ACER AN515-45-R6XD Nitro 5 15.6" FHD Ryzen 5 5600H 3.3GHz NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 6GB 8GB RAM 512GB SSD Win 11 Home Black

This Acer Nitro 5 is the best value gaming laptop on the market today. Purchased for $729.99 in Oct 2022. Cheapest laptop with a RTX 3060 GPU by at least $100 when I bought it. One caveat, I upgraded the RAM with a Team Group Zeus 2x8 GB (16 total) 3200 kit $40. The AMD 5600H processor is awesome for gaming, but performs best with dual channel RAM (2 sticks). It's best to have two sticks of the same memory, but if you are on a budget you can just add another 8GB stick of 3200 DDR4 SODIMM RAM Make sure the voltage is 1.2. The Ryzen processor will not take 1.35. I also added a 1 TB NVME drive from Team Group ($58) as well in the 2nd M.2 slot. I ran the built in benchmarks for Cyberpunk and and Shadow of the Tomb Raider both before and after the upgrade. Setting were 1080p and I used DLSS in both. The screen's default refresh rate is 60 FPS, I changed it to 144 and turned on GSync. I used Nvidia's GEForce Experience to change the graphical settings. When set to optimal (high) Cyberpunk ran at 47 avg FPS before changing the Ram and 67 after (that's with DLSS and Ray Tracing!). Tomb Raider would not run the benchmark before RAM upgrade (would crash partway through) ran it at Optimized (highest settings) at 59 FPS. When settings were set to performance after RAM upgrade Cyberpunk went from 62 to 112 FPS and Tomb Raider from 63 to 122 FPS. The gameplay also looked a lot smoother and had less artifacts after the RAM upgrade. Now I will say the fans were Screaming loud when I ran these benchmarks. I was basically stress testing this system. The laptop could benefit from sitting on a cooling pad and headphones would help your ears. But this is to be expected running top AAA games on a laptop with settings turned all the way up. In any case, I was surprised that a laptop at this price point could crank out that level of performance. A few other things to note: the build quality feels solid. This is not a thin and light laptop, but a gaming laptop. It is chunky and I expected that. I like the backlit keyboard and trackpad seems to work just Fine. It is a plastic chassis, though, and is a fingerprint magnet. Doesn't bother me, but might bother others. I don't actually expect to do a lot of gaming on this, but it's good to know I can, especially if I'm traveling.

[This review was collected as part of a promotion.] This laptop is amazing! It was really easy to set up and transfer everything from my old laptop over. It also connected right away to my Wi-Fi. The laptop is super fast and the colors and bright and clean. It's everything I was hoping for. Very excited to find out what else I can do with it. Best laptop I have had so far