Buying a proper gaming laptop with decent performance for under $700 is normally wishful thinking, but this Black Friday deal from Acer gets you all that and more. With specs that will be good enough to mostly deliver reliable 1080p gaming at medium detail settings or higher, and a good enough screen to make the most of that fast frame rate, this Nvidia gaming laptop is a fantastic buy at its current $579 price.
Be under no illusion, the best gaming laptops in the world will comfortably outperform this one, but this Acer ANV15-52-586Z packs a decent punch and will be enough to fire up any modern game, even if you do have to compromise a little on detail settings. From Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 to Minecraft, this machine will cope with the lot.
The heart of this laptop is its Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 GPU. This is a modest chip compared to the best GPUs, but it still packs in Nvidia’s second most recent graphics architecture, getting you access to its very capable ray tracing RT cores and DLSS frame generation. The latter can effectively double your frame rate in supported games by using AI to generate an extra frame in between each regularly rendered frame. It’s not a miracle cure for a low frame rate, especially at anything around 30fps, but it can make a solid difference.
Crucially, while you may have to drop details in some games down a bit, this GPU is still surprisingly capable, despite having just 6GB of VRAM and a mere 2,560 CUDA cores. This GPU can run Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p with mostly high detail settings and an average of over 60fps. You can even turn on ray tracing and get around 45fps, though expect some stuttering.
Meanwhile, in Fortnite, it will get you over 120fps at 1080p using high detail settings (with Nanite turned off), making for an experience that will be smooth enough to feel competitive.
This solid GPU offering is backed up by an Intel Core i5-13420H CPU, which is an eight-core chip with four performance cores and four efficiency cores. It’s Intel’s slightly older 13th-gen architecture, rather than its 14th-gen, but it’s still speedy enough to avoid being a painful bottleneck.
Perhaps the biggest factor to watch out for here is that this laptop only comes with 8GB of DDR5 RAM. That’s enough to get by, but there’s a good chance you’ll want to upgrade this in the future. RAM upgrades on laptops are generally quite easy to sort, but it’s something to consider if you don’t like the idea of doing some DIY.
As for the screen, it’s a 15.6-inch, 1080p model that uses IPS LCD tech, so it offers good viewing angles. It won’t be the last word in dazzling colors and contrast, but is fine for an entry-level machine and will be great for gaming. With a 165Hz refresh rate, it will also keep up with the fastest frame rates that the RTX 4050 is likely to output.
Also included in this laptop is a 512GB SSD – enough storage for half a dozen AAA games – and WiFi 6 for speedy wireless connectivity. You also get a sensible selection of ports, including three USB-A, two USB-C, a headphone jack, Ethernet, and a full-size HDMI, for easily connecting to a monitor or TV.
Normally priced at $749, this Acer machine has had $170 lopped off its price on Amazon, making it just $579. It’s one of the cheapest gaming laptops we’d recommend. Anything below that price will likely use a much weaker GPU integrated into the CPU. It might not be the most slim, portable, and flashy design, but if you just want a workhorse gaming laptop for an incredible price, don’t delay on this deal.
