RTX 30-series gaming laptops from Acer are here

Acer has wasted no time in being first off the blocks in announcing a set of AMD and Intel powered laptops featuring Nvidia’s freshly announced GeForce RTX 30-series mobile GPUs.

The cheapest way of getting your hands on an Acer branded RTX 30-series laptop comes in the form of the Acer Nitro 5, where configurations with the RTX 3060 mobile GPU start at £999 for the 15in version and £1,049 for the 17in model.

The Nitro 5 comes with an AMD Ryzen 7 Mobile Processor and a 512GB SSD. Suffice it to say that things can get a lot more expensive, mind, as you can drop in up to 32GB RAM, a 2TB NVMe SSD and a RTX 3080 GPU should you wish.

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If you’re firmly on Team Intel but still want the joy of a next-gen Nvidia GPU, then Acer has you covered with its Predator Helios 300 and Predator Triton 300 SE.

The former comes with a 240Hz IPS display coupled with an 11th-generation Intel Core H35-series i7 processor, up to 32GB RAM and up to a GeForce RTX 3080 GPU. Prices start at £1,299 and it should arrive in February.

The latter has portability in mind and squeezes in an 11th-gen H35-series Core i7 processor and RTX 3060 GPU into a remarkably sleek “Spartan-like all-metal chassis” that’s just 0.7in thick and 1.7kg in weight. It comes with a 14in FHD display with a 144Hz refresh rate, and should be good for ten hours’ battery life, although you’d be mad to do much 3D gaming away from the plug socket, frankly. It starts at £1,399 and should arrive in February, too.

Freshly announced at a special event this afternoon, Nvidia’s RTX 30-series mobile chips have instantly surpassed the RTX 20-series as the top-of-the-range GPU for gaming laptops. The Ampere based graphics chips not only offer the best possible frame rates in the latest games, but also support ray tracing for incredibly detailed lighting effects in supported games. If they’re anything like the desktop cards, expect demand for RTX 30-series based laptops to be extremely high.