When you’re buying a new laptop, the majority of the selection in front of you will be powered by Intel processors or a combination of Intel processors and NVIDIA dedicated graphics. AMD’s Ryzen APUs are starting to be used more, though, and not just in the traditional budget space. Overall, an AMD-powered laptop represents an excellent value package, especially on laptops without dedicated graphics. If it’s one of the best Windows laptops with AMD Ryzen you seek, you’ve come to the right place. Here’s our list of the best Ryzen laptops.
The best AMD Ryzen laptops
HP Pavilion Aero 13 laptop
Top pick
Weighing around 2 pounds, the HP Pavilion Aero 13 is the best sub-$1,000 laptop you can buy right now. With an excellent display, keyboard, audio, and AMD Ryzen performance, it’s a premium laptop that is super affordable. You get the latest Ryzen 5000 Series processors, and a laptop that at this price was once impossible. Additionally there’s a choice of colors, and styling borrowed from HP’s more expensive laptops to give you a truly impressive package.
Razer Blade 14 gaming laptop
Best gaming
The Razer Blade 14, the company’s first-ever AMD Ryzen laptop is an absolute monster. It follows the traditional Blade design, but size-wise slots between the Blade Stealth and Blade 15. You get a 14-inch 165Hz 1440p display, a Ryzen 9 5900HX, and either an NVIDIA RTX 3070 or 3080. Razer’s traditional features such as Chroma are here, too, as is plenty of connectivity and an innovative cooling solution. The Blade 14 is one of the most powerful gaming laptops available today.
Lenovo Flex 5 14
Flipping good
If you ignore the average-quality display, what you have with the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 14 is a potent yet affordable convertible laptop. With up to 6-core AMD Ryzen 5 4000 Series APUs on tap, you get good CPU and GPU performance, and this is paired with a great keyboard and all-day battery life. It’s well built, has 16GB of RAM, fast storage, and even comes with an active pen included for some digital inking action.
Acer Swift 3 laptop
Budget performance
The Acer Swift 3 is another laptop with an average-quality display, but that more than makes up for it elsewhere. In this case, you’ll find a Ryzen 7 4700U inside with 8 cores and a powerful integrated GPU that can better the performance of some of NVIDIA’s entry-level dedicated chips. The design and build are solid, the price is attractive, and it even gets decent battery life.
HP Pavilion Gaming Laptop
Budget gaming
HP’s Pavilion Gaming Laptop keeps the price way down but doesn’t skimp on the hardware. Inside you’ll find an AMD Ryzen 5 4600H processor paired with an NVIDIA GTX 1650 GPU, which is a solid pairing for 1080p gaming. It comes with a small but upgradeable SSD, 8GB of RAM, and a nice, subtle design with a strong keyboard for when you need to stop gaming and start working.
Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 (AMD)
Ultrabook in design
Microsoft’s latest Surface Laptop 4 features powerful “Surface Edition” AMD Ryzen 4000 Series chips, which include up to an 8-core APU and AMD Radeon graphics, all in a slim and light Ultrabook chassis originally designed for an Intel chip. It’s available in either 13.5-inch or 15-inch display sizes, and features all-day battery life and super-fast Windows Hello, not to mention a great keyboard and trackpad.
Lenovo Legion 5 Pro gaming laptop
16-inch gaming
A more affordable, but still mightily powerful AMD-powered gaming laptop, the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro gets a Ryzen 7 5800H paired with NVIDIA’s RTX 3070 for frame-shredding performance. You also get a high refresh rate display with QHD resolution, a fantastic keyboard, and all the ports you could possibly need to hook up your external devices. The styling is also quite subtle, making it a laptop you could also take to work without being embarrassed in the meeting room.
Choosing the best AMD Ryzen laptop
Ryzen-powered laptops often slip under the radar, but the truth is there are some fantastic laptops out there powered by AMD. Currently, we’d happily recommend the HP Pavilion Aero to anyone specifically looking for a Ryzen laptop, and, frankly, anyone who isn’t that bothered with what’s inside. It looks great; it’s beautifully made, powerful, and quite affordable given the package it presents.
Gamers are well represented, in particular by HP. At the budget end of the scale you really can’t go wrong with the excellent spec sheet on the HP Pavilion Gaming Laptop, while for the more demanding gamer the Razer Blade 14 is the one to beat.
Budget buyers aren’t left out either, with excellent laptops like the Lenovo Flex 5 delivering style and performance similar to much more expensive laptops, but at a price more agreeable to budget buyers, perhaps even for education or general home use with the kids.
After CES 2022 we’re also expecting to start seeing Ryzen 6000-based laptops in the coming months, and while we don’t yet know just how good the new APUs are going to be, we’re anticipating some impressive results based on what we know so far.