In the PCWorld office chat, I call the Acer Nitro V gaming laptop “Old Faithful” because it reliably goes on sale every few weeks. Today, we’re seeing its typical big discount from an unusual source: MicroCenter. You can usually only get this store’s best sales in person, but right now it has a Nitro V with a Ryzen processor and RTX graphics card for just $599.99.
Now, this is definitely a budget gaming laptop, so set your expectations accordingly. With an AMD Ryzen 5 7535HS 6-core processor and an Nvidia RTX 4050 discrete GPU, it’ll run circles around any laptop that relies on integrated graphics—but that RTX 4050 is on the low end for laptop graphics cards, so you won’t be getting 4K ray tracing. You will be able to run the latest 3D games at least passably on its 1080p 15.6-inch screen, and with lower settings or online multiplayer, hitting the 144Hz refresh rate should be easy enough.
The Nitro V also makes a pretty decent desktop replacement for students or those who need a little more oomph, thanks to 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage space. Both of those can be upgraded rather cheaply if you’re okay with opening it up, thanks to two user-accessible RAM DIMMs and two easy-to-reach, full-length M.2 storage slots. It can handle up to 32GB of RAM and up to 2TB of storage in each slot for a maximum of 4TB, according to a bit of Googling, but I’d double-check with the laptop in hand before buying any new parts.
This is a big chonkster of a laptop, nearly an inch thick and 4.63 pounds, according to Acer’s specs. Even with that much beef, I wouldn’t expect a lot of battery life if you’re actually using it to play games. (It’ll probably last a while if you’re only using it for more mundane tasks, though.) For more impressions, check out PCWorld’s review of it, but keep in mind that’s for an Intel variant of the design.
MicroCenter is a bit of a wildcard in terms of stock, so I can’t guarantee that this deal will be available for long. The good news is that if you miss it, you can just wait a little while for Old Faithful to come back again.
Get this Acer Nitro V gaming laptop for just $600