An RTX 3080 gaming laptop for just £1200 is one of the best early Black Friday deals yet

I had to check this particular Black Friday deal three times to make sure the specs were right, but yes, you can indeed get an RTX 3080-equipped version of the Acer Nitro 5 gaming laptop for £1200. That’s hundreds upon hundreds of pounds less than the average RTX 3080 laptop, even during the current season of early Black Friday offers.

Until Nvidia get around to making a mobile version of the RTX 4080, this is the second-most powerful RTX laptop GPU you can get, so it’s much more commonly found inside £2000-plus models. Suffice to say, chances to secure yourself such a graphics chip for £1200 are very rare indeed. And it’s not like the other components are guff: the AMD Ryzen 7 5800H is a perfectly adequate octa-core CPU, and the Nitro 5 ignores slow mechanical storage to equip itself with a 1TB SSD.

UK deal:

Acer Nitro 5 - £1200 from Ebuyer (was £1880)

The 1080p display’s refresh rate also maxes out at 360Hz, which is fitting, as the RTX 3080 is one of precious few laptop GPUs that might be able to fill that out in certain games.

If you’re looking for a catch, I will say that while I haven’t used this specific Nitro 5, my experience with prior models found that they don’t have terribly colourful screens. Nor particularly high build quality, though it’s not like the plastic chassis will disintegrate in your hands either. If performance is paramount, then this is an exceptional bargain – perhaps the single best early Black Friday gaming laptop deal so far.