A tech journalist since the TRS-80 and Apple II days, Grevstad specializes in lightweight laptops, mobile workstations, and productivity software. While the 8GB of RAM is only adequate in terms of multitasking, you can upgrade the RAM all the way up to 32GB. The hexa-core Ryzen 5 4000-series CPU should tear through CPU-intensive activities such as video encoding or database crunching. ACER NITRO 5 – BUDGET GAMING LAPTOP. That said, Acer (as it has with previous models) has done its best to give the Nitro 5’s shell a slim, tapered appearance. It's also an excellent choice as a daily driver, with remarkable battery life. After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. I am using this Acer Nitro 5 from 8th of October 2019. Although the more GPU-intensive the game, the smaller the difference. Rated for 300 nits (or candelas) of brightness, the Nitro 5’s 15.6-inch display uses IPS (in-plane switching) technology to boost viewing angles. We took a look at the $830 Nitro 5, which features an Intel Core i5-9300H clocked at 2.4GHz, an Nvidia GTX 1650, 8GB of DDR4 RAM, a 1TB hard drive, and a 128GB SSD boot drive. © 1996-2020 Ziff Davis, LLC. Customer Reviews: Acer Nitro 5 17.3" Gaming Laptop Intel Core i5 8GB Memory NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti 512GB SSD Obsidian Black AN517-52-52T3 - Best Buy. You can also upgrade the Nitro 5’s internal storage using the available PCIe slot or the empty 2.5-inch HDD drive bay. White backgrounds are just a touch off-white, but colors, while they don't pop, are reasonably vivid and well saturated. Otherwise, though, this is an impressive value—the keyboard is comfortable, the screen isn't dazzling but is certainly acceptable, and the laptop delivers true 60fps gaming if you dial back the image settings a little bit. The smaller SSD is the biggest practical cut for most folks; it will make it tough to install many games. You may want to shift to the second-best settings depending on the game, but this is an admirable performance for an under-$700 gaming rig, one that makes some $1,000 machines (themselves budget models, as gaming laptops go) look overpriced. All right, so I think it’s time to wrap up this review. MacBook Pro vs. MacBook Air: Which 13-Inch Apple Laptop Is Best for 2020? The Acer Nitro 5 is an inexpensive gaming laptop that promises a good gaming experience even at full HD resolution, but it cuts some corners on build quality and everyday computing performance. There are small but dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys above the numeric keypad; the Delete key isn't in its usual corner position but sandwiched between PrtSc and Home. It is the cheaper of the bunch - the Nitro 5 (AN515-54). Sign up for What's New Now to get our top stories delivered to your inbox every morning. For starters, the Nitro 5’s hinge is now black rather than maroon, which means that the shell is now almost entirely black, aside from the bright-red cooling vents in the rear. On average, the Acer took a second or two longer to perform each Photoshop operation, joining the GL65 at the back of the pack. Overall, Acer says that the new Nitro 5 has an 80 percent screen-to-body ratio. We’ll delve into the Nitro 5’s real-world performance in a bit. We present two Superposition results, run at the 720p Low and 1080p High presets and reported in frames per second (fps), indicating how smooth the scene looks in motion. not the fastest i7 implementation, and high CPU temperatures in games on this version. That said, when I did use the trackpad for everyday PC chores, I found that it did the job and avoided false inputs. Unsurprisingly, you’ll do much better using headphones or external speakers, and yes, DTS:X Ultra audio sounds pretty good when piped through a pair of decent gaming cans. The Nitro 5's red-backlit keyboard boasts a generous 1.6mm of travel distance, along with outlined W, A, S,D, and arrow keys. The least expensive Nitro 5 variant packs in a quad-core Core i5-9300H processor, a GTX 1650 graphics card, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB solid-state drive, while the priciest system comes with a hexa-core Core i7-9750H CPU, an RTX 2060 GPU, 16GB of RAM, and a roomier 512GB SSD. Big, bulky and heavy: That’s pretty much the name of the game when it comes to gaming laptops, and the Nitro 5 is no exception. Graphics are powered by a 4GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650, so the Acer naturally falls short of gaming laptops with the GTX 1660 Ti. This one has AMD's new Ryzen 5 4600H—a six-core chip that's priced like an Intel Core i5 but slugs it out with Core i7 CPUs—and approaches 60fps in top titles. The Acer Nitro 5 is an inexpensive gaming laptop that promises a good gaming experience even at full HD resolution, but it cuts some corners on build quality and everyday computing performance. Save. Below you can compare the scores of Acer Nitro 5 (AN515-55) with the default settings (left), and with the “Gaming and Web design” profile (right). In contrast to its brother, it is entirely made out of plastic and has the red detail on the hinge assembly - typically for a Nitro 5 laptop. Read helpful reviews … The Nitro 5s are Acer’s entry-level gaming notebooks, … I can’t really review the laptop itself since it was defective from the start. I did, however, note a little screen bleed near the top of the display on my review unit, below and slightly to the right of the webcam. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. While this year’s Nitro 5 looks more or less the same as earlier iterations, there are a couple of key differences. One complaint is that the volume buttons share space with the up and down arrow keys, which means you’ll need to hold the Function key to adjust the sound. A media card reader would have been a nice touch, but its absence on a gaming laptop like the Nitro 5 isn’t a deal-breaker. I compared the Nitro 5's performance to that of four other gaming laptops. We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. The Nitro 5 weighs in at 5.51 pounds and is just more than an inch thick, with a chassis made primarily from black plastic. The Good The Acer Nitro 5 is an understated gaming laptop that's well configured for the money. It's clear from these games' charts which three laptops are using the GeForce GTX 1650, and which two are using the stepped-up Radeon RX 5500M and 5600M GPUs. For financially challenged gamers, it doesn't get any better than this. Acer's Nitro 5 gaming laptop says you can have a modest budget of $800 or less and get a decent amount of horsepower for playing AAA games. It has 8GB RAM of DDR4 memory and 1TB of hard disk storage. Acer says the webcam offers SHDR (super high dynamic range) imaging, and I’ll take their word for it, but I didn’t find the webcam’s images to be particularly vivid. In November 2018, we reviewed an under-$700, AMD Ryzen 5-powered version of Acer's 15.6-inch Nitro 5 budget gaming laptop. PCMag Digital Group. The more expensive rigs bested the Nitro 5 in most benchmarks, but the Acer overall proved to be such a good gamer that you'll quickly run out of room on its skimpy SSD. It also provides access to the audio presets and to Nvidia's GeForce Experience utility. Learn more about PCWorld's Digital Editions, Evidence of screen bleed in the full-HD display. I’ve used this laptop … I’m hoping that is the only issue with the machine as most reviews I’ve read about the Nitro 5 are positive. Well, the 2018 rig had a quad-core Ryzen 5 2500U processor and barely managed 30 frames per second (fps) in 1080p gaming. You can manually switch the fans to a not-too-noisy max mode or click a CoolBoost button to increase fan speed in auto mode. There’s also an $880 version that’s almost identical, except it trades the dual-drive storage solution for a single 500GB SSD. We saw some evidence of screen bleed on the Nitro 5's 15.6-inch display, particularly near the top of the panel. Less garish than many rivals, the Nitro is clad in black plastic with a red rear panel. Again, the eight-core Ryzen 7's prevailed, but the Nitro's six-core Ryzen 5 proved more than capable, dominating the Core i5 in the MSI GL65. Medium-thin bezels surround the full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) screen, which pushes average brightness with good contrast. At 0.94 by 14.3 by 10 inches and 5.5 pounds, the Nitro 5 is averagely hefty for a 15.6-inch gaming laptop; it's an almost exact match for the Dell G5 15 SE. But unscrewing the bottom panel reveals welcome room for expansion: a second M.2 slot for another SSD, plus a 2.5-inch drive bay for up to a 2TB hard drive. The CPU inside this laptop is Intel Core i5-8300H processor. Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing benchmark, in which we put a stopwatch on systems as they transcode a brief movie from 4K resolution down to 1080p. It’s not quitethe most expensive Nitro 5, but it’s close. The Bravo 15 and G5 15 SE won again—as you'd expect, since they cost $330 and $530 more respectively—but the Nitro 5 performed ably in these gaming simulations. The Nitro 5 has neither a face recognition webcam nor a fingerprint reader to let you skip passwords with Windows Hello. The all-plastic enclosure comprises matte and … A lightning … Gaming-wise, The Acer Nitro 5 was generally faster than the Gateway. The buttonless touchpad taps and glides smoothly and clicks stiffly. The next figure shows how well the display is able to reproduce really dark parts of an image, which is essential when watching movies or playing games in low ambient light. Also worth noting are the highlighted WASD keys, while a highlighted hotkey launches the NitroSense thermal management app that we mentioned earlier. Best Buy. This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. While both the Nitro 5 and Bravo 15 benefit from AMD's new "Renoir" CPU architecture, there's only so much Acer can do with a $330 lower price. More impressive is the Nitro 5’s networking features, including a gigabit ethernet port and cutting-edge Wi-Fi 6, which means you’ll be able to wring every last bit of throughput out of the latest gaming routers. You can see their (mostly superior) specs in the table below. Tipping the scale at 4.7 pounds (or 5.7 pounds if you include the 135-watt power adapter), the inch-thick, 15.6-inch Nitro 5 feels as hefty as it sounds. The downfiring stereo speakers on the Nitro 5 are augmented by object-based DTS:X Ultra audio, and the results are, well, OK. It's short on storage, but the latest edition of Acer's Nitro 5 economy gaming laptop is otherwise the best yet, delivering lively 1080p gameplay for less than $700. This review is part of our ongoing roundup of the best laptops. Apple MacBook Pro vs. Microsoft Surface Laptop 3: Which 13-Inch Premium Laptop Is Tops? Besides packing a six-core Ryzen 5 versus an eight-core Ryzen 7, the Nitro 5 has 8GB of memory versus 16GB and a 256GB rather than 512GB NVMe solid-state drive. Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider are both modern AAA titles with built-in benchmark routines. Share. We run these tests at 1080p resolution using both moderate and maximum graphics-quality presets—Normal and Ultra for Far Cry 5 under DirectX 11, Medium and Very High for Rise of the Tomb Raider under DirectX 12. 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