Not long ago it was unthinkable you'd be able to get a gaming laptop for anything under $800. Now you can get a capable gaming laptop for $798, with a real GPU in it—like the entry-level GTX 1650, right? Well, this deal defies that expectation, too: the Acer Nitro 5 has a proper RTX 3060, which means ray tracing and legitimate gaming power on the go. Unsurprisingly, it's high on our list for Cyber Monday gaming laptop deals.
Although this was discounted on Black Friday to under $600, it's now bounced back to its original price yet, it's still the cheapest gaming laptop we've been able to find for Cyber Monday as the specs for this system are good for the price. There's a 6-core Ryzen 5 5600H processor that can turbo up to 4.2GHz, which is going to handle most games with ease. There's a 144Hz 1080p panel, a good match for the RTX 3060, and a 512GB NVMe SSD. It'll be fast, and big enough, as long as you aren't trying to play too many games the size of Call of Duty Warzone.
The 8GB of RAM are a bit of a drawback, but it's also user-upgradeable. If you take out a few screws and pop off the bottom, you can get at the DDR4 slots and plop in another 8GB stick for cheap. Then you've got a heck of a gaming laptop for $800.
- We're curating all the best CyberMonday PC gaming deals right here.
There's even another M.2 slot on the Nitro 5's motherboard, so if you aren't satisfied with 512GB of storage, you can plop another terabyte or so in there by snagging a Black Friday SSD deal. Here's a handy video walkthrough for upgrading both the RAM and SSD. All you'll need is a screwdriver.
Don't expect the Nitro 5 to feel like a premium laptop; the body is plastic, it's going to be a bit bulkier than something like a Razer Blade, and the RTX 3060 isn't going to let you go wild with ray tracing and max settings on games like Cyberpunk 2077. But heck, this is an entire computer for about the price of a desktop RTX 3070. If you're looking for a budget avenue into portable PC gaming, this is it.
