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With Sony and Microsoft raising prices on their gaming consoles there's never been a more compelling time to embrace PC gaming instead, and I just spotted great laptop deal on a budget gaming laptop that can help you get RTX 50-series gaming power for cheaper than ever.
For a limited time the Acer Nitro V 16 AI gaming laptop is $699 at Walmart, which is $200 off the usual $899 asking price and a far more affordable price than this budget beast usually goes for.
Now this is a cheap gaming laptop even before the $200 discount (part of Walmart's GeForce Week sale), so you should keep your expectations in check when imagining all the fun you'll have playing the best PC games on the Acer Nitro V 16's WUXGA (1920 x 1200 pixels) 180Hz IPS display.
You can expect most games will run very well at 1080p or the native 1200p resolution, but you will likely have to rely on Nvidia's performance-enhancing DLSS tech in order to achieve high framerates in modern games.
But thanks to the AMD Ryzen 5 240 CPU, Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 laptop GPU and 16GB of RAM you can count on good to great performance in many games, though you won't be able to store many on the 512GB SSD.
That said, let me remind you that you're getting components in this gaming laptop that are generally as good or better than what you get in the Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5, and yet with this deal and current inflated pricing this RTX 5050 gaming laptop is just $50 more expensive than a new Xbox Series X—and it's actually $50 cheaper than a PlayStation 5 Pro console.
You also get three free months of Xbox Game Pass when you buy this laptop, which means you get three months of access to a service full of free games you can try on your new laptop to see what you like best.
And not only do you get the far broader PC game catalog to play on this laptop via Steam, Xbox Game Pass and other PC game platforms, you also get a fully functional Windows 11 laptop that can handle whatever work you need to do as well as light photo/video editing.
You get a pretty decent array of ports on the Acer Nitro V 16, including 3 USB-A ports, a USB-C port, a microSD card reader, an RJ-45 Ethernet port (for jacking into high-speed Internet connections) a microSD card reader and crucially, an HDMI 2.1 port.
That HDMI 2.1 out ensures you can connect this little gaming laptop to a gaming monitor or fancy TV and play the latest games with full support for variable refresh rate. That's exactly the same benefit you get out of a PS5 or Xbox, except you can also disconnect the Acer Nitro V 16 from your TV and take it with you when you want to game on the go.
Just don't expect great battery life. While we haven't had a chance to test this specific model of Acer Nitro V 16, the other Acer Nitro V gaming laptops we've tested in the past have (like almost all gaming laptops) reliably only lasted a few hours while surfing the web on battery and 1-2 hours while gaming without being plugged in. That's why I recommend you pack the charger if you take this thing on the go with you.
This is probably the lowest price I've ever seen a gaming laptop go for with a modern Nvidia RTX 50-series GPU inside, so if you want a taste of the next generation of PC gaming this might be one of the most affordable ways to get started. Just act fast, because Walmart's GeForce Week sale ends September 28!
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