Acer Nitro 5

Our Verdict

Acer’s Nitro 5 doesn’t have much longevity with its entry-level hardware, but it’s a great option for budget-minded buyers who enjoy light gaming & wouldn’t mind upgrading in a few years.

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IDG / Hayden Dingman

That said, this is unmistakably a gaming laptop—same as the Nitro 7 we reviewed a few months back. It’s aggressive, especially the vents on the rear, though at leastthosearen’t red this time. I also find the pentagonal lid shape questionable. It doesn’t really do much khổng lồ slim the Nitro 5’s profile, nor is it especially interesting.

But in most respects the Nitro 5 is identical khổng lồ the Nitro 7, & I liked the Nitro 7. The Nitro 5 even features, if not thesamekeyboard as the Nitro 7, then one I enjoyed equally as much. As I said when reviewing the Nitro 7:


“In most ways it’s just your typical chiclet slab, but there’s a generous amount of travel to each keystroke and a crisp, tactile click that makes it a joy to lớn type on.”

Like the Nitro 7, I’ve found myself using the Nitro 5 to write articles more often than I expected. It feels great—better than keyboards I’ve used on laptops two or three times the price. I still wish the touchpad had discrete mouse buttons, as that’s a pet peeve of mine on gaming laptops, but that feature punches well above the Nitro 5’s price point.

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IDG / Hayden Dingman

The pattern repeated in the HandBrake test, where we re-encode a 30GB MKV file down lớn the apk Tablet standard. The Nitro 7 wasn’t exactly speedy, but still managed to lớn finish the job almost ten minutes faster than the Nitro 5’s poor bộ vi xử lý core i5 và its 44-minute encode. That said, the 2019 Nitro 5 did manage to improve upon its predecessor’s time (52 minutes) by almost ten minutes, so it’s not all bad news. You’re getting a lot more bang for your buck this year than last year.

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IDG / Hayden Dingman

…as well as in our real-world gaming benchmarks,Middle-earth: Shadow of MordorandRise of the Tomb Raider. These are unimpressive results. The fact that the GTX 1650 struggles khổng lồ maintain a steady 60 frames per second at 1080p resolution inRise of the Tomb Raider—a four-year-old game—isn’t great. There’s not a ton of runway for the Nitro 5, especially as we draw near the next console generation.

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IDG / Hayden Dingman

But it’s really affordable. I think that’s the catch here. The Nitro 7 ran with the same GTX 1650 & cost hundreds of dollars more, which is almost impossible lớn justify. The Nitro 5’s discount price at least gives it a shot at relevance. Not that long ago, its about-$800 price wouldn’t even have netted a proper graphics card. That in mind, the price here is pretty reasonable.


There’s been one last major improvement: battery life. We knocked 2018’s Nitro 5 for its 291-minute runtime, và Acer apparently took the criticism to lớn heart. For 2019 the battery’s been upgraded from a measly 48Whr lớn a more resilient 59Whr, with the over result that this year’s model lasts more than two hours longer.

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IDG / Hayden Dingman

Sure, that won’t translate directly into two more hours of peak-performance gaming—we vày our rundown thử nghiệm with looped video, which is considerably less intensive. Still, for a gaming laptop? Seven hours of battery under our kiểm tra conditions is almost unheard of.

Bottom line

Honestly the only aspect of the Nitro 5 that gives me pause is longevity. Look at thatRise of the Tomb Raiderbenchmark again: The GTX 1650 struggles with a four-year-old game. You’re definitely not going to lớn max out most of 2019’s biggest releases, & it’s only going to lớn get worse from here.

On the other hand, it’s about $800. Would I recommend saving up an extra $150 lớn $200 for Acer’s beefier Predator Helios 300, reviewed in July? Yes, absolutely. But if you simply can’t, or if you plan to buy a cheaper máy tính and upgrade more often, then the Nitro 5 is a respectable entry-level machine. The build quality far surpasses what I’d expect from a máy tính xách tay this cheap, và the internals are “good enough,” for what that’s worth.