Listen folks, I've reviewed a lot of the best gaming laptops over the years. I mean a LOT: to the point where they eventually all begin to morph into one large, vaguely laptop-shaped blob. Fortunately, some are able to stand out from the crowd - and today, that's the Acer Nitro 17.
Now, I want to be clear that this isn't the most powerful gaming laptop money can buy. It comes equipped with some very respectable specs, however, with a shiny new Nvidia RTX 4050 graphics card and AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS octa-core processor along with 16GB of RAM, meaning it should be able to play all the latest games on its large 17.3-inch display (which also packs a 165Hz refresh rate, perfect for twitchy shooters like Valorant and CS:GO).
What makes the Acer Nitro 17 so appealing right now is the price. Since Nvidia debuted its RTX 4000-series GPUs last year, it's been hard to find a laptop featuring one of the new cards for less than $1000. But thanks to this early deal from the upcoming 'Amazon Prime Day 2' (which takes place on October 10-11), you can nab this gaming laptop for just $969 - almost 20% off the original retail price.
You're not missing out on other features here either: the Acer Nitro 17 packs a speedy 1TB SSD so you'll have plenty of storage for all your games, and the keyboard features RGB backlighting - a must-have for the majority of gaming laptops, let's be honest.
Despite its large display, it's also relatively thin (as far as gaming laptops go) at just 1.1 inches at its thickest point. We've also got a respectable selection of physical ports, including an HDMI output for connecting to a second display and even a microSD card reader - a rarity on laptops these days that I'm always happy to see.
At this sort of price, you'd usually expect slightly older specs; the new slate of RTX 4000 laptops typically start around the $1,050-1,100 mark, so it's great to see this one drop below the thousand-dollar line. Given that the Nitro 17 normally sells for $1,199.99, this is a discount definitely worth considering - it's the lowest the laptop has ever been on Amazon.
Oh, and did I mention that it comes with a fabric carry case too? Because there's that.
