There are a lot of great budget gaming laptops on the market, but the Acer Nitro 5 sits is one of the few that are regularly recommended. Not only does it have a great build, but it also looks sleek, and you can get it at a significant discount from Best Buy for $800 rather than the $1,000 it usually goes for.
Why you should buy the Acer Nitro 5
The Acer Nitro 5 has a few similarities with the Acer Nitro 5 Spin and comes with an RTX 3050 Ti under the hood. While that’s not one of the best graphics cards on the market, it’s still relatively powerful for something you can find on laptop and great for 1080p gaming. Even better, the 15.6-inch screen of the Nitro 5 is not only FHD, but also has a 144Hz refresh rate, and while you might not always be able to hit both a high refresh rate and high graphical settings, at least you have a bit of wiggle room. The larger monitor also gives you access to a nice big mechanical keyboard to type and play on, and that has surprisingly little flex for what is supposed to be a budget-oriented gaming laptop.
The CPU is a 12th Gen Inte i5-12500H, a mid-range CPU that should give you more than enough power to play most games and easily handle most productivity work. You also get 16GBs of DDR4 RAM to work with and 512GBs of storage space, although the latter is on the small side, so we’d encourage you to grab one of these external hard drive deals. Besides that, Acer throws in Windows 11 Home, Wi-Fi 6, and a couple of nice speakers so that you can enjoy your movies and games without headphones when you’re alone. It’s also loud enough to drown out the fans’ sound when gaming in performance mode, which is another big plus.
All in all, while the Acer Nitro 5 didn’t quite make it on our list of best gaming laptops, it’s still an excellent gaming laptop if you’re on budget, especially with the discount from Best Buy bringing the price down to $800 from $1,000. On the other hand, if you’d like to see a few more alternatives, there are a lot of other great gaming laptop deals you can take advantage of, so be sure to browse.
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