The budget gaming laptop sector is booming, as the CPU and GPU gains of the last few years are trickling down nicely and you can get a very fast frame rate at 1080p for a lot less than you’d pay for something like an Alienware 18 Area-51. You’re not getting quite the same level of GPU power or build quality either, but a cheaper laptop like the Acer Nitro V15 can still produce the goods. And the heat. And the noise.
Acer has taken a trip back in time for the V15, with the model sent to PCG for review sporting a Core i7 13620H processor. That’s a Raptor Lake chip with ten cores split between four P-cores and six E-cores for 16 simultaneous software threads thanks to the 13th Gen coming before the death of P-core Hyper-Threading. It’s a chip from 2023, but its max turbo frequency of 4.9 GHz means it’s still competitive, even if it puts out a lot of heat and drives the Nitro’s cooling system crazy.
