Killer £999 gaming laptop
RTX 30 power for a ridiculous price
SCORE
PRICE £833 (£1,000 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/323nitro
I t was bound to happen: a an
AAA game would launch that demands ray tracing capabilities, and so it came to pass with Metro Exodus Enhanced
Edition. With a good chance that other games will follow the same route, Acer has come to the rescue of impecunious gamers with the Nitro 5 AN515-45.
This latest iteration of the Nitro 5 gaming laptop family comes with an Nvidia RTX 30-series GPU and remarkably its lowest-priced model costs £950. That’s with a Ryzen 5 5600H and RTX 3060 graphics, but for a mere £50 more you can upgrade the CPU to a Ryzen 7 5800H – and that’s exactly what I test here. Both models come with 8GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD and a 15.6i 15.6in, 144Hz H Full HD screen.
Physically, th the Nitro 5 is the same big, black black, plastic affair we reviewed two months ago
( see issue 321, p58). It’s a glossy case that loves fingerprints, but over overall it feels well screwed together. Talking of screws, if you remove 11 of them from the underside of the laptop, you can take the base panel off to access the Wi-Fi 6/Bluetooth 5 card, two RAM sockets, two M.2 storage slots and a 2.5in SATA 3 storage bay. Clearly, there’s plenty of room for future upgrades.
Weighing 2.3kg and measuring
363 x 255 x 23.9mm, the Nitro 5 isn’t exactly compact or light. The good news is that it’s packed with ports, with one USB-A 3.1, two USB-A 3 and one USB-C 3.1 data port (it doesn’t support power delivery or monitors). You’ll also find a Gigabit Ethernet socket, an HDMI 2 output and a 3.5mm audio jack.
The robust keyboard should stand up to frantic prodding, but note that this £1,000 version of the Nitro 5 only has a single-colour backlight. Despite a sticker boasting “DTS: X Ultra” and “immersive gaming” audio, the pair of speakers are pretty humdrum: an extra dollop of bass would be more than welcome. You may want to i invest ti in a decent pair of external nal speakers or a gaming headset. The 720p webcam is d decent nt enough, but it doesn’t esn’t support Windows ndows Hello biometric security, and nor is there a fingerprint ngerprint
scanner. r. This his “humdrum” theme h extends to the 15.6in matte IPS display. A maximum brightness of 257cd/m² and sRGB gamut volume of 61% are both on the low side, while the screen’s average Delta E was badly adrift at 6.97. It at least has a maximum refresh of 144Hz, which I’d argue is more important in a gaming laptop than accurate colours.
But most important of all: speed. The potent combo of an eight-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 5800H and Nvidia RTX 3060 GPU is astounding for the price, and – to put it bluntly – this thing goes like the clappers. It returned very nearly th the highest score we’ve seen from a laptop in the PC P Pro benchmarks, with a tota total of
323. Only Asus’ far more expensive ROG systems ems have done better, and even then we’re talking a few points. In n terms of performance per pound, d, the Nitro 5 is simply off the chart. .
The GTX TX 3060 is a fine performer f er in games, even if it’s a l long way from the output offered by its bigger ger brothers, the RTX 3070 and 3080. The Nitro 5
averaged 115fps in Wolfenstein: Youngblood ood with ray tracing and DLSS enabled, nabled, compared to 187fps f s for the RTX 3080-toting Asus s Zephyrus S17 ( see p56). Switch witch off DLSS but keep ray tracing on and the frame rate dips to a still playable 89fps. What do these scores tell us? That while the RTX 3060 inevitably lacks the grunt of the RTX 3080, it can still render ray-traced visuals and shaders well above 60fps at 1080p, with no AI upscaling required.
The more demanding Hitman 2 benchmark reached an average frame rate of 47fps, but this jumped to 99fps as soon as I dialled down the game’s supersampling setting from two to one. Doom, on the other hand, hit a steady 144fps at the highest settings. All that raw power dramatically takes its toll on this laptop’s unplugged stamina, which is further exacerbated by its small 58Wh battery. Expect two hours of gaming at most. In our lightweight video-rundown test, the Nitro lasted for only 6hrs 30mins before running out of juice. You will need to carry the weighty power supply on your travels. One positive note, however, is that even at maximum spin, the laptop’s fans aren’t loud.
The screen is weak and its battery life is verging on the dismal, but other than that it’s hard to fault the Nitro 5. It redefines the gaming performance you can expect for £1,000. Combine that with the plethora of upgrade options and it’s a surefire success.
SPECIFICATIONS
8-core 3.2GHz (4.4GHz boost) AMD Ryzen 7 5800H processor 8GB DDR4 RAM 6GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 graphics 15.6in 144Hz non-touch IPS display, 1,920 x 1,080 0 resolution 512GB M.2 PCIe SSD SS 720p webcam 2x2 Wi-Fi 6 Bluetooth ooth 5 USB-C 3.1 (data only) USB-A B-A 3.1 2 x USB-A 3 HDMI Gigabit bit Ethernet port 3.5mm jack 58Wh Wh battery Windows 10 Pro 363 x 255 x 23.9mm (WDH) 2.3kg 1yr limited mited warranty model number ber NH.QBCEK.001
“It returned very nearly the highest score we’ve seen from a laptop in the
PC Pro benchmarks, with a total of 323”