Trick #2: Deceptive marketing claims
The #1 best-selling laptop on Amazon is plenty suspicious, but it isn’t the only way sellers are looking to pull one over on shoppers. Some are trying to trick buyers by misrepresenting what a laptop can do.
Gaming laptops are a particularly deep reservoir of terrible listings. A search for “gaming laptop” on Amazon will surface comically terrible laptops like the ACEMAGIC AX16PRO, NIMO N155, and the… uh… “Gaming Laptop, Laptop Computer, Computer Laptop.”
Matt Smith / Foundry
The ACEMAGIC, being sold by a company called SMART DEALS WAREHOUSE, is guilty of the first trick mentioned above with a very high listed price of $1,600 that’s discounted down to $500. But it pours salt on the wound with a second trick: it misrepresents itself as a gaming laptop. The listing claims it’s an “ACEMAGIC 2025 Gaming Laptop” and uses generic marketing images with attractive anime characters and race cars, with particular focus on the laptop’s AMD Radeon Vega 8 graphics.
As you probably already know, the Vega 8 is the integrated graphics solution included with many AMD Ryzen chips. Not only is it an iGPU, it’s not even the latest iGPU. The Ryzen 5700U on this laptop was launched back in 2021, so its equipped Radeon integrated graphics are a couple generations behind the latest hardware.
PC World’s review of the HP Envy x360, a laptop with the same Ryzen 5700U and Radeon Vega 8 graphics, found it achieved a 3Dmark Time Spy score of roughly 1,500. Laptops with the latest integrated graphics from Intel and AMD tend to score at least 3,000 in that test.
Can the ACEMAGIC laptop load and play a PC game? Sure. But the experience isn’t going to be any better than what you can get with any other budget or mid-range laptop with integrated graphics.
