The coolest laptops we tested at CES 2025

The new CPUs, GPUs, and laptops announced at CES this week set the tone for Windows computers in the year to come — and so far, 2025 is looking pretty promising. There are a bunch of new notebooks I’m excited to test out when they come around, many of which are gaming-focused since the launch of Nvidia’s RTX 50-series cards is ushering in an onslaught of graphics-heavy refreshes and upgrades.

There are many new laptops coming from Dell, Alienware, Asus, Acer, Lenovo, MSI, and Razer. Many may just boil down to chip bumps and slight refreshes, but there are some that are betting big on new ideas, thinness, raw power, and over-the-top accouterments. Here are the ones I’m most excited for.

Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6

I’ve already written and said a lot about Lenovo’s concept-turned-buyable-product that is the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6. It’s the coolest laptop we saw. It’s our outright best in show for CES 2025. And it’s also possible when it comes time to review one later in the year that the challenges of Lenovo trying to graft software functionality for its rollable display onto Windows may be a bridge too far.

But the way that Lenovo let us handle it like a normal laptop (closing it with its lid still extended, packing it into a tight backpack) shows promise that this might not just be a fragile beta test of a product coming to market.

Hearing the ThinkBook’s motors fire up and seeing its screen grow and shrink is an experience you just don’t get anywhere else right now. It might become another niche like Lenovo’s dual-screen Yoga Book 9i or Asus’ copycat ZenBook Duo, but it’s a novel attempt to do something unique. We’ll have to see if Lenovo sticks the landing.

Apple learned the hard way with the MacBook Pro years ago that prioritizing thinness over everything else results in too many sacrifices. But Asus is here with a very thin laptop that’s an incredibly light 2.18 pounds and is using it to once again come at the MacBook Air. (The name itself is a dead giveaway if you just squint.)

I’m not going to kid myself and think this is really going to be a “MacBook Air killer,” especially with an Arm-based Snapdragon X processor that has fewer cores than ones already released, but it might still be a slick laptop that’s so light it feels like it barely adds anything to your backpack. And given the solid battery life we’ve seen on even more powerful Snapdragon chips, it’s possible the lower-power processor in the A14 will make it a battery champ.

Razer’s formula with its high-end Blade laptops has always boiled down to looking and feeling a little like a MacBook Pro — but for Windows and gaming instead of just content creation (though it can do that, too). The new Razer Blade 16 is looking to trim the fat from the last-gen model, going back to a thinner chassis that still offers plenty of ports and high-end specs like RTX 50-series GPU options, a lovely OLED display, and a switch to AMD CPUs (a first for the Blade 16). Razer’s bright green logo on the lid will always be polarizing, but I’m intrigued to see if this new configuration can work out for both graphics-demanding games and creative workflows.

There are a lot of laptop light shows at CES, but nothing is quite as showy as Asus’ redesigned Strix Scar gaming laptops. The Strix line has always been big, with beefed-up gaming specs and lots of RGB, but for 2025, it’s getting a new 360-degree wraparound light strip. And in its most “but wait, there’s more” sense of showmanship, it also has Asus’ programmable AniMe dot-matrix display from older Zephyrus models.

This might be the gaming laptop I’m most excited to try out because in addition to seeing what its RTX 50-series GPUs can do in the latest AAA games, I wonder how many hours of my time I can lose to putting dumb stuff on the Strix’s lid.

Just. Look. At. This. Thing.

MSI’s limited Titan Dragon Edition is such an outlandish creation, but I find it hard not to admire its ridiculousness. The ludicrous gaming laptop has a giant dragon design and a 3D-printed dragon medallion under glass in its palm rest that’s decorated with Norse runes all around.

But I’ll be honest: I’m listing it here as kind of a red herring. While MSI will likely sell out of the few Dragon Editions it’s making for its loyal fans, it will also have a regular Titan A18 HX AI laptop matching its same wild specs in a dragon-free design. And move one step down to MSI’s Raider, and you get most of the specs of the Titan in a slightly more conventional gaming laptop. That may be the real one to test and get a more palatable taste of MSI’s boisterous designs.

I know, I know. It’s a China-only release, and it wasn’t new for CES. But I got to see Asus’ Aidol 14 Air Fragrance Edition and its collaboration variant with Anna Sui at the show, and it was just so dang charming. It isn’t just a dressed-up rose gold or lavender laptop made to pander to certain demographics, it actually seems like a well-specced and thought-out product. Asus took one of its Vivobooks and built a magnetic diffuser puck into its lid, designed to dispense an oil-based fragrance as the laptop runs and warms the essential oil. Yes, Asus is hoping to sell people essential oil packs every 30 to 90 days, but reps from the company were upfront that you can just use your own oils.

Is it totally unnecessary? Yes. But you know what? It’s also fun and smells great.