The current sweet spot for a reliable laptop to handle average work, home office or school tasks is between $700 and $800 and a reasonable model for creative work or gaming is $1,000 and up.
Cheap gaming laptops don't get much better than the Acer Nitro V 15, which combines a cool design with cool Triple-A performance for $999 as tested. (The base model is only $749.) We also now ...