The best 4K laptops in 2023

The best 4K laptops are beautiful enough to make your jaw drop. Yes, you can watch movies and TV shows all in 1080p if you want, but with a sharper resolution, at 3840 × 2160, 4K panels are typically brighter and even more colorful than 1080p screens. And since there's an increasing number of games that support this resolution, the best gaming laptops are stacked to deliver the best experience possible.

There's a huge selection of the best 4K laptops, and you'll find these super-sharp displays on the best laptops you can buy, including the best 2-in-1 laptops and workstations. And the best 4K laptops can double as video editing laptops and the best photo editing laptops as well. However, keep in mind that 4K laptops typically don’t have the best battery life around, so there are some compromises you’ll have to make. See our latest Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 1 review.

We determined which were the best 4K laptops by measuring the nits of brightness and the percentage of sRGB or DCI-P3 that their panels cover. When (not if) 8K laptops arrive, we'll be ready for a whole new page for you.

The Quick List

Best 4K Laptop Overall

The gorgeous OLED touchscreen on the Asus ZenBook Pro Duo 15 comes with Pantone validated color, to guarantee vivid accuracy across any creative work. That's especially important for this beast, which has been seemingly built for the professional's workload with an 11th Gen Intel Core i9 processor, RTX 3070 GPU, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD.

But the Duo does have a display advantage. As the name and the picture hint towards, there's a second display. The ScreenPad Plus is a 14 x 4.3-inch 3840 x 1100-pixel touchscreen panel on the bottom deck that makes for an incredibly useful tool for prosumers — gaining extra controls in Photoshop or using the stylus for illustration work.

See our full Asus ZenBook Pro Duo (UX582L) review.

Best 4K Gaming Laptop

Alienware continues to raise the bar of what a gaming laptop can and should be. The latest addition to the family is the X17, a beautiful bruiser of a desktop replacement that’s only 0.8-inches thick. The ultra-premium system comes with all the fixings including an Intel Core i7 processor, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 GPU and dual SSDs. Need more? How’s a 17.3-inch, 4K display, powerful speakers and a Cherry MX keyboard sound?

Of course, something this pretty and powerful is also seriously expensive at $3,679 ($2,199 starting), so it’s not for the faint of heart or small of bank account. But if you can afford it, the Alienware X17 is a hell of a powerhouse that easily makes its way onto our best 4K laptops page.

See our full Alienware X17 review.

Best 16-inch 4K Laptop

Is 15 inches too small? 17 inches too big? Split it down the middle with this slick 16-inch laptop from HP. The HP ZBook Fury 16 G9's 16-inch, 4K+ (3840 x 2400) display is clocked in at 120Hz with a 16:10 aspect ratio.

We measured the Fury 16 G9’s display with a colorimeter, covering an impressive 107.5% of the DCI-P3 color gamut and scoring an average brightness of 412 nits. It's incredibly colorful and wonderfully bright.

To top off its excellent display, the ZBook rocks an Intel Core i9-12950HX processor and Nvidia RTX 5500 graphics chip with 24GB of VRAM that blasted through our performance metrics. So if you're a video or photo editor, the ZBook is more than enough for you to blast through some intense workloads.

See our full HP ZBook Fury 16 G9 review.

Best HP 15-inch 4K Laptop

This year’s HP ZBook Studio G8 holds on to the award-winning G7 series styling but bumps up the power to help content creators with their creative projects either in the studio or in the field. The $4,727 system is gorgeous, powerful, MIL-SPEC tough, and is one of the best content creator laptops on the market. Oh, I forgot to mention, its OLED 4K touchscreen is bright, vivid and positively stunning.

This salacious attention grabber comes with an 11th Gen Intel Core i9 processor, 32GB of RAM, 2TB of SSD storage, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 GPU that will more than handle all your Adobe Creative Suite power-hungry needs and then some. It's easily one of the best 4K laptops that we've tested, even if it's priced at a whopping $4,727 as reviewed.

See our full HP ZBook Studio G8 review.

Best 4K Workstation

Is the HP ZBook Fury 17 G8 the best workstation on the market? I suppose that depends on your budget and configuration, but if your pockets are deep enough for an Intel Xeon processor and Nvidia RTX A5000 graphics (boy howdy!), this is about as future-proof as laptops get right now.

In terms of raw power, this notebook is tough to beat, and even if it runs out of battery when you’re on the go, it’s still heavy enough to fight crime with. Granted, the $6K configuration we tested is overkill for most laptop users; it’s nigh impossible for this kind of mobile muscle to fail too hard on our standard benchmarks. And that’s partially the point, in my opinion. The world of mobile tech continues to march forward at an exponential rate, and if you don’t have the right laptop for your respective career, opportunity might very well pass you by. 

But that’s hardly a concern with the ZBook Fury 17 G8 thanks to a stunning 17.3-inch touchscreen, intimidating specs under the hood, and plenty of ports to power your pertinent peripherals.

See our full HP ZBook Fury 17 G8 review.

Best 4K Dell Laptop

Meet the workaholic’s dream. The Dell Precision 5760 is priced at $2,059 to start, with our review unit costing $3,941, is a sleek, sexy workstation that offers power and endurance in a thin, portable package. But the Precision’s just getting started. 

It has a massive 17-inch bright, colorful WLED 4K touch display that renders smooth eye-catching images and video. And you’ve got some solidly potent specs, including an11th Gen Intel Core i7 CPU, an Nvidia RTX A3000 GPU, and a 2TB SSD. Plus, you get a heaping helping of security features. 

The Dell Precision 5760 is packed full of wins and earned its way onto our best 4K laptops page.

See our full Dell Precision 5760 review.

Best 4K Lenovo Workstation

I love playing with expensive toys, but who the heck is the Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 1 really for? Not the budget-friendly professional nor up-and-coming businesses — it’s for the highly paid professional or Fortune 500 companies. So unless you can afford $4,663, look away now.

Okay, big spenders. The Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 1 will net you a beautiful 16-inch, 4K display, a comfortable keyboard, a great pair of speakers, and a powerful Core i9-12950HX vPro processor and Nvidia RTX A5500 GPU. However, despite its ridiculous price and boring design, it has a short battery life, so you’re going to have to stay plugged in the majority of the time.

This is one of the best 4K laptops I’ve reviewed — I’m just a tad salty about the battery life.

See our full Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 1 review.

Best 4K Display

New screen size, who dis? Razer is the latest laptop OEM to switch from odds to evens when it comes to screen size. The Razer Blade 16 brings that sleek, minimalist design that we know and love from the company — along with some cool bells and whistles such as the overclockable Intel Core i9 processor and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU — making it one of the most powerful gaming laptops on the market. 

But there’s more than that. Check out the display, the 16-inch, 16:10 mini-LED is absolutely stunning, bursting with color and seriously sharp detail. Razer could have just gone with a regular 4K display, but never afraid to buck convention, the company has unveiled the world’s first dual-mode mini-LED panel with the ability to switch between 4K resolution with a 120Hz refresh rate and 1920 x 1200 with a 240Hz refresh rate. Essentially giving gamers and content creators the best of both worlds, the laptop is designed to deliver an optimal visual experience no matter what you’re doing. Throw in a bunch of ports, a comfy, colorful keyboard, some great audio, and you’ve definitely got yourself a winner worthy of sitting on our best gaming laptops page.

But at $4,299, I expect faster file-transfer speeds and a smoother transition between display modes. If you want a powerful gaming laptop that sits on the cutting edge, read on to learn the ins and outs of the Razer Blade 16.

See our full Razer Blade 16 review.

How to Choose a 4K Laptop

Choosing the best 4K laptops for you really depends on what you’re using the laptop for. Do you just want to watch movies on a pretty screen? Are you into gaming and want to experience high frames all in 4K? Or are you a professional creator that needs a 4K laptop for video editing and 3D modelling? Once you know what you're buying that dazzling display for, you can work backwards from there.

How We Test 4K Laptops

We put each laptop through extensive benchmark testing — both synthetic and real-world — before they end up in the hands of our reviewers. We evaluate each aspect of the laptop, including its performance, battery life, display, speakers and heat management.

In our benchmark testing, we use a Klein K10 colorimeter to detect the brightness and sRGB color gamut of the laptop's display. For performance testing, we run the laptop through a gauntlet of benchmarks, including Geekbench 4.3 and 5.0 and 3DMark professional graphics tests. 

To determine real-world performance, we task the laptop to convert a 4K video to 1080p resolution and to duplicate a 4.97GB multimedia file. Our real-world graphics test is the Dirt 3 benchmark with medium settings at 1080p resolution.

We also run heat tests by playing a 15-minute full-screen video and measuring temperatures in different areas of the laptop. Last but not least, our battery test consists of continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness. For MacBooks and premium Windows 10 laptops, a runtime of over 9 hours is considered a good result whereas gaming laptops and workstations that can stay powered for longer than 5 hours deserve praise. 

These tests are complemented with extensive hands-on testing from our reviewers who critique everything from the laptop's materials to the feel of its touchpad.

Why Trust Laptop Mag

Laptop Mag reviews over one hundred different laptops every year, from paperweight ultralights to everyday workhorses to lumbering gaming notebooks that scorch the frame rates of even the hottest AAA games. We're not just experts in the laptop field, as we go one step further by meticulously testing smartphones, tablets, headphones, PC accessories, software, and even the latest in gaming. 

We are 100% independent and have decades of experience to help you buy with confidence. In fact, Laptop Mag has been testing and reviewing products for three decades, and we continue to deliver trustworthy reviews you can rely on. 

Our experienced team of writers and editors scour the available information about the laptop and put it through its paces to determine which is best for you. But before they start, the testing team subjects each system to a rigorous regimen of synthetic and real-world tests to see how a system handles the type of work and games you’re most likely to throw at it. 

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