.24lb

  8 hours

League of Legends is a CPU bound game. You’ll be able to play the game with high framerates at low settings as long as you get a good CPU.

What’s better than a modern CPU? The CPUs released last year and this year even from the low end of the spectrum are crazy fast for mickey mouse games like LoL.

What’s the better than Ryzen AMD processor and the Core i3 10th on a budget low end laptop? Nothing right now. 

3.5GHz and the Radeon Vega 3 here (which is just as good, if not slightly better, than the Intel HD 620) will give you anywhere from 55-75FPS.

There other cheaper choices on Amazon, if you do some research. But notice that most of these guys only have Windows 10S which does not allow you to install LoL. Most of them also come with 4GB.

If you got a copy of Windows 10 (which sells for about 100$) if you upgrade the RAM to be dual-channeled w. some RAM stick you got in the closet(again costing ~50 bucks), that might be a better deal.

If you want to avoid all the hassle just get the HP 14, nothing beats the price at the moment.

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2. Lenovo IdeaPad 3
Best Laptop for League of Legends Under 400

  Intel Core i3-1005G1 Up to 3.4GHz

  4GB RAM

   Intel UHD

  128GB PCIe NVMe SSD

  15” HD 

  4.07 lbs

  8 hours

This is the best deal taken out of the table and on Amazon under 400$. I just want to talk about the pros and the cons of this machine over the HP 14”. Although it’s 120$ cheaper and has Windows 10 on it, the 4GB RAM is soldered into the motherboard, that means you can’t take it out but you can upgrade it (and you probably will at some point) to 8 or 12GB (this is the limit for MC) which is going to cost you around 40 bucks. The SSD on it is just as fast as the HPs SSD but it has 1/2 the capacity.

Anyways, as long as you upgrade it to 8 or 12GB you should get the same framerates as you would with the HP 14, should cost you around 40 bucks which adds to a total of 390$. 60$ cheaper than the HP, a great deal indeed.

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3. Acer Nitro 5
Best Gaming Laptop for League of Legends

  Intel Core i5 9300H

  8GB RAM

   GeForce GTX 1650 

  256 PCIe SSD

  15” FHD 1080p IPS

  5.07lb

  5 hours

I think even famous competitive gamers could settle with this one. It’s got a mid-range GPU and the latest Core i5 9300H and honestly even that’s too much to play LoL at high settings.

This little beast will run the game at 85-100FPS at FHD high settings every setting enabled when entangled in a group fight, yes!

The reason behind the high framerates is simple, LoL, is a CPU bound game and the 9th Core i5 has +4GHz. That’s crazy, that was a workstation highest frequency two years ago.  

The only problem with this little beast is that the fact the price fluctuates and it’s selling like hot cakes right now. 

4. ASUS TUF FX505DT 
Best Gaming Laptop for League of Legends w/ 120Hz

  AMD Ryzen 5 R5-3550H

  8GB DDR4

   GeForce GTX 1650

  256GB PCIe SSD

  15.6” 120Hz Full HD

  4.85lb

  5 hours

This is might be even a far better option than the Acer Nitro and it’s actually 100$ cheaper for one small difference: the display.

The 120Hz will make the game a lot smoother especially at very high settings (The Acer Nitro 5 is capped at 60Hz so you’re screen will only display 60FPS at the most although the game will run at +100 fps for sure).

How is it cheaper than the Nitro 5?

The AMD Ryzen 5 3550H doesn’t have the same performance as the Core i5 9300H and it’s a lot cheaper to put on a laptop. The performance however isn’t that far off from the Core i5 9300H, probably around -10% less. 

Check out the performance on this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A72i5YaZcE&t=1226s

You’re still getting 85-100FPS at high settings.

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5. XPC MSI GF65
Best Gaming Laptop For LoL under 1000

  Core i5-9300H

  16GB DDR4

   GTX 1660Ti

  256GB SSD

  15” full HD 120Hz IPS

  4.10lb

  4 hours

I’m not a big fan of this laptop but we’ve already gone through pretty much all the deals to play the game even at the highest settings.

I don’t like it because it’s way too powerful just for LoL. The 2060RTX is a beast GPU that’s just going to swallow LoL with shoes on and honestly the CPU isn’t really the best match for it. But that’s just speaking for other games though, for LoL this combo is okay.

This beast with all the armor on is going to make run LoL at 130-160FPS at high settings/FHD with  the whole shebang on.

Why did we post this laptop though? The price it’s only 900$ and most 2060RTX laptops sell for at leat 1100$.

If budget is not an issue though, I’d advice you get the Acer Predator which has the very same hardware except for a more powerful CPU. That’s not going to make a big difference for LoL(it will increase your FPS to 200FPS probably but 150FPS is way too mucuh already) but it will for other games.

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How To Buy The Best Laptop For League Of Legends

The hardware requirements for LoL are pretty low and the game is playable with just over 15fps.

But if you get a laptop with the official minimum requirements you’re not going to get a solid and consistent framerate. 

Most modern laptops today will be okay though, you just need to avoid a few bad apples.

How?

This will automatically get you a 8GB of RAM, a fast CPU, the FHD display you need to play LoL

Most of us want to get the best bang for our buck though and avoid unnecessary power, what’s the point of getting 500FPS at high settings when you could be doing fine with 100FPS?

1.GPU

The GPU isn’t necessarily the most important component for LoL but in the laptopville it can dictate the quality of your purchase and what other high end components you will end up with so it’s good to know what GPUs are all about and what they can offer you in terms of FPS/settings for LoL.

Basically there are two types:

1.1 Integrated Cards

These come by default and share resources with the CPU, so they are a lot weaker to process graphics.

Low-Medium Settings

Integrated GPUs whoever have come a long way these days. They’re not just useful to play 2D PC games, indie games or 10 year old franchises. They’re sufficient to play triple A games at low settings and in some cases at medium settings.

Performance: As long as you get a recent integrated GPU, you should be able to play LoL at low settings with +60FPS. 

What are the latest? Intel HD 5XXX,6XXX. AMD Radeon Vega X, AMD Radeon RX.

Here are some specific examples:

All of them will give you  the same framerates, if you are picky about a tiny bit more speed then go to notebookcheck.com and compare them side by side. Here’s an example.

I’m not saying you can’t play the game at high settings with these but you’re not going to get solid and consistent framerates throughout the match and you’d be lucky to get 30FPS( a super fast CPU might help offset the lack of GPU power).

1.2 Dedicated Graphics Cards

Dedicated GPUs have their own “vRAM” and do not share resources with the CPU, they can process images on their own and they are several times faster than integrated GPUs.

Modern NVIDIA GPUs

2018-2020 AMD GPUs

High Settings

High settings at 80-120 FPS can be played with something like a NVIDIA GTX 840M or an AMD R7 M260X, dropping to 80FPS during team fights only.

What does this mean for modern GPUs and the table?

All of them are either equal or more powerful than those two GPUs. So as long as you get one you’ll be able to play at high settings starting at 80FPS and going up to 300FPS (though there’s no point going beyond 120FPS I think).

Blue: MX150,MX250,Pro RX 555X These will give you 80-120FPS at high settings 1080p.

Green: GPUs can output 100-150FPS at very high settings with dropping below 100FPS.

Purple GPUs: completely overkill for LoL. Don’t touch them unless you get a great deal on them or you plan on trying other AAA games.

NVIDIA vs AMD

You’ll have many people swear up and down that an intel machine with NVIDIA graphics is the way to go for. I can agree with that  but they are also expensive.

AMD laptops have disadvantages usually 10% less faster/powerful but they are still decent machines at very decent prices. One thing that I’ve noticed is that they can be a bit hotter than the average NVIDIA armed laptop though.

CPU

Like almost any game out there. CPU is the single most important component to make your framerates jump to crazy numbers.

Clock Frequency vs Multi-Core

The rule for gaming is simple, no matter how much game developers tout their “multi-core optimization”, all games rely on single clock speeds. This means that all that matters in a CPU is the clock frequency of a single core not the number of cores or cache or anything else.

With this rule in mind you can save yourself a few bucks but buying the supposedly “weaker GPU”  than the other one who supposedly has “8 cores” with +0.2GHz clock frequency.

This makes the rule of finding a good CPU a much simpler task. Just look at the clock speed regardless of the generation or the brand. Forget about the U,HQ,HK,H labels just look at the clock frequency.

Low settings:  If you want your Integrated GPU be able to hit 60fps at low settings FHD, get anything close to a 3GHz .

High settings: 80-100FPS at high settings FHD will just need anything close to 4GHz. This has a few exceptions if you have a pretty good GPU then you can get away with 3.5GHz.

Streaming

I don’t like streaming on a laptop, it makes it hot and that’s dangerous for both the CPU and GPU. If you’ve got no other choice, then jut get a cooling pad and yes more cores will help offset the loss in framerates.

RAM

8GB vs 16GB

Because 8GB is standard today and that’s exactly how much you need to make LoL run with no hiccups, the question is whether or not to ugprade yours to  16GB.

The answer is no. There’s no need to. Heck even 4GB might be enough if you’re not running anything in the background.

Dual Channeled RAM

You can squeeze a few more fps if you set up your RAM to be two sticks of the same size and same model.

Ex: x2 4GB RAM for 8GB and x2 8GB for 16GB. Don’t ask me why or how it works, it just makes the CPU run faster that’s all.

Storage

LoL only requires 12GB . Patches/updates might go as far as 20GB in the future. So you really don’t need to worry about storage. SSDs will not help your framerates either , they’re standard these days and that’s actually good because they’ll make your laptop run faster outside of LoL.

Display

IPS FHD

FHD is a must for the game. How else are you going to play the game at FHD if you got a 720p display?

If you’re shopping for laptops under 500, you ought be careful with these two specs. Some laptops will have them others not. 

Refresh Rates

Refresh rates means how many times your display can refresh the image on it. If it’s 60Hz it means 60 images per second. 

So yes, if you’re GPU outputs 60 frames per second you’re going to need an equal or higher refresh rate than 60.

Ideally all laptop display would have 1000Hz but this fluctuates between 60 and 300. The higher the refresh rate of a laptop’s display, the higher the price increase. 300Hz display can make a laptop cost as much as 2000 dollars.

I’m not saying you should get 300Hz displays but if you have a beast GPU you’re definitely will be hitting past the 100+FPS and if you want to see every framerate on your screen you better make sure your laptop has at least that much refresh rate.

If you have a 60HZ screen and 100FPS, you’ll still feel the game smoother than just having 60fps but yeah you’d notice a huge difference if you could a higher refresh note.

Keep in mind that some manufacturers try to cut down prices by giving you a 60Hz even with a powerful 1000 laptop.  It’s probably the only thing to be cautious when checking out a laptop’s display specs.