Not long ago, it was unthinkable that a gaming laptop could be bought for $650. That was the price one would pay for a chunky laptop for office work and nothing else. Now, for $650, you can get a high-performance gaming laptop with a real GPU, like an entry-level GTX 1650." Well, this deal also defies that expectation: the Acer Nitro 5 has a proper RTX 3060 on board, which means you can get ray tracing and legitimate gaming power. Not surprisingly, it ranks high on our list of Cyber Monday gaming laptop deals (open in new tab).

The system's other specs are also good for the price: it's powered by a six-core Ryzen 5 5600H processor that can turbo up to 4.2 GHz, which should handle most games with ease; the 144 Hz 1080p panel is a good match for the RTX 3060, which works well with it, and a 512GB NVMe SSD, which is fast and large enough unless you're trying to play games the size of Call of Duty Warzone a lot.

The 8GB of RAM is a bit of a drawback, but user upgrades are available. By removing a few screws and removing the bottom, the DDR4 slot can be accessed and an 8GB stick can be added inexpensively. That way, you can get one heck of a gaming laptop for $650.

The Nitro 5's motherboard also has another M.2 slot, so if 512GB of storage isn't enough, you can add another terabyte or so by getting the Black Friday SSD special (open in new tab). Here's a handy video tutorial (opens in a new tab) for upgrading. All you need is a driver.

Don't expect the Nitro 5 to feel like a high-end laptop. The body is plastic, it will be a bit bulkier than something like the Razer Blade, and the RTX 3060 won't let you go wild with ray tracing or max settings in games like Cyberpunk 2077. But it will get you an entire computer for about the same price as a desktop RTX 3070. If you're looking for a cheap path to portable PC gaming, this is it.