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So, you're a big-picture person? You need a laptop to match. A model with a 17-inch screen, or one of the emerging behemoths with an 18-incher, could be just your size. Lucky for you, here at PCMag, we've been testing and benchmarking big laptops (along with small, medium, and tiny ones) for more than 40 years, making us a trusted authority in notebook reviews. We consider performance, battery life, screen quality, keyboard comfort, connectivity, and portability to pick the best laptops for different jobs. Our current pick for the best big-screen laptop for most users is LG's Gram Pro 17, for its surprisingly light weight, gorgeous 16:10 display, and game-ready GPU. However, we test more than 100 laptops a year, so naturally, we have more vetted 17- and 18-inch laptops to recommend. Check 'em out; we've got concise summaries for every product, along with a detailed buying guide and a helpful spec comparison.
Our Top Tested Picks
LG Gram Pro 17 (2023)
Asus ROG Strix G17 (2023)
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- RELATED:
- Best Gaming Laptops
- Best Cheap Gaming Laptops
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- Best Mobile Workstations
Best Giant-Screen Laptop for Most Users
LG Gram Pro 17 (2023)
- Remarkably light for a 17-inch laptop
- Big, beautiful 16:10 display with variable refresh
- Long battery life
- GeForce GPU suitable for light gaming
- Flexible bordering on flimsy
- Awkward top-row keys
- Poor audio
The LG Gram Pro 17 is an impressively light 17-inch laptop with a stunning 16:10 aspect ratio display, speedy performance, and lengthy battery life. Despite being slightly heavier than its predecessor due to the inclusion of a discrete Nvidia GeForce graphics chip, it is still amazingly portable for a desktop replacement system. The RTX 3050 may be on the low side among recent Nvidia GPUs, but it's still suitable for light gaming and is helpful for content creators. Though the new laptop's flimsy feel and higher price keep it from repeating as an Editors' Choice award winner, it remains a pleasant surprise if you seek a large-screened, lightweight laptop.
If you want a powerful desktop replacement laptop system a large, beautiful display but not the usual added weight, consider the LG Gram Pro 17. It's also capable of mild gaming and relatively heavy content creation workloads. The LG Gram Pro 17 is the best choice for a lightweight, large-screened laptop with potent performance and long battery life.
Best Giant-Screen Budget Gaming Laptop
Asus ROG Strix G17 (2023)
- Speedy CPU
- Colorful, vibrant, easy-to-see display
- Decent price with Walmart offer
- Pitiful battery life
- No USB4 ports
For a big-screen gaming machine that won't require big spending, look to the 2023 Asus ROG Strix G17. It drives serious CPU performance with an AMD Ryzen 9 processor, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 GPU produces speedy 1080p gaming, all for a relatively reasonable price. However, the real treat for the cash-strapped gamer is the 17-inch 1440p display, which has an impressive 240Hz refresh rate complete with Nvidia G-Sync for optimal gaming performance.
Ideal for gamers on a budget, the ROG Strix G17 pumps steady 1080p frame rates through a bright, vibrant, high-performance display. Of course, it does all this at a price that will leave you with a bit of cash left over for the next Steam sale.
Best Giant-Screen Gaming Laptop
Alienware m18 R2
- Blistering processing and gaming performance
- Relatively approachable starting price
- QHD+ 165Hz display with FHD+ 480Hz option
- Optional mechanical Cherry MX keyboard
- Expensive as tested
- Heavy, even for its size
- Screen could be brighter
If you're shopping for an 18-inch gaming laptop, portability is hardly your top concern, and that's fine because the Alienware m18 R2 is a beast—both in performance and presence. You'll get blistering processing and gaming speeds with Intel’s latest 14th Gen HX chips and Nvidia's most up-to-date GeForce graphics, and a choice of visuals with either a QHD+ 165Hz display or an FHD+ 480Hz option. You can even add a Cherry MX mechanical keyboard for an extra premium flair. Top configurations will get pricey, but it's the best 18-incher for most shoppers and gamers.
If you're shopping for a big-screen gaming laptop, you know that machines with top-end hardware will deliver the best performance to justify the larger display. The Alienware m18 R2 isn't the most expensive, but top configurations drive superb performance, making it a standout in the growing 18-inch category.
Best Cost-No-Object Giant-Screen Gaming Laptop
MSI Titan 18 HX
- Unmatched gaming performance
- Plenty of power (and memory) for professional workloads
- 18-inch 4K 120Hz mini LED display
- Haptic glass touchpad with customizable lighting
- Mechanical Cherry MX keyboard
- Prohibitively expensive
- Big and heavy
- Short battery life
Maximum power comes at a price, and the MSI Titan 18 HX proves how true that is. Stacked with an Intel Core i9-14900HX CPU and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, this 18-inch powerhouse bested the competition in benchmarks and gameplay alike, and it pushes the envelope further with a superb 4K 120Hz mini LED display and choice mechanical Cherry MX keyboard. The feature set is premium and the performance is top-notch, but the price makes it clear that this superpowered gaming laptop isn't for everyone. If money is no object, then MSI Titan 18 HX is the bragging-rights gaming laptop to buy.
When power and premium features matter far more than a pesky price tag, the MSI Titan 18 HX is the machine of choice. It may be hella expensive, but it's the most powerful 18-inch gaming laptop we've seen, with desktop-beating performance and a display that shows off the system's unmatched framerates.
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The Best 17-Inch and 18-Inch Laptops for 2025 Compare Specs
If you're a multi-window multitasker or your eyesight isn't what it used to be, a 17- or 18-inch laptop screen can be a godsend. On the negative side, this screen size dictates a bulky machine—one that's often too big for a briefcase, requiring a special laptop bag, a backpack, or a roller bag, and too heavy for more than occasional transport between home and office or cubicle and conference room.
The lightest big-screen laptops, with one major exception, generally weigh in at under seven pounds. (The one big outlier, the LG Gram Pro 17, is an extraordinary case that comes in at under three pounds.) The heaviest, which are invariably gaming models, tip the scales at a back-breaking 7 pounds or more, and in some cases, that's not counting hefty AC power bricks. Airline tray table? Forget it. More like checked baggage.
Nor should you expect long battery life from a plus-size notebook. These machines are designed to run on AC power most of the time. If yours can endure unplugged for more than four hours, consider yourself lucky. (Just take a look at the tested runtimes of our favorites in our spec comparison table.)
So, are these trade-offs too much to suffer merely for a pleasing view? Are luggables just the large-print books of the laptop world?
No—they're also the performance leaders. Their larger shells accommodate the most powerful processors and graphics cards, the strongest cooling systems, the most memory, and multiple solid-state drives (SSDs) for ample storage. They have plenty of room for all the ports you might need, as well as spacious, desktop-class keyboards with full keypads for numeric data entry.
Jumbo laptops aren't for frequent fliers, but they fill a big niche. Let's look at what they can do, and what to look for as you shop for one.
Work or Play: What Is Your 17- or 18-Inch Laptop For?
A few 17-inch and 18-inch laptops are general-purpose PCs for people who want an occasionally portable system with a large screen. Most, however, fall into one of two camps with opposed but equally hard-core audiences: mobile workstations and serious gaming laptops.
Both types can handle what many PC users think of as work: office productivity and email using Word, Excel, Outlook, Chrome, Slack, and so on. But mobile workstations, as seen in our special guide, laugh at such modest apps. Instead, they carry independent software vendor (ISV) certifications of compatibility and smooth operation with programs for way tougher computing jobs: computer-aided design (CAD) and advanced 3D modeling and rendering, crunching through huge scientific or engineering datasets, or delving into video editing and the creation of worlds for virtual reality. And they rely on state-of-the-art CPU and GPU power to do so.
With the exception that CPU muscle is a little less important while GPU strength is paramount, much the same applies to gaming laptops. They're designed to play the latest and greatest titles at high speeds—at least 60 frames per second, double the rate recognized as providing minimally smooth gameplay—with all the visual details and eye candy turned up to 11. On-screen stuttering or tearing just won't cut it, and lag can be fatal during a frag fest.
Whichever class of giant-screen machine you are considering, you're likely drawn to it by the one big thing the two main types have in common: the screen. Let's look at that.
What Kind of Display Is Best in a 17-Inch or 18-Inch Laptop?
In the 17-inch and emerging 18-inch laptop classes, workstations and gaming laptops alike benefit from choosing the right screen type. A solid baseline pick would be an in-plane switching (IPS) or organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panel, which gives you the sharpest colors and contrast, as well as the widest off-center viewing angles. Touch screens aren't very popular in either class, with both gamers and workstation pros preferring the pixel-by-pixel control of a mouse.
Gamers often choose displays capped at 1080p resolution for high frame rates' sake; fast gaming at 4K resolution requires a costly, top-of-the-line graphics processor (GPU), like those in the 4080 or 4090 reaches of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4000 series. By contrast, some workstation users enjoy the highest-resolution screen possible to mimic the desktop experience of multiple monitors or for editing 4K video. Some mobile workstations also excel at precisely matching what's seen on screen to your finished work's destined output, offering a choice of the web's sRGB, print's Adobe RGB, or cinema's DCI-P3 palettes or color spaces. A few recent models from makers such as Asus and Gigabyte also come with validations by Pantone for color accuracy.
Most standard laptop LCDs have a refresh rate of 60Hz, redrawing the image on the screen 60 times per second. That's fine for the human eye—television is 30Hz, and most movies are 24Hz—and for 90% or more of applications and users. But it's not enough for fanatic gamers who've invested in graphics chips that can crank out more than 60 frames per second. Hence the availability of gaming laptops with so-called "high refresh" 120Hz, 144Hz, 240Hz, or even 300Hz and 360Hz displays. (See more about whether you need a high-refresh display.) Shoppers in this stratosphere will also find some screens that support Nvidia's G-Sync technology, able to synchronize the refresh rate of the display on the fly to the GPU's output for smoother appearances.
CPU, Memory, and Storage: Which Components to Get in a 17-Inch or 18-Inch Laptop?
When it comes to CPUs, Intel parts teamed with discrete Nvidia GeForce or Nvidia RTX A-series (formerly Quadro) graphics processors lead the popularity contest over AMD's mobile Ryzen 5 and 7 chips with their integrated graphics or discrete Radeon and Radeon Pro GPU solutions. Intel's Core i7 and Core i9 processors are still readily available in giant-screen laptops like these, with 13th- and 14th-generation processors dominating.
Many incoming systems with screens smaller than 17 inches employ Intel's Core Ultra "Meteor Lake," "Lunar Lake," and "Arrow Lake" chips, and 2025 will see the last of those in larger laptops, for sure. The mighty—and mighty costly—14th Gen Core i9 chips occupy the top of the market, with a showing by Ryzen 8000-series and Ryzen AI 300 chips. (Read much more on choosing the right laptop CPU.)
For mobile workstations, the "classic" Core i7 and Core i9 rule (Intel's server-class Xeon chips are fading from the laptop workstation scene) and, in some cases, support for server-style error-correcting code (ECC) memory. Though outside the mainstream for ISV apps, ECC's ability to detect and fix single-bit memory errors is a plus for scientific, architectural, or financial computing jobs intolerant of even the slightest data corruption. However, expect to see Intel Arrow Lake H/HX and Ryzen AI 300 processors emerge soon in these highest-power laptops.
Regular, non-ECC RAM will serve just fine for most buyers, though. An allotment of 8GB of memory is the bare minimum for a modern Windows laptop, with 16GB really the floor for power machines like most 17- and 18-inch models are. (More than 32GB is not usually necessary unless you have the budget to burn or will also do heavy-duty content creation work or streaming in addition to your gaming.) Workstations have a heartier appetite for RAM, with 32GB a practical minimum; many models support a whopping 64GB or 128GB. In the case of a workstation portable, you'll want to look into the specific RAM requirements of the applications you plan to run to gauge how much you should splurge on memory.
As for storage, look for one or two M.2 solid-state drives—the first SSD for the operating system and favorite applications, the second perhaps for games and data. Most performance-conscious portables use slightly quicker PCI Express (PCIe) rather than SATA solid-state drives; PCIe has mostly taken over the field at this point. In connection with PCIe SSDs, you'll often see the acronym "NVMe" (for Non-Volatile Memory Express) bandied around, as well as a few proprietary monikers, such as HP mobile workstations' Z Turbo Drives. Both indicate the fastest SSDs. (See our guide to the best PCI Express NVMe SSDs.) Some SSDs are in the M.2 form factor and upgradable; others may be soldered down, and not.
Half a terabyte of storage is the smallest amount you should accept; 1TB or 1.5TB is more mainstream, and some workstations include up to 4TB or more of capacity. If money is a limiter, a smaller SSD (say, 512GB) is a fair compromise if adding an external drive later is an option for your overflowing data. A 17-inch or 18-inch laptop, though, is most likely to have room for more than one drive. Some may have an empty bay to let you install an aftermarket 2.5-inch drive (maybe even a platter-based hard drive) or a slot or two to install an extra M.2 SSD yourself. This can be an economical option; the configuration option for a 2.5-inch hard drive is all but extinct in new models nowadays.
Choosing a GPU in a 17-Inch or 18-Inch Laptop: Gaming or Pro Work
Mobile workstations' graphics cards are divided between Nvidia's RTX and A-series (formerly Quadro, and much more common) and AMD's Radeon Pro (far less common) brands. Their silicon is optimized for different operations than the companies' respective GeForce and Radeon parts for gaming laptops, as well as for hard-charging, constantly-on rendering, or calculations.
On the gaming side of the fence, too, Nvidia enjoys a big market lead in mobile GPUs. Its "Lovelace" architecture defined its GeForce RTX 40-series chips. You'll still see Lovelace-based chips in current gaming and media creation laptops and the enterprise-focused "Ampere" in workstation systems, but newer Nvidia GeForce RTX 50-series chips are imminent in early 2025, employing Nvidia's latest architecture, "Blackwell." In laptops, "Blackwell Max-Q" promises to boost the new architecture with better battery life and voltage-optimized performance.
The basic story for both workstations and gaming rigs is a familiar one, though: Generally speaking, higher model numbers and bigger prices bring you more speed and faster frame rates. All of the current GeForce RTX chips support playing and exploring VR worlds, while high-end mobile workstation parts like the Nvidia RTX A series support VR authoring or creating them, for example. At the entry level, the mobile GeForce RTX 4050 or RTX 4060 mobile GPUs provide affordable gaming at 1080p, and more premium GeForce RTX 4070, 4080, and RTX 4090 can scale higher and even hit 4K resolution on games with DLSS 3.
More powerful models, like the GeForce RTX 5090, GeForce RTX 5080, and GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, should start to hit laptops as of March 2025. Pairing the new architecture with the newly updated DLSS 4, in a limited number of games to start, is expected to deliver gains in frame rates for those who choose to apply it.
As for rival AMD, Nvidia dominates laptop GPUs. But AMD's Radeon RX mobile GPUs have made some decent inroads into gaming machines over the past year, especially with AMD's launch of its AMD Advantage laptop program, which mandates certain performance and component requirements. So far, though, Radeon RX GPUs have tended to appear more in 15-inch-class machines and less so in 17- and 18-inchers.
Ready to Buy the Right Big-Screen Laptop for You?
That's about it for general advice, except for matters of personal preference. Keyboards, for instance: Some gaming laptops go wild with colorful, customizable RGB backlighting and feature macro keys for storing frequently used command or combat sequences, while some mobile workstations' touchpads or pointing sticks feature the third (middle) mouse button often used in CAD and similar applications. And we don't think you should buy a 17-inch or 18-inch laptop in either of these groups that doesn't have at least one Thunderbolt 3 or Thunderbolt 4 port, which combines USB-C and DisplayPort functionality with daisy-chainable support for external docking and storage solutions.
At any rate, you're ready to shop for the notebook of your big-screen dreams. Get started by checking out the reviews and specs we've assembled here, and good luck: Flex those biceps and get your back-strengthening routine down pat. You're going to go big. On the flip side, your eyes will be very, very happy.
