In November 2018, we reviewed an under-$700, AMD Ryzen 5-powered version of Acer's 15.6-inch Nitro 5 budget gaming laptop. Today, we're doing it again. What's changed, aside from the new Nitro being $30 cheaper [$669.99 at Best Buy for our test model]? Well, the 2018 rig had a quad-core Ryzen 5 2500U processor and barely managed 30 frames per second [fps] in 1080p gaming. 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. It makes compromises for its low price, but if you can't afford our $999 Editors' Choice, the MSI Bravo 15, you will find it a terrific value.
Undercutting the Under-$1,000 Set
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. 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. The smaller SSD is the biggest practical cut for most folks; it will make it tough to install many games. 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. There's a drive cable in the box.
Graphics are powered by a 4GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650, so the Acer naturally falls short of gaming laptops with the GTX 1660 Ti. Since you won't see frame rates much in excess of 60fps, the IPS screen sticks to the generic 60Hz refresh rate instead of supplying a 120Hz or faster panel.
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. It's not ponderous, but you can find lighter competitors—the MSI GL65 9SC is 5.1 pounds, for instance.
Less garish than many rivals, the Nitro is clad in black plastic with a red rear panel. Despite my complaints in past reviews of the system, the red-on-black keyboard lettering remains so low in contrast as to be illegible—unless you're in direct sunlight or a pitch-black room with the red keyboard backlight on full, you'll need to be a touch typist and can only guess at the function key shortcuts.
On the laptop's left flank, you'll find two USB 3.2 Type-A ports, a Killer Ethernet port, an audio jack, and a security lock slot. Another Type-A port joins a USB-C 3.2 port and HDMI video output on the right. The AC adapter plugs in at the rear. Acer forgot an SD card slot. Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth handle wireless communications. [The Wi-Fi 6 support is a nice surprise in a budget machine like this one.]
The Nitro 5 has neither a face recognition webcam nor a fingerprint reader to let you skip passwords with Windows Hello. The 720p webcam is a typical laptop economy model that captures soft-focus, noisy shots. Audio doesn't get very loud—it'll fill a small room—but isn't bad, short on bass but clear and mellow. DTS:X Ultra software lets you choose among music, movie, voice, strategy, RPG, and shooter presets or play with an equalizer.
Medium-thin bezels surround the full HD [1,920-by-1,080-pixel] screen, which pushes average brightness with good contrast. Fine details are sharp and not pixelated. White backgrounds are just a touch off-white, but colors, while they don't pop, are reasonably vivid and well saturated.
The keyboard has a shallow, snappy typing feel; it's quiet and comfortable. 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. The buttonless touchpad taps and glides smoothly and clicks stiffly.
A special key near the keypad launches a NitroSense utility, which displays CPU and GPU temperature, usage, and fan speed and the current power plan. It also provides access to the audio presets and to Nvidia's GeForce Experience utility. 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.
Other software on the Windows 10 Home system tilts toward bloatware, with Dropbox, Norton Security Ultra, and ExpressVPN trials and game ads in the notification tab. An Acer Care Center utility centralizes tuneup and update functions.
I compared the Nitro 5's performance to that of four other gaming laptops. All are among the more affordable we've tested lately, but it's important to note that only the MSI GL65 9SC is down in the Acer's price range: The MSI Bravo 15 and Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3i are about $1,000 each, while the Dell G5 15 SE is in the $1,200 ballpark. You can see their [mostly superior] specs in the table below.
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's also an excellent choice as a daily driver, with remarkable battery life. [See how we test laptops.]
Productivity and Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL [formerly Futuremark]. The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system's boot drive. Both yield a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.
Though it trailed the Ryzen 7 systems, the Nitro 5 easily cleared the 4,000-point mark that we consider a winning score in PCMark 10. The quintet's speedy SSDs made mincemeat of PCMark 8's storage test.
Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
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, too, is a tough test for multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs; lower times are better.
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.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. 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. We time each operation and add up the total [lower times are better]. The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters.
On average, the Acer took a second or two longer to perform each Photoshop operation, joining the GL65 at the back of the pack.
Graphics Tests
3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and lets high-end PCs and gaming rigs strut their stuff.
Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene, this one rendered in the eponymous Unigine engine for a second opinion on the machine's graphical prowess. 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. For lower-end systems, maintaining at least 30fps is the realistic target, while more powerful computers should ideally attain at least 60fps at the test resolution.
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.
Real-World Gaming Tests
The synthetic tests above are helpful for measuring general 3D aptitude, but it's hard to beat full retail video games for judging gaming performance. Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider are both modern AAA titles with built-in benchmark routines. 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.
The Acer flirted with the magic 60fps mark at the games' finest quality settings. 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.
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.
Battery Rundown Test
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. [We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop into airplane mode.] In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the Blender Foundation short film Tears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system quits.
The Nitro 5 more than doubled the next best systems' runtime. You won't see anywhere near 15 hours in actual gaming, but some unplugged gaming—along with a full day's productivity or streaming entertainment—is eminently possible.
The Nitro 5 doesn't steal our budget gaming Editors' Choice from the recently anointed MSI Bravo 15 because it's hard to endorse a system with only 256GB of standard storage, though as mentioned the Acer's available M.2 slot and 2.5-inch bay are big pluses.
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. It also saves you enough cash to buy four or five top games [or rather, four games and a secondary SSD to buy, install yourself, and store them on]. For financially challenged gamers, it doesn't get any better than this.
See It
$724.83 at Amazon
MSRP $669.99
Pros
Impressive CPU and 1080p gaming performance for the money
Cons
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.
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