The cheapest gaming laptop we recommend is on sale for a record-low $450

SAVE $200: As of May 14, Best Buy has the Acer Chromebook 516 GE (Intel Core 5 120U, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) on sale for just $449. That's 31% off its $649 MSRP, its biggest discount ever.

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Credit: Acer

Acer Chromebook 516 GE (Intel Core 5 120U, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD)

$449 at Best Buy
$649 Save $200

 

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Chromebooks aren't the sort of laptops most people associate with great PC gaming experiences, but for cash-strapped shoppers, we consider the 16-inch Acer Chromebook 516 GE a fantastic pick. Mashable's Alex Perry called it "an incredible value" at $649, commending its long battery life, comfortable RGB keyboard, ample port selection, and "excellent" 120Hz display.

That $649 number is the Chromebook 516 GE's usual going rate, by the way — right now, it's on sale for way less at Best Buy. A 31% discount from the electronics retailer brings it down to a mere $449, which is its best price to date.

The Chromebook 516 GE comes with an Intel Core 5 120U processor, 8GB of memory, and 256GB of storage. Those probably sound like underwhelming specs, but they're perfectly fine for a machine that's meant to stream titles from kitted-out servers instead of playing them locally. If you mainly play games through cloud services like Xbox Game Pass and Nvidia GeForce Now, the Chromebook 516 GE is a stellar alternative to other entry-level gaming laptops.

Perry noticed some input latency when he played certain games on the Chromebook 516 GE, but was otherwise "fairly impressed" with its overall gaming performance: "I started a new game in Control, jacked the settings up all the way, turned on ray tracing, and was a little blown away," he said. In our Geekbench 6 benchmark, it earned the highest multi-core score out of all the Chromebooks we've tested by a wide margin. It's zippy for what it is.

Finally, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention the Chromebook 516 GE's battery life: It held out for more than 10 hours on a single charge. That makes it the longest-lasting Chromebook we've tried and the longest-lasting gaming laptop in our database. (In testing standard gaming laptops, we're content if we can get over an hour of use per charging cycle.) To quote Perry again: "That’s just good stuff, folks."