Acer Nitro 5
Acer’s budget range of gaming laptops gets a new component injection.
We’ve loved the last couple of Nitro devices from Acer and it looks like the 2021 Nitro 5 is on track to deliver the same bang-for-buck value as its predecessors. Part of the reason these budget gaming rigs can afford to be such good value is that they harness the power of 10th generation Intel H processors, which were almost end-of-life when the first 2021 Nitro 5s hit shelves locally. Regardless of their age the i5-10300H or the i7-10750H are powerful mobile CPUs that’ll give you enough under the hood to push through demanding workloads, creative projects and gaming.
In addition to the Intel arrangements, the Nitro 5 also has AMD models that range all the way up to a Ryzen 9 5900HX with an Nvidia RTX 3080 and 32GB of RAM for $3,999, which is pretty reasonable considering the power and the fact that it’s currently widely available. There were AMD Ryzen 7, 16GB, RTX 3070 models made too, but good luck finding one in stock anywhere. We tested an i7, 16GB, RTX 3060 model that you can get for $2,199 from Harvey Norman, which definitely hits a sweet spot in terms of price and performance, but we’d opt for the similarly priced R7 AMD model from Wireless 1 if we had the choice. This rig sports a 15.6-inch 144Hz 1080p monitor for high paced online games and fast shooters, but it’s actually quite bright and vibrant for a matte display. You’ll get different screens for different models, so we can’t really speak for the whole range and Acer has opted to sell different devices through different vendors so keep an eye on the specs table.
Main processing performance was where we’d expect from the 10th Gen i7 CPU which is fine for demanding work tasks, but is still between 20 and 35 percent behind the Ryzen 7 5800H. The Nvidia RTX 3060 performs nicely though, beating a 2060 (Max-Q) by about 25 per cent and trails behind the 3070 by about the same margin. You can expect to demolish most creative tasks and you’ll get 60fps on many modern shooters at Ultra 1080p and over 100fps on anything less demanding.
The Nitro 5 isn’t the slimmest gaming laptop you can get, but even budget devices like this are under 2.5cm thick and weigh just 2.3kg, which makes them portable. The keyboard is nice to type on and the trackpad is quite usable. Someone definitely made an oversight with the rear powerport, which can be difficult to plug in, and the screen hinge doesn’t offer consistent resistance so it can slam shut, but on the whole it’s fine for a budget rig.
Battery life was pretty good for a gaming laptop lasting four hours and 26 minutes in PCMark 10 battery benchmarks and 6 hours and 22 minutes in 1080p movie playback. It’s still a long way off the five hours and 59 minutes and eight hours an 18 minutes respective lifespans you get on an Asus TUF gaming running a Ryzen 7 5800H and a RTX 3070, but laptop vendors seem to still be keeping red CPU configuration runs to a minimum, so we can’t imagine you’ll actually be able to buy an AMD laptop anytime soon.
If you can’t get an AMD model the i7 Acer Nitro 5 is a good-value alternative 1080p gaming laptop.