The most powerful laptops

Using a powerful laptops can be a game-changer if your creative projects require resource-intensive software. Whether you’re rendering frames for a complex 3D animation, editing 8K video, adding dazzling special effects, retouching hi-res photos or any other demanding tasks, a laptop that’s lacking in RAM and graphical power can really slow you down. So we’ve picked out some heavyweights that should be able to handle whatever you through at them, including a powerful gaming laptop.

With the latest silicon inside, todays most powerful laptops are nearly strong enough to stand alongside burly desktops, but have the added advantage of allowing you to work anywhere, be it at home, in the office, or on the move. Our experts have road-tested many of the laptops on this list in rigorous detail, performing both standardised lab test and putting them through their paces with demanding creative software. To find out more about our process, see our guide to how we test laptops.

If you don’t need quite so much power, we have round-ups of the best computers for graphic design and the best laptops for architects that also include very capable machines. We also have a guide to the best laptops for writers, which includes more economic options. But for now, let’s take a look at the most powerful laptops money can buy today.

The quick list

The most powerful laptops in full

The most powerful Apple laptop

We knew this machine would need to be put through its paces, which is why we asked our resident power user, Rob (who works in 3D animation), to review it. He spent hours benchmarking the MacBook Pro 16-inch M3 Max (2023), using power-hungry creative software, testing different workflows and speed on Apple‘s latest silicon. And he deduced that this is a real step up from previous iterations of the Pro, making it the number one pick for this guide. 

A concern with powerful laptops is the battery life, but Rob was blown away by the 22 hours of life on a single charge. This makes it super-portable, though if the screen is a bit big for lugging around, you could go for the 14-inch version instead.

Rob was pleasantly surprised by the benchmark tests, which put this laptop firmly ahead of the competition. This is thanks to the graphical prowess and RAM (that can range from 36 to 128GB). With an M3 Max inside, this MacBook Pro will handle all everyday creative tasks with power to spare for editing studio-quality movies or working on the most intense rendering and effects. For example, Rob tested the laptop on projects using Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve and Fusion Studio, which were super-smooth.

Like the M2 model, the newest MacBook Pro retains a slew of beloved ports, Rob was delighted by the inclusion of the HDMI port in particular, but there’s also memory card slots.

Read our review of the MacBook Pro 16-inch (M3 Max, 2023) to find out more about why we this laptop’s power blows us away.

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The most powerful Windows laptop

If you prefer Windows to MacOS, the most powerful Windows laptop that we can recommend is the ASUS ProArt Studiobook. It manages to pack in some of the most powerful components on the market, and then keep them cool enough to extract huge levels of performance. When we tested this powerful but sleek laptop, we found it to be a great option for everything from image editing to 3D rendering. It laughs at 4K video, is enjoyable for playing games, flies through raw image processing and it looks good too.

The Intel i9 processor 13980HX has eight performance cores and 16 efficiency cores for a total of 32 threads, and is capable of boosting all the way to 5.6GHz. Storage can go up to a massive 8TB split across two upgradable SSDs. Connectivity is well catered for thanks with Thunderbolt 4 and USB 3.2 Gen 2, and the customisable ASUS dial can be useful for regular actions like zooming, scrubbing through a timeline or adjusting brush sizes.

The keyboard took a while to get used to for our reviewer, since it fits in a numeric pad into the 16-inch shell, but we liked the feeling while typing and ASUS has included a 16:10 ratio haptic touchpad that works with a stylus.

The only real disappointment was battery life – we got only four and a half hours with automatic dimming turned off – and the fan is a little noisy. With this amount of power that’s largely expected, you can switch between several cooling profiles, and we found the laptop did keep cool. It’s not the slimmest laptop, but again, that’s not surprising either, and this is more of a laptop to use in a workspace like a creative studio rather than for taking on the move. 

See our full ASUS ProArt Studiobook OLED (H7604) review for more details.

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The best design for creatives

The Acer ConceptD 7 Ezel Pro is a great choice for any creative looking for a powerful Windows device that was designed from the ground up to eat through any task you can throw at it. It’s got some seriously powerful hardware packaged up in a stylish design, configurable with a choice of powerful Intel processors, NVIDIA graphics cards and bags of RAM, which means it’s great for 3D animation and 4K video editing. 

Not only can it run just about every application you throw at it, but it looks incredibly stylish to boot, with a fancy all-white chassis that stands out against the sea of grey and black options currently dominating the market. It’s pretty safe to say that Acer is giving Apple a run for its money with this design.

Perhaps its biggest selling point, however, is its stunning Pantone-validated 4K IPS display, which can be folded into six different positions enabling you to use the machine as a conventional laptop, as an easel with a Wacom EMR pen, or to present to clients. It’s one of the nicest screens we’ve seen on a laptop, and it makes it a brilliant choice for people who want accurate colours and top-notch image quality alongside powerful components.

Just note that weighing in at 2.5kg, this is a powerful laptop for a studio or office but you are less likely to want to throw it into a backpack and use it on the go.

For more details, see our full Acer ConceptD 7 Ezel Pro review.

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The best powerful portable laptop

As we mentioned above, the ASUS ProArt Studiobook is a laptop that belongs on a desk in a studio. For a more portable but impressively powerful Windows laptop, we can thoroughly recommend the ASUS Zenbook Pro 14 OLED. A serious player among pro creative laptops, this is a MacBook Pro rival, both in terms of performance and sleek design, even if the lid is a little smudge-friendly.

The design is innovative, with the rear of the lid protruding a little for better air circulation. The touchscreen is gorgeous and there’s an ASUS Dialpad for shortcuts. This isn’t the 3D dial on the Studiobook; instead it’s built into the trackpad and activated (and deactivated) with a click. The touchscreen provides excellent colour coverage and accuracy, earning it a Pantone validation, and vivid brightness (550 nits in HDR mode). The response time is 0.2ms, you can crank the refresh rate up to 120Hz for gaming.

Weighing around 1.6 kilograms, its not a feather but it is compact and we didn’t find it cumbersome to carry to work and back. It does lag behind MacBooks in battery life – we got over 8 hours of video playback but found it hard to get through a full day working without a charge. Other than that, this is a perfect powerful and portable laptop for any travelling graphic designer or photo editor. 

See our detailed ASUS Zenbook Pro 14 OLED review for more details.

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The best big screen powerful laptop

If you prefer Windows over MacOS, the best Dell laptops also have a lot to offer. The most powerful laptop in Dell‘s range is the Dell XPS 17, which demonstrates that a laptop with a big, big screen doesn’t have to be bulky and impractical to carry. While hiding some seriously impressive components and fitting in a giant 17-inch 4K display, the XPS 17 remains an impressively thin and light device, which means you can comfortably carry it around with you. This makes it an ideal powerful laptop for people who want to work out and about.

When we wrote our Dell XPS 17 (2022) review, we appreciated the power of Intel’s latest 12th Gen CPU (13th Gen is now available) and found the laptop could handle processor-intensive tasks without any slowdown or lag. It could quickly and efficiently perform even the most graphically-intensive tasks, like exporting high-resolution images, or rendering video, while keeping cool, literally and metaphorically. Battery life has had a boost over previous generations of the XPS 17 and you can expect up to 10 hours of life with light use – pretty impressive for such a powerful computer.

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The most powerful laptop for gaming

If you’re looking for the most powerful laptop for gaming as well as creative work, the Razer Blade 17 is an excellent choice. It carries the well-regarded NVIDIA Studio laptop badge, thanks to its top-of-the-line graphics card. In our review, we were dazzled by the Razer Blade 17’s ability to handle complex tasks with ease, with barely a whisper of noise, and without any overheating, thanks to 32GB of DDR5 RAM. Its ability to complete the Blender Benchmark in just 7 minutes and 47 seconds was comparable to the power of desktop systems, and we found that it handled creative apps and intensive games, including VR, like a dream.

The Razer Blade 17 does have one Achilles heel, and that’s its battery life. It’s poor even by the standards of high-performance laptops, which tend to be power-hungry at the best of times. In our testing, we found the Razer Blade 17 able to manage 3 hours and 12 minutes of general browsing on a single charge, but this went down to 1 hour and 17 minutes when sculpting in Blender. And when playing Cyberpunk 2077? Just 57 minutes. 

It does come bundled with a 280W power brick, which softens the blow a bit, and it’s worth remembering that the Razer Blade 17 has a lot going for it, including its sublime QHD display and its excellent keyboard. If you can cope with the battery limitation, this will be a tempting option. (Also note that a successor, the Razor Blade 18 is also available. 

Our full Razer Blade 17 review goes into detail. 

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The most powerful laptop with rugged design

If you need the most powerful laptop that you can take into the desert or on a similarly extreme mission, the Dell Latitude 7330 Rugged Extreme might just be the one for you. It’s a laptop that comes in a flight case with an integrated carrying handle, reinforced rubber armour and rubber port covers. It boasts an IP rating of 65, meaning it’s sealed against dust and particulates and can survive low-pressure water jets.

This all makes for a chunky, heavy design for a mere 13-inch laptop which is pricey for the spec. There’s a lot more than just armour on show here, though. There’s a lot of connectivity – the version we reviewed had an an extra USB-C Thunderbolt port along with the USB, HDMI port, Micro SD card reader, optional Express card slot and SIM card slot, all covered by rubber doors that lock closed. And on the bottom, there are doors that allow the SSD to easily be replaced. 

The touchscreen works when using gloves and there’s a stylus niftily located on the side of the chassis too. We found the keyboard was nice to work on, although the trackpad is small and not the most responsive, which caused us to push too firmly and trigger touch gestures unintentionally. 

As for power, we tested a configuration with Intel Core i7-1185G7 processor and 16GB of RAM. That’s by no means the most powerful setup in this guide, but we found it zipped along well, boosting to 4GHz if required. There is no dedicated graphics processor, however. The integrated graphics do OK providing some hardware acceleration in image and video editing but this isn’t designed for gaming. Battery life was a reasonable seven hours, but then you can also swap in new batteries if you’re out in the field. 

See our Dell Latitude 7330 Rugged Extreme review for more.

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Other options

Immensely powerful, slick and stylish, the ASUS ROG Zephyrus M16 comes with the latest, greatest Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card, a powerful processor, a flashy LED display on the lid and a hefty price tag, but that last one is to be expected. 

If you can afford it, this will serve as both a gaming and creative powerhouse (just as long as you don’t stray too far from an outlet). There’s a big 2TB onboard SSD storage, and 32GB of RAM that will run pretty much all the most demanding creative software you can find. And when work is done, you’ve got a laptop that’s primed for AAA gaming on max graphics settings. 

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The Dell XPS 15 is another favourite from the current generation of Dell XPS laptops. It’s still one of the best and most powerful laptops around, not just for creatives, but anyone seeking the best of everything with very little compromise. It’s equipped with the latest 11th generation of Intel processors, a powerful NVIDIA RTX graphics card and plenty of RAM configurations to cater the device to your needs. 

There are a few issues specific to users’ needs though, as you’re losing the standard USB-A port from the previous generation of the laptop, which might make hooking up any peripherals like a graphics drawing tablet tricky for digital illustrators and sculptors, and many creative types like a larger display to work on. For those needs, you might have to get an external dock. Plus, if you prefer a larger screen, the Dell XPS 17 (number 3 on our list) is a great alternative.

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One of ASUS’s portfolio of high-end gaming laptops, the TUF Gaming F17 has been refreshed with some of the latest tech. This includes Intel’s latest 12th Gen CPU, as well NVIDIA RTX 3000-series graphics, and on the display side of things, you get a 17.3-inch screen with a meaty 144Hz refresh rate. It’s a good choice for content creation tasks like video editing, as well as gaming. 

The Intel Core i7-12700H and 16GB of blisteringly fast 4800MHz DDR5 RAM means you can stream and create content with ease. Leverage the full gaming performance of the GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU with a dedicated MUX Switch. It also features an empty M.2 NVMe SSD slot to easily upgrade your laptop storage.

The screen could be better; while it’s very well specced on paper, in person it lacks a little vibrancy, not to mention brightness. Still, this is a really high-performing laptop, and if your work and play habits require a fast-performing computer, it’s a really solid choice.

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FAQs

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Also see our pick of the best laptops for video editing and the best 4K monitors for designers and artists. And if you’re going for a MacBook, you might want to choose the best MacBook Pro accessories.