This Acer gaming laptop checks all the right boxes for $1,300
For any given laptop model there are an absurd number of configurations, and some of them are objectively worse than others despite being priced the same—no, there's no good reason for it, gaming laptops are just miserably chaotic.
Here's a nice sight, then: An Acer Predator Triton 300 with an RTX 2070, Intel Core i7-10750H, 16GB RAM, and a 1TB SSD, and it's on sale from Microsoft for $1,299.99, which is a good price compared to other gaming laptops out there.
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This Acer Predator model also has a 1080p screen with an IPS panel (a good panel) that can hit 144Hz—pretty standard for a gaming laptop.
If you search "gaming laptop" on Amazon or another retailer, you'll probably find lots of configurations that are similar to this one, but a little worse. Often where they skimp is the SSD, offering 512GB instead of 1TB. If this is going to be your main PC, not just for gaming but also for dumping photos and videos from your phone and other tasks, you'll want the 1TB drive. You'll also be happy you have 16GB of RAM and not 8GB.
Though Microsoft doesn't say so, the RTX 2070 graphics processor in this laptop will utilize Nvidia's Max-Q design, which means it'll be a little less powerful than the same GPU in a bulkier, louder laptop where it's allowed to run at the full wattage. That is a trade-off you make with any thinner GeForce laptop—if you want more performance, look at bulky 17-inch laptops instead. Personally, I think that laptops shouldn't be so massive that they're uncomfortable to carry around. Microsoft says that this Acer is a very reasonable 3.75 lbs, although Acer's site says that the model weighs a still-reasonable 4.41 lbs. (I suspect Acer is the one that has it right.)
Acer Predator Triton 300 | RTX 2070 | Intel i7| $1,699.99 $1,299.99 at Microsoft
A stylish gaming laptop with a good configuration: 16GB RAM, a 1080p 144Hz IPS display, and a 1TB SSD. You can play any modern PC game on it, not necessarily with the graphics settings maxed out, but looking plenty good enough.View Deal
Before you pull the trigger, also consider the ASUS ROG Zephyrus that's in our Black Friday gaming laptop sale round-up. It's got roughly the same specs, but with a 240Hz display, and it's on sale for $1,249.99 at Best Buy. With either, you'd be getting a pretty good laptop at a pretty good price.
There's one other question to consider: Should you buy a gaming laptop right now at all?
If you have a desktop PC where you already do most of your graphically-intensive gaming, and you just need a portable computer for work and school and a bit of gaming while you're traveling, you could get a much cheaper laptop, like this HP laptop for $450. If, however, you want a laptop to be your primary PC gaming device, going with an RTX 2070-equipped machine right now is a reasonable way to do that. It'll also work well for running VR games if you get a VR headset that hooks up to a PC.
GeForce RTX 30-series laptops aren't here yet, but they might come as soon as January, so if you're after a top-of-the-line laptop experience, you could wait and see—on the desktop side, the performance jump between RTX 20-series and RTX 30-series cards was quite dramatic, and the same could be true for the mobile chips.
However, if you're happy with good laptop graphics performance from a 2020 perspective, buying a discounted RTX 2070 laptop right now is a reasonable thing to do. And RTX 30-series laptops might be hard to find in-stock for a while, if this year's graphics card shortages are any indication.
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