Best value for money ~1500 eur gaming laptop. Acer v15 Nitro vs XMG A/P505

dre028

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Jul 11, 2011
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I am looking to buy a laptop, which I will mainly use for schoolwork (I am going to be taking engineering, so I will likely run CAD and other programs on this system), as well as some light gaming and the usual browsing etc. As such my main priorities are CPU & GPU performance, battery life and to a lesser degree, portability.

My main problem is that I live in Malta, and computer stuff is generally more expensive to buy locally and few major websites located in the EU will ship here. So I have ended up with a rather limited choice here.
The choices I have are these :
Acer Aspire V15 Nitro (some version of it) : http://www.scanmalta.com/scanshop/computing/laptops-1483/feature/gaming/acer-aspire-vn7-591g-768l-15-6-i7-1128gb-16gb-gtx.html
or
the XMG A505 : http://www.mysn.eu/shop/xmg-a505-gaming-notebook.html?___store=default&___from_store=default (configured with 16 GB Ram, 250 GB SSD and 1TB HDD)
or
the XMG P505 : http://www.mysn.eu/shop/xmg-p505-gamingnotebook.html#!prettyPhoto (configured with 16 GB Ram, GTX 965M, 128GB SSD and 1TB HDD)

The Acer is from a local shop so it would be better in terms of maintenance, warranty and such. However I have heard that the keyboard is not so good on this, and on the acer website I couldn't find the configuration as specified in the shop website so I'm not entirely sure on it's accuracy.

I am also somewhat confused regarding the XMG laptops as I do not really understand the difference between the A and the P 505 besides the GPU's available on them and their pricing.
The A505 is definitely a much better fit to my budget (the shipping is around 60 eur from the website), however it cannot be configured with a 965M. Im not sure if a 965M is really worth the extra 150 eur unless the P505 has some other differences from the A.

I was also slightly worried about the battery life of these laptops. I have heard that the Acer and A505 are relatively decent and have ~ 3 hours of light browsing/typing, while the P505 has a shorter lifetime with similar use.

Most of the other stuff regarding the screens etc isn't of any major importance to me so they don't make much difference. I would prefer a more comfortable keyboard and trackpad but it isn't a total deal breaker to me.

I would be very grateful for any advice on the matter :)
And thanks to everyone who read through all this :D