A 14-inch gaming laptop is convenient, but if you can't spare the screen space or you don't mind the extra heft, a 16-inch is the ideal step-up. Luckily, there are heaps of excellent 16-inch laptops available, and some with pretty tasty discounts, including this Acer Nitro 16.
The GPU is the star of the show. It'll deliver a lot of the oomph required to actually reach the maximum refresh rate on the 2560 x 1600 panel included on the Nitro 16 in some games, and if you have DLSS enabled you'll get close in others. That's a pretty demanding combination for any laptop, but a 140W RTX 4070 like this one found in the Nitro 16 will deal a whole lot better with it than most mobile GPUs we've seen available in the more affordable laptop market.
The CPU is one of our absolute favorites: AMD's excellent Ryzen 7 7840HS. Not only is this an eight-core and 16-thread machine, it comes with the 780M iGPU that powers many of today's handheld gaming PCs. That might not seem like a benefit when you have an RTX 4070 on the side, but it means you don't need to run that GPU unless absolutely necessary, saving heaps of power.
Keeping the system fed is 16GB of DDR5 memory and a 1TB SSD. I'd like to see larger SSDs used on most gaming laptops these days—install sizes are not to be trifled with for the latest titles—but 1TB is the bare minimum I'll put up with on an affordable machine.
While it's a bit tame in terms of its design, it's anything but in terms of its spec. If it's not your bag, however, you can check out our page covering the best gaming laptop deals today for more options.
