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 2023 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; after the summaries, you'll find a detailed buying guide and a helpful spec comparison.

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.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

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 hardcore, 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.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

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. Onscreen stuttering or tearing just won't cut it. 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 indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO) 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.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

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. The most popular option for 17-inch and 18-inch gaming notebooks is Intel's Core i7 and Core i9 H series, not the lighter-hitting Core i7 U- or P-series CPUs that show up in thinner, lighter laptops. The mighty—and mighty costly—Core i9 chips occupy the top of the market. (Read much more on choosing the right laptop CPU.)

For mobile workstations, the Core i7 and Core i9 rule (Intel's server-class Xeon chips are fading from the laptop workstation scene), in some cases with 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.

(Credit: Charles Jefferies)

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, possibly joined by one or two 2.5-inch hard drives—the SSD for the operating system and favorite applications, the roomier hard drive for games and data. (Increasingly, though, the drives beyond the boot drive these days are SSDs, too.) 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 (for an SSD-only system) 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 256GB or 512GB) as the boot drive, paired with a roomy hard drive, is a fair compromise. A 17-inch or 18-inch laptop is most likely to have room for both. Some may have an empty bay to let you install an aftermarket 2.5-inch drive or an M.2 SSD yourself. This can be an economical option, though again, support for 2.5-inch hard drives 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.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

On the gaming side of the fence, too, Nvidia enjoys a big market lead in mobile GPUs. Its "Ampere" architecture defined its GeForce RTX 30-series chips. You'll still see Ampere-based chips out there, but at the higher end of the gaming-laptop market, the newer GeForce RTX 40-series "Ada Lovelace" GPUs have all but supplanted the Ampere models.

The basic story for both workstations and gaming rigs is a familiar one, though: Higher model numbers and higher prices bring you more speed and higher 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. At the entry level, the mobile GeForce RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti enjoyed a long life, but most new budget gaming laptops feature RTX 4050 or RTX 4060 mobile GPUs. These suffice for reasonable gaming at 1080p.

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, 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 we've assembled here (we've outlined the key specs for all of them below), 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.