Runs Abandoned Realms (Awesome MUD), Baldur's Gate 3, Heroes of the Storm, etc, fast with no problems at all. I upgraded the RAM at Memory Express for $25 for another 8gb - a wonderful deal.

This laptop is heavier than you might imagine. It wouldn't work well actually sitting on your lap on a couch. This really needs to be set up on a hard surface due to weight and in order for the fans to disperse heat.

This is a great entry level gaming laptop. It's not the top of the line but it's magnitudes better than a similarly priced non-gaming laptop (i.e. something without a decent graphics card that you might find from somewhere other than memory express). I strongly recommend this laptop as a backup gaming unit as long as you are aware it's heavy and needs a hard surface to play on. Upgrades to 16gb for cheap! Thank you Memory Express!

Stock PCI3 v4.0 drive is a Samsung rated at 6850MB/s read and 5075MB/s write. Acer did not go cheap.

The only weakness is my wallet, this laptop was the best i could afford, which is not a weakness at all.

For the sale price the Nitro 5 AN517-55-57FR-US is exactly (and more) than I was expecting. I immediately replaced the 8GB RAM with 64GB to run LLM (Local AI) and it handles 8B to mid 20b models very well at eval rate: 4.32 tokens/s. Even 70b models run but slowly, mainly a CPU/GPU limit. This laptop also has x2 nVME slots so lots of expansion. 17" screen is clear and detailed, great for 50+ year old eyes. Thanks to the sales in the Burnaby store they are very helpful!