I test laptops for a living – here are my favourite Amazon Prime Day laptop deals
If you want to bag a laptop bargain this Amazon Prime Day, these are the deals our laptop expert recommends
The Amazon Prime Day sale is now running full-tilt, bringing a smorgasbord of laptop deals to our doorsteps. Anyone hoping to find a bargain offer on a new notebook should be very pleased with the range of offerings.
Not only are there deals on potent gaming laptops with the latest Nvidia RTX 40-series graphics cards, but I’ve spied discounts on affordable everyday machines with OLED screens, 2-in-1 foldables that can double up as tablets, and budget laptops for students.
Important Amazon Prime Day information
Before I get to the products worthy of your consideration, it’s important to highlight that you’ll need an active Amazon Prime membership to get the best prices. If you aren’t currently subscribed, you can follow this link to start a free 30-day trial and still get the discount.
It’s also worth noting that Amazon Prime Day ends at midnight tonight (17 July) and that most of the deals listed below will expire then.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s take a look at the best Prime Day laptop deals and what makes them so good. I’ve also highlighted their weaknesses so you can make as informed a purchase as possible.
Acer Nitro V16 (was £1,200; now £899)
Pick it for… AAA gaming with AI on a laptop
But beware of… poor battery life
Acer’s new Nitro V16 gaming laptops don’t mess too much with the basic formula that has long served the Nitro line well. They are still quite big and bulky and made from plastic but they offer solid specs at a very attractive price.
The V16 is built around a 165Hz 1,980 x 1,200 IPS display which is a cut about the 144hz panels some Nitro models make do with and features an Nvidia RTX 4060 GPU and an 8-core AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS. That’s a combination that can chew through even the most demanding games at high frame rates.
The CPU is one of AMD’s new Hawk Point models with a built-in AI Neural Processor, a very rare feature at this price point. It also features AMD’s potent Radeon 780M iGPU so you have serious graphics power even with the RTX 4060 dormant. There’s also a 1TB SSD and 16GB of RAM thrown in.
The Nitro V has a sticker price of £1,200 but for Prime Day it’s down to £899 which makes it outstanding value.
Asus Vivobook 15 (was £545; now £499)
Pick it for… a lovely OLED display at a bargain price
But beware of… graphics performance
You just can’t beat a good OLED display for a top-notch viewing experience on a laptop, especially when it comes to HDR content. This model of the Asus Vivobook 15 only comes with a 1,920 x 1,080 60Hz OLED panel rather than the 2,880 x 1,620 120Hz one but you still get VESA Display HDR TrueBlack 600 certification.
The rest of the package is good too, with a potent 12-core Intel i5-12500H CPU, a 1TB SSD and 16GB of RAM. You can even open the Vivobook 15 up and add more memory into the spare SODIMM slot.
General usability is helped by a wide selection of I/O ports — 3 x USB-A, USB-C and HDMI — and an expansive numeric keyboard. The only fly in the ointment is that the 12th-gen Intel chip lacks an AI neural processor and uses the Iris Xe iGPU rather than the newer, far more capable, Arc iGPU. Given the price that’s a minor niggle, however.
The cream on this particularly tasty laptop cake is the Prime Day offer price, just £499 down from its RRP of £799 and most recent price of £545. As a general-purpose media machine — for consumption or creation — the Vivobook 15 is hard to beat for the money.
Acer Aspire 5 (was £657; now £580)
Pick it for… discrete GPU work on the cheap
But beware of… the mediocre IPS screen
Sometimes you need a discrete GPU that can chew through an edition or modelling job without bringing the rest of the system to its knees. The Acer Aspire 5 is one of the cheapest ways you can get a discrete GPU, albeit the rather lowly Nvidia RTX 2050.
I’ve tested the RX 2050 in the Acer Aspire 7, a similar machine to this but with a 144hz rather than a 60Hz panel as fitted to the Aspire 5. The RTX 2050 is no match for the likes of the RTX 3050 but it can still run 3D modelling jobs between twice and three times as fast as Intel’s Iris Xe iGPU and use its own 4GB of RAM while doing so.
The RTX 2050 also supports ray tracing, which can be handy for gaming, though don’t expect to run AAA titles at high detail levels with ray tracing; that’s well beyond this GPU’s comfort zone.
The rest of the package is solid with an Intel Core i5-1235U CPU, 8GB of RAM and a usefully fast 512GB SSD. The display — FullHD IPS 15.65in — is rather drab, but you get a Thunderbolt 4 port and add a second SSD. For just £580 on Prime Day, it’s stonking value.
Dell G15 (was £1,149; now £910)
Pick it for… solid AAA gaming performance
But beware of… big and heavy, especially with the huge power brick
Dell’s G-series laptops are doomed to live in the shadow of their more powerful, more glamorous but also more expensive Alienware brothers and that’s a darned shame because there are some very nice machines in the G lineup.
The G15 5530 is one such option. While its potent 14-core Intel Core i7-13650HX CPU isn’t as AI-friendly or efficient as the AMD CPU in the Acer Nitro V16 above, it goes like the clappers and is complemented by an RTX 4060 GPU, a 512GB SSD and 16GB of RAM with room for a second drive and two SODIMM slots.
This G15 comes with a truly massive 330W power brick, one of the biggest I’ve ever seen, and an example of overkill given the power draw of the system. The whole thing is a bit big and bulky making it more movable than portable though that’s true of many gaming laptops.
For £910 in the Prime Day sale, the G15 is an excellent all-round gaming machine which emphasises power above all and that’s just how I like my gaming laptops.
Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 (was £380; now £280)
Pick it for… cheap and light everyday computing
But beware of… the fact it’s not up for any heavy-lifting
A perennial question I get asked is “What is the best cheap, useable Windows laptop?” Of course that all depends on one’s definition of cheap. I usually take it as meaning £300 or less and for that sort of money, you have to temper your expectations. That’s why this Prime Day deal on the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 caught my eye.
Even at the full asking price of £499, the IdeaPad Slim 3 isn’t bad value. It’s built around an Intel Core i3-N305 processor boasting eight cores and a boost clock speed of 3.8GHz with 8GB of RAM. Performance is perfectly respectable away from high-demand tasks or gaming and this model comes with a 512GB SSD rather than the more common 256GB.
Weighing just 1.55kg and less than 18mm thick, it’s very portable and its 47Wh battery can easily deliver more than 10 hours thanks to the low demands of the CPU. There’s a decent range of I/O ports including a full-function USB Type-C port and the keyboard — complete with a numeric pad — isn’t too shabby. The 15.6 FullHD IPS screen is rather drab though I’ve seen worse on laptops costing much more.
It all comes back to the price. For just £280, the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 is a genuinely useable full-sized Windows 11 laptop that will happily perform day-to-day tasks and looks and feels like a more upmarket model than it is. For the money, you can’t go wrong.
Acer Predator Helios Neo 18 (was £1,999; now £1,500)
Pick it for… awesome large-screen gaming
But beware of… its size; it’s massive and heavy
With Acer’s Predator Helios Neo 18 gaming laptop we’re firmly in the arena of no-compromise machinery. Thanks to the admittedly impressive 18in 2,560 x 1,600 165Hz IPS screen the Neo 18 is big, very big. And when you include the power brick you’ll be carrying around 5kg of kit.
Performance is bordering on epic thanks to an Nvidia RTX 4070 GPU with a turned-up-to-11 140W TGP and a fire-breathing Intel Core i7-14700HX CPU which boasts 20 cores of which eight are performance cores that can run at a maximum 5.5Ghz. With the performance settings turned to Max in the Nitro Sense CP it goes like the devil himself is chasing it.
Thanks to Nvidia’s Advanced Optimus dynamic display switching you don’t have to faff about rebooting the system to enjoy G-Sync frame synchronisation either. The keyboard is solid and large and features per-key RGB lighting for that full-on gamer vibe. Battery life is pretty dire and the speakers are rather raucous but those are pretty minor issues given the Neo 18’s role in life.
For Prime Day this massive slab of laptop gaming goodness can be yours for just £1,500, down from an RRP of £1,999 and an average Amazon price of £1,857. Whichever way you look at it, it’s a massive amount of laptop for a surprisingly small amount of money.
