Acer Nitro 5 AN515-44
A drab display and plasticky finish, but it packs a punch, a 144Hz panel and plenty of upgrade potential
PRICE £667 (£800 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/321acer
T he Acer Nitro 5 series of gaming laptops is available in a wide variety of models with both Intel and AMD chips, starting at £749 inc VAT. I’ve tested the AN51544 version (NH.Q9HEK.002) with a Ryzen 5 4600H CPU and GeForce GTX 1650 Ti graphics, which at the time of going to press was £800 from Amazon as part of a bundle with a gaming headset, mouse and mouse mat.
The challenge for buyers is that bundles such as this can disappear on Amazon, and you can’t buy this exact model from Acer’s website. You can buy a version (without accessories) with a more powerful Ryzen 7 4800H processor for £999, or with a Ryzen 5 4600H and lesser GTX 1650 GPU for £749, but be warned: navigating the intricacies of the Acer laptop range is fraught with difficulty, so make sure you avoid any base models with a 60Hz panel rather than the 144Hz display here. In return, you’ll be rewarded with a laptop that’s great value, if a little rudimentary when it comes to look and feel.
Indeed, two words spring to mind when you first lay eyes and hands on the Nitro 5: “black” and “plastic”. On the plus side, it’s reasonably solid; on the negatives, just because it’s plastic doesn’t mean it’s light. At 363 x 255 x 23.9mm and 2.4kg, the Nitro 5 has the heft of fellow 15.6in laptops of old.
The port selection is similarly par for the course. On the left, you’ll find a Kensington lock, RJ-45, two USB-A 3 ports and a 3.5mm audio jack. On the right, there’s a third USB-A 3 port, a data-only USB-C 3.1 connector plus an HDMI 2 video output. The only rear-mounted inclusion is for the DC-in power connector. Once you remove
11 Philips screws and whip the base panel off, you can also access the battery, wireless card, two DDR4 SODIMM slots, two M.2 2280 slots and a 2.5in SATA3 storage bay. That’s a huge range of upgrade opportunities. The memory slot is especially valuable as the Nitro 5 only ships with 8GB of single-channel RAM.
The keyboard is solid, quiet and precise – although some might bemoan the absence of customisable RGB backlighting in favour of a fixed red LED. Also note the presence of a numeric keypad and a bold red border around the vital WASD keys. Acer puts a thick border around the cursor keys too, which double as screen brightness and volume controls, and the NitroSense control panel launcher. All nice touches that I quickly came to appreciate.
NitroSense is Acer’s bespok bespoke gaming performance and fan control panel. It’s not as comprehensive as the comparable systems on Asus and HP machines but, being simpler, it’s easier to master. If all you want is an easy way to make your notebook run ru fast and cool when requir required, d NitroSense does just that that.
The Nitro 5’s display is a 15.6in IPS unit with a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080, an anti-glare finish and a maximum refresh rate of 144Hz. Frankly, it’s not all that good. The panel is bright enough at 283cd/m2, but sRGB coverage of 59% is dismal, as is the average Delta E of 5.69. Inaccurate colours aren’t much of an issue when gaming – a strong 1,303:1 contrast ratio is arguably more important – but it makes for a poor viewing experience when admiring photos or watching films. It’s this laptop’s biggest weakness. Speaker quality isn’t great, either. These fire out of the side and bottom of the base rather than up and out of the keyboard deck, which is never an ideal acoustic solution, but I still expected better than the Nitro delivered. There’s little bass and the volume is merely adequate. That’s doubly unfortunate as the Nitro 5 has one of the loudest fans I’ve heard on a gaming laptop. Compensation for this noise comes from the power within, with the sixcore Ryzen 4600H in this test model producing an overall score of 200. The GTX series GPU in the Nitro doesn’t support ray tracing like the RTX card in the Asus machine on p56, but then the Asus costs significantly more.
For the money, the Nitro is a great gaming choice. It averaged a fine 59fps in our Hitman 2 test (with 1x super sampling) and 112fps in Wolfenstein: Youngblood. Doom hovered between 90fps and 100fps, even when hell was quite literally breaking loose.
And if you intend to game on the move, you’ll be pleased that the 57Wh battery lasted for 9hrs 48mins in our (albeit lightweight) video-rundown test. The h final benchmark to note: our review w machine’s 512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe Me SSD proved fleet of foot, with ith average read and write speeds peeds of 2,154MB/sec and 1,712MB/sec respectively.
The combination of a powerful AMD Ryzen
CPU and a decent
Nvidia GPU in a laptop costing osting less than £1,000 was always ways going to be a good idea and d the he upgrade options are comprehensive. hensive. It’s a shame that the screen lets the side down, and the sound system could be better, but gamers will find this a great purchase for £800.
SPECIFICATIONS
Six-core 3GHz (4GHz boost) AMD Ryzen 54600H processor 8GB DDR4 RAM 4GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Ti graphics 15.6in 144Hz non-touch IPS display, 1,920 x 1,080 resolution 512GB M.2 PCIe SSD 720p webcam 2x2 Wi-Fi 6 Bluetooth 5 USB-C 3.1 (data only) 3 x USB-A 3 HDMI Gigabit Ethernet port 3.5mm jack 57Wh battery Windows 10 Home 363 x 255 x 23.9mm (WDH) 2.4kg 1yr limited warranty model number NH.Q9BEK.004
“Doom at native resolution constantly hovered between 90fps and 100fps, even when hell was quite literally breaking loose”