For today’s students, the laptop is probably the single most important thing you can buy. It’s the centre of both your studies and downtime, and yet a shocking number of university-goers end up regretting their hardware choices.
In July, NVIDIA surveyed 600 recent or soon-to-be graduates and found that 48% hadn’t done enough research before buying their laptop, and a massive 37% regretted their purchase.
This isn’t wholly surprising, given the growing hardware demands for must-have student software. Of those surveyed, 38% needed their laptop for graphic design and animation, while 36% needed theirs for coding and programming. Photo and video editing and AI/deep learning followed with 31% and 27% respectively. What’s the one thing these disciplines have in common? The need for significant hardware power.
That leaves many notebooks severely underpowered for students’ needs, but laptops powered by NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs are built with these hardware demands in mind. Designed to deal with workloads from the most intensive graphic design programs to the latest blockbuster games, the options we’ve picked out below are even thin and light enough to be thrown in a backpack when lecture time rolls around.
The NVIDIA difference
For many academic subjects, having the raw power of GeForce RTX 30 Series hardware has never been more important. Whether you’re coding, video editing or noodling away on 3D design, the NVIDIA Studio platform accelerates things with faster apps, exclusive tools and advanced drivers built for students and creatives.
And when it comes to gaming, the GeForce RTX 30 Series has a lot of clever hardware and software working in tandem to take performance to new heights.
Take DLSS – or “Deep Learning Super Sampling”, to use its full name. This uses advanced algorithms to upscale a game, giving you the speed of a low-resolution output with the graphical fidelity of a higher one for the best of all worlds. As you can see from the video below, details such as text in Death Stranding are clearer with DLSS enabled than without, which is simply mind-blowing.
That’s handy because it allows the GeForce RTX GPUs to introduce real-time ray tracing in supported games. This is the cutting edge of graphic technology, where every beam of light is calculated in real-time for unprecedentedly realistic lighting, shadows and reflections, as you can see in the video below.
NVIDIA’s engineers have built their hardware to address the challenges facing laptop gamers, with features that perfect the experience in every way: strong battery life, whisper-quiet usage and, of course, unrivalled performance. NVIDIA Max-Q, for example, is a suite of AI-powered technologies balancing performance and efficiency. CPU Optimizer, Rapid Core Scaling and BatteryBoost 2.0 are all part of the package.
Likewise, NVIDIA Reflex gives you the edge in competitive shooters by shaving off milliseconds from your response times (from mouse click to headshot), while Advanced Optimus automatically selects the right graphical output to maximise battery life and performance (you don’t need the full power of GeForce RTX to run a spreadsheet, for example).
In short, if you want to avoid suffering from buyer’s remorse, you can’t go wrong with a GeForce RTX 30 Series-powered laptop. We’ve scoured through the market to pick out eight that should comfortably see you through your studies and help you improve your Fortnite K/D ratio, all without breaking the bank.
Our pick of NVIDIA’s laptops for students from £649
TUF by name, tough by nature: this GeForce RTX 3050-powered laptop is built to military-grade levels of durability to ensure it can take all the bumps and knocks of student life. With the AMD Ryzen 5 4600H and 8GB of RAM powering things, it can comfortably hit 187fps in Fortnite at 1080p despite its reasonable price.
For £50 more, you can switch to the Intel Core i5-11400H courtesy of the Acer Nitro 5, giving you a whole lot more battery: up to seven hours’ worth, in fact. You’re looking at around 190fps in Fortnite and up to 90fps in Call of Duty: Vanguard at 1080p.
Weighing in at 1.86kg and coming in at just 21.7mm thick, MSI’s offering is ideal for students constantly on the move – especially with the £150 saving that Currys is currently offering. The specs are otherwise the same as the Acer Nitro above, meaning you’ll easily break into three-figure frame rates in games such as Fortnite, Rocket League and Apex Legends at 1080p.
If you need more gaming grunt, then a laptop powered by the GeForce RTX 3060 will help, and this model currently has £170 off at Amazon. With the AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and 8GB of RAM, this laptop will run just about anything you throw at it – whether it’s for work or play.
As Gigabyte writes in the listing, “frames win games,” and you’ll get plenty with the GeForce RTX 3060-powered G5 laptop. With an 11th-generation Intel Core i5 processor and 16GB of RAM, the laptop should comfortably hit triple-figure frame rates on the 144Hz screen. It even has two easily accessible M.2 slots, should you need extra storage on top of the 512GB SSD.
The ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 has plenty that will make it appealing to less frequent gamers. The 15in OLED screen, for example, really makes TV pop with its cinema-grade 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut. It’s no slouch in the performance stakes, either, with an 11th-generation Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and a massive 1TB of fast SSD storage.
If you want something that will play the latest games in all their graphical splendour right up until graduation day, the MSI Katana GF66 could be the answer, thanks to its use of the extremely powerful 8GB GeForce RTX 3070 GPU. The rest is no slouch, either: an 11th-generation Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and a 144Hz screen guarantee top performance whatever you’re up to.
If you’re after a compact powerhouse, then the Acer Swift X packs a huge amount of power into a tiny 1.39kg package. Rocking the AMD Ryzen 7 processor, 16GB of RAM, 1TB of SSD storage and a nippy GeForce RTX 3050Ti GPU, this 14in laptop is super-portable, without sacrificing too much in the way of performance.
Alan Martin is a freelance writer with more than a decade’s worth of experience, mainly in the technology space, with bylines at The Evening Standard, Tom's Guide, The i and many others. His main focus at Expert Reviews is ensuring that your next pick of phone or wearable is the right choice for you and represents the best possible value for money. In the past he’s covered a broad range of games, dental apparel and pet accessories and, on one memorable occasion, had to strip off to retrieve a rogue drone from a lake – such is his dedication to reviews.
