Acer Nitro N50
Solid, all-round PC demonstrates the joy of specs
Acer’s Nitro PC range, available in the UK from Currys and PC World, generally sits below its Predator gaming PCS (see our review, Issue 544), but the N50-100 DG.E0REK.006 that we were sent for testing came with the highest available specification, making it a very capable all-round mini-tower. The eight- core AMD Ryzen 2700 processor is paired with a good mid-range Geforce GTX 1060 graphics card, carrying 6GB of its own memory, and Windows 10 is installed on a 256GB SSD that’s complemented by another terabyte of hard-drive space.
Don’t confuse the 2700 chip with the 2700X, although both can be overclocked. The 2700 is a little slower all round – about 20 per cent in our tests, and further behind when multitasking. It’s still pretty quick, and the GTX 1060 will satisfy all but the most demandingng ggamers as well as assisting compatible creative programsams (video or photo editing, for example). However, we saw a couple of results that, for unexplained reasons, were slower than we’ve previously seen from this card.
Despite being fitted in a fast M.2 slot,lot, the SSD only marginally exceeded SATA TA speeds in our tests, hitting 655 megabytesabytes per second read and 575 write speeds. . That’s still at least four times faster thanan a traditional hard drive, and enough to make loading and switching between programs feel snappy.
There are plenty of USB ports, includingding a Type-c, though nothing extra fast, and three Displayport outputs as well as HDMI and DVI. The front panel has both an SD card reader and a DVD writer, and 802.11ac Wi-fi is included, although this takes up a second M.2 slot that you might prefer to use later for another SSD. Internal expansion is limited, but you could add one more 2.5 or 3.5in SATA drive, and the RAM slots will take up to 64GB of memory.
This all adds up to a very decent PC, but in a price bracket that’s not lacking competition, and as usual it’s hard for a big brand like Acer to compete on value with local system builders. Palicomp’s Intel i5 Cosmos, which we tested with an intel i5-8600k processor (see Issue 532), now comes with an i5-9600k chip, overclocked to 4.8GHZ. Despite having only six cores handling one thread each, versus the Ryzen 7 2700’s eight cores and 16 threads, it’s likely to deliver even higher performance in most tasks. The Cosmos also has a superior GTX 1070 GPU and twice the hard-drive space. And it costs £100 less, but Wi-fi and a DVD writer are optional extras.
It’s worth looking at the other configurations in the N50 range, which are all supplied in the same case. Just £600 gets you a quad-core i3-8100 and a basic GTX 1050 graphics card (see www. snipca.com/30399), but with only 4GB of memory and a 1TB hard drive mildly accelerated by a 16GB Intel Optane cache, this is likely to feel underpowered for Windows 10. The £749 six-core i5-8400 option (see www.snipca.com/30398), with a 4GB GTX 1050 Ti and a 128GB SSD as well as the 1TB hard drive, looks like good value, although it was out of stock at the time of writing. With a roughly comparable Ryzen 5 2500X processor, only GTX 1050 graphics but a 256GB SSD, the price rises slightly to £769 ( www. snipca.com/30402).
A decent do-it-all PC with impressive specifications