Exposing The "Gaming Laptop" Scam on Amazon

[00:02] dare you. At the top of the search results are tons of these laptops from brands like Jumper, Nimo, Kaiga, Molrace, Chewie. Who are they? I mean, high-performance gaming ones. Many of them even have glowing reviews. But,

[00:18] these are not actual gaming laptops. I think they're a scam. You see, to be a gaming laptop, it needs to have a powerful GPU, one capable of playing the latest games at least at decent settings. This means either a discrete

[00:32] Nvidia GPU or a powerful integrated one. Well, none of these laptops have either of those. Check out the Nimo 17. It costs $900 and it's advertised as a powerful gaming laptop. They literally call it gaming laptop and claim that on

[00:47] it you'll be able to unleash peak performance. But, it doesn't have a discrete GPU. In fact, it uses AMD's Zen 4 CPU and that architecture is from 2023. As a CPU, it's not a bad performer, but for gaming, it's dreadful

[01:03] unless you pair it with a dedicated GPU, which they don't. The Radeon 780M that is integrated in this laptop CPU, it is woeful for 2026 standards. It's really only able to handle just very simple games and older titles like League of

[01:18] Legends. But, of course, Nimo claims it will give you seamless gaming across your favorite titles. In fact, they go as far as saying that their gaming laptops are engineered to just dominate e-sports. Now, if you know anything

[01:31] about competitive gaming, you'll know that competitive gamers, they play on fast refresh rate displays. Well, this laptop doesn't have one. But, they don't just stop at gaming. They claim that this laptop is for freelance video

[01:44] editors and researchers running local AI models. Guys, the whole reason Nvidia is now one of the most valuable companies on planet Earth is because AI models run on their GPUs. This laptop, it doesn't

[01:58] have one. And check this out. On Nimo's product page, they're showing Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, on stage with their brand just proudly in the background. But if you spend 2 seconds looking at that photo, you'll see that this is

[02:11] Lisa's 2026 presentation on a completely different product. She's talking about Andy's much newer and more powerful Strix Halo processor, which does have an integrated GPU capable of decent gaming and suitable for running local AI

[02:26] models. But none of these Nimo laptops have that chip. At least not the ones on their Amazon store. All of them use old hardware with low-end integrated GPUs. And here's the kicker. At the time I made this video, you could actually buy

[02:41] made this video, you could actually buy Lenovo's Lock, a very famous real gaming laptop for $100 less. And that has a powerful Nvidia RTX 5050 with a fast refresh rate display. And I'm not just picking on Nimo here. All these brands,

[02:56] they seem to be doing the same thing. Let's take the Mal Race 8 and 1/2 inch laptop. It might not be called a gaming laptop, but it did come up first when I searched Amazon for one. And from their advertising, Mal Race's that is, it

[03:10] certainly seems like they're trying to go for that. Heck, they literally say it is a high performance fast laptop. Is it? It uses a 6-year old AMD processor, the Ryzen 4300U. Now, pay close attention to the U in

[03:25] that CPU's name. Unlike the H processor in the Nimo that I just talked about, which is designed for performance use, U processors are designed for very simple tasks, web browsing and responding to emails. So, you've essentially got a

[03:40] very basic processor from 2020 without a dedicated GPU, and you're pretending it's a powerful gaming laptop. Look, it seems like these companies are just trying to trick unsuspecting buyers. I mean, picture this. A mother who's

[03:54] strapped for cash, she's working super hard just trying to buy her son his first gaming laptop sets his birthday. She sees this and thinks, "Wow, I can afford to buy him a new laptop." And she buys it. It's going to be pretty

[04:07] heartbreaking when he opens it up and tries to game on it. Guys, I made a lot of claims here. It's time to see if these gaming laptops are as bad as I think they are. So, I went out and bought both of them. I also got

[04:20] in that lock, that gaming laptop to compare these two, and a bunch of other compare these two, and a bunch of other laptops around this price point. >> So, when Josh and I were sitting there ordering these laptops, we noticed one

[04:35] of them was in stock locally as it was going to arrive that day. So, they must be selling a lot of these. When we got them in and actually opened them up, the Nemo looked surprisingly nice. I like a blue laptop and it's kind of unique. Its

[04:48] construction feels similar to other budget ones we've seen before. There's a bit of lid flex and keyboard deck flex, but it's not that bad. It's [snorts] also not that heavy for a 17-in laptop, significantly lighter than the lock. I

[05:01] parts like a discrete GPU and the cooling that it requires. The Mall Race, by comparison, just looks dull and feels a bit cheaper. Both look like they are using the same design language. We believe these laptops are all from the

[05:14] same manufacturer, just white labeled with their logo slapped on the lid. Now, the moment we turned on these laptops, we saw how horrendous their displays are. The Mall Race's display flickering from PWM is so bad, we couldn't even get

[05:28] a clean B-roll shot. In terms of brightness, they are dim, the bare minimum that we consider viable, around 300 nits. They are matte displays, which is helpful as you don't see reflections, but these are still dim panels. And the

[05:41] want to use it for creative work like they claim. But, clarity is also an issue. When you stretch 1920 by 1080 pixels across such a large panel, content looks really fuzzy and pixelated. In fact, the Mall Race's

[05:55] 18.5-in display is the least crisp panel of any laptop we've tested. Yes, I could technically do my Excel work on this laptop, but small text looks like crap. Now, on the flip side, if you were only gaming, a lower resolution display would

[06:09] help. It's easier for GPUs to drive, especially low-end ones like these. But, this is still something we wanted to call out as Mall Race's own marketing material says its display is larger, wider, and clear, which is just not

[06:22] Anyway, lower resolution displays can also have a positive effect on battery life. Both these laptops came with around 80 W batteries, which is decent, and something they could be calling out as a positive on their listings, but

[06:35] they've actually made a mistake here. Mall Race advertises it as 7,000 mA hours, which is a measurement that is used for small phone batteries. This makes it hard to understand what you're buying and how it compares to other

[06:47] laptops. Who's in charge of these things? Anyway, when we finally got to the Mall Race with its super old processor was absolutely painful to use. Installs that normally took minutes took hours. This laptop uses Wi-Fi 5, which

[07:02] was originally released way back in 2013. But, it wasn't just that. Speeds were inconsistent. Sometimes 50 megabits per second, which is horrendous, and per second, which is horrendous, and sometimes 300, which is okay. Either

[07:15] way, much slower than a regular gaming laptop with Wi-Fi 6 or better. Even when we plug into our network, it was still ridiculously slow. Faster than Wi-Fi, but still slow. Perhaps its ports are really slow, which can happen on cheap

[07:28] with third-party sellers is customer service and return policy issues. Now, we don't know for sure if that's an issue with Nemoz, and certainly their overwhelmingly five-star reviews may lead you to believe otherwise, but we

[07:42] did find some concerning feedback. One buyer posted that their laptop was new one, and when they received the replacement, there was also an angry note along with it saying the employee was forced to work the weekend. So

[07:55] professional. Back to you, Josh. >> Well, we've kept you guys waiting long enough. It's time to reveal the underwhelming performance results. In Geekbench, which tests a variety of common performance tasks that you may do

[08:08] on your laptop, the Mal Race it is literally the slowest laptop we've ever Folks, I have been warning people about buying a MacBook Neo saying it may not be powerful enough for your future needs or even your current ones. Well, check

[08:22] this out. The Neo single-core speed is as fast as the Mal Race's total multi-core performance. Ridiculous. Now, as I said, the Zen 4 chip in the Nemo, not a bad processor for CPU-only tasks, and you can see that

[08:37] here. It is competitive with other laptops at this price point. Switching to Cinebench, which tests a max CPU workload, the Nemo it performs even better amongst its competitors, but these are not gaming tests. They don't

[08:51] use the GPU. So, let's look at Time Spy, the quintessential gaming benchmark. Here, the Mal Race's score is so bad, it's practically invisible on our graph. And the Nemo, it isn't much better, either. The Nemo is essentially on par

[09:06] with Intel's new Wildcat CPUs for budget laptops. Now, those laptops are normally have better built, and they start around $600 less than the Nemo. But the real

[09:18] nail in the coffin is the Lock, the bonafide budget gaming laptop with a bonafide budget gaming laptop with a discrete GPU, that performs four times better than the Nemo and costs $100 less, at least at the time we made this

[09:31] video. And compared to the Mal Race, the Lock performs 18 times better. I couldn't even make this up, guys, if I tried. And check this one out. You can buy a premium thin and light laptop from last year around this price. Take the

[09:47] Yoga Slim 7i. It's much better built. It has a better keyboard and a stunning OLED display. It also has one of Intel's Lunar Lake processors from last year. And that processor has a good integrated GPU. As you can see, the Yoga Slim 7i

[10:02] just destroys these gaming laptops. But wait, there's more. When you look at SteelSeries Nomad, which is compatible with macOS, the MacBook Neo beats both

[10:14] of these gaming laptops. I mean, come on. This is just beyond ridiculous. And the synthetic benchmarks, it actually does translate to real gameplay. We

[10:26] normally run Cyberpunk's benchmark at full HD resolution on high settings because it's an older title and even low-end gaming laptops, they can run it on these settings. But not these. The Neo only managed 19 frames per second

[10:40] and the Mole race 6 frames per second. Can you imagine unboxing one of these gaming laptops for Christmas and getting this kind of frame rate? It would just be an awful, awful experience. Especially when you could have got

[10:53] around 80 frames per second if you bought a real budget gaming laptop like the Lock or Gigabyte's gaming A16. And this just once again debunks Neo's marketing material that this laptop has discrete-level graphics performance.

[11:07] Technically, they can claim this if they're comparing to a very old laptop GPU. And guess what? That's exactly what they're doing. The Nvidia GTX 1050 that they're comparing to in their graph, that was announced in 2017.

[11:22] That is an older GPU, older than this entire channel, which is, of course, extremely misleading. Now, Sam recently joined us as a professional gamer to help us improve our gaming laptop reviews. So, the first

[11:35] laptops I made him game on were these ones. He hated it and I'm pretty sure was regretting his decision. You see, the Nemo, it was really only playable on extremely old games such as Minecraft and League of Legends.

[11:47] However, even for a game like League, it was disappointing. The laptop, it could manage more than 60 FPS, but because the screen was capped at 60 hertz, you saw no benefit from that. And things got worse from here. If you're playing a

[12:01] more intensive title like Cyberpunk or Forza 6, the Nemo, it couldn't even reach 30 frames per second, no matter how low you dropped the settings. And the Mall Race, it was significantly worse. In League of Legends, even at its

[12:15] frames per second during team fights and had constant freezes. The only game that he tested that was playable on the Mall Race was really Minecraft. It was able to maintain 60 frames per second, but

[12:28] that was on its lowest setting. For such a light game like this, you'd really hope that you could up the settings so the game looks better. When he did, the to 30 frames per second with heavy

[12:41] Finally, I had him in the Lock and the Yoga Slim 7i to game on and that's when The Lock, it just crushed the lighter titles averaging hundreds of frames in League and Minecraft, easily maxing out the laptop screen's fast refresh rate

[12:56] 165 hertz. It provided a very smooth gaming experience. In Cyberpunk on high settings, it was able to reach 80 to 90 frames per second and it was a similar story in Forza 6. The Yoga Slim 7i, he enjoyed but for a

[13:10] different reason. He found it was well suited for the lighter titles that he tried on it where it constantly capped out at 60 hertz. It wasn't well suited for heavier titles like Cyberpunk or Forza where he only got 30 to 40 frames

[13:22] per second, but he did appreciate its other benefits. He really liked how nice the games looked on its vibrant OLED display. Now, one of the positive side effects of not having a discrete GPU is better battery life. Well, the Nemo with

[13:37] its large battery and no dedicated GPU, it did really well here, 9 hours. a low-powered processor, this processor, it's just too old, outdated, and inefficient. Its battery life was bad at about 5 hours. Funnily enough, it

[13:52] which does have a powerful dedicated GPU. All right, I think we've all seen enough. These gaming laptops, they're just not modern gaming laptops. Even they were never intended to be in gaming laptops without a dedicated GPU. And

[14:09] guys, we've picked two at random here. You know, Nemo, Morace, Chewi, Jumper, Kaiga, the rest of them, they all appear to just be doing the same thing. Slapping their logos on cheaply made laptops with old hardware and marketing

[14:22] them as gaming ones. Even some of their laptops with newer hardware, like Nemo's laptops with newer hardware, like Nemo's $1,300 gaming laptop, it still doesn't have a dedicated GPU. For that price, you can buy a real gaming laptop with an

[14:35] RTX 5060, which will completely destroy this one. In fact, while filming this video, the Morace with that crappy CPU jumped up to $1,300, too. These companies are just being deceptive, and it really speaks to a

[14:50] broader trend in e-commerce right now. Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, and most of the others, they've opened up to these third-party sellers. And then, chasing third-party sellers to sponsor search results. This has enabled these

[15:04] nefarious companies to come in and try and trick us. And there are other ways, other schemes that these third-party sellers are doing. Check this one out. I searched Best Buy for the Yoga Pro 9i. A third-party seller's listing actually

[15:18] came up above Best Buy's own listing for that laptop. The third-party seller is charging you more than Best Buy is for a worse a GPU. You're getting a 5050 with a third-party seller's one, not the better 5060. If you don't know any

[15:33] better, you may assume that like wines, the more expensive one is the better one. What's worse is both these listings are for the older 2025 model, not the are for the older 2025 model, not the newer 2026 one. But, the third-party

[15:46] seller does not disclose this, only Best Buy does. Instead, they try to entice you by throwing in a cheap USB hub. Funnily enough, this kind of reminds me of buying a car, you know, where they try to bundle crap in as an excuse to

[15:59] just jack up the price. Guys, we have a great relationship with Best Buy and I am certainly going to be raising this with them. But look, at the end of the day, this path that major e-commerce stores are going down, it's

[16:11] bestlaptop.deals. Our website, it helps you navigate these stores providing transparency and clarity into what you should really be buying and what is actually a good deal. We don't allow any dodgy third-party

[16:25] sellers. We don't allow sponsored search results or advertisements of any kind. And we only recommend laptops that we have tested ourselves. If you are in the market for a budget gaming laptop like the ones I've talked about today,

[16:38] there's really two ways you should go. Either buy an older real gaming laptop with a dedicated GPU. I'm going to be listing some good ones down below. Or buy something like the Yoga Slim 7i which I talked about today. Those

[16:50] laptops, they have a decent integrated GPU, certainly won't game as well, but premium, and they are capable of playing some older titles. Again, I've listed a video. Funnily enough, Minimo actually reached

[17:04] out to sponsor our video. Well, I hope they'll be pleased with how this one turned out. But in all seriousness, I need to ask for your help. Good people are being misled. Minimo actually says they have more than 130,000 customers.

[17:17] Now, I'm not saying all of them were misled or unhappy, of course not, but I'm sure a lot were. And that's where we need to step in and help. So, please share this video. Let's get the message out there. Guys, I rarely ask for help,

[17:30] but this is important. Thanks for watching. Until next time, I will catch watching. Until next time, I will catch you later.