Acer Nitro N50-610
A lightweight gaming PC in almost every way; Acer needs to go heavy if it’s goin going to mix with its UK opposition
SCORE PRICE £749 (£899 inc VAT) from currys.co.uk
What if. That is the question that haunts the Acer Nitro N50-610. This gaming PC comes tantalisingly close to being a bargain, but it’s handicapped by two crucial cost-cutting measures that it can’t quite overcome. If you have sufficient technical nous, it’s easy to rectify them both – but it will cost a little money.
The first and most obvious handbrake is 8GB of RAM. Supplied as two DIMMs, this leaves two empty sockets so you can add two more sticks yourself at around £20 each. Is doing so necessary? No, because Windows 10 runs happily with 8GB of RAM in general use, but it seems a shame to hold back a six-core Intel Core i5 processor that’s so capable at multitasking. Note that the tenthgeneration Core i5-10400F supports Hyper-Threading too.
Next, we’d address the SSD. While it’s positive to see a NVMe SSD fill the motherboard’s single M.2 slot, Acer saves pennies by choosing a low-cost and mediocre drive: sequential read scores of 1,460MB/sec are tolerable, but we expect far quicker writes than 830MB/sec from a NVMe SSD. Nor does it help to only have 256GB of storage; this is meant to be a gaming PC, in which case you want your main games to be installed on the solidstate drive. We all know how greedy modern games can be.
Again, an upgrade is relatively easy, although it will involve reinstalling Windows (and there’s no DVD writer here; if you want that, consider the Nitro N50-110 instead) and you’ll need to dispense with the supplied SSD. There’s also the small matter of spending around £70 on a fast 500GB SSD, or £150 on a 1TB unit.
While we’re considering upgrades, you may find that after you’ve installed a few heavyweight games that the 1TB hard disk is busting under the strain. Fortunately, a 3.5in bay lies in wait for a second drive, and due credit to Acer for lining up the SATA connector to make this easy.
The bad news? That’s your lot when it comes to upgrades, with the compact case containing an equally compact motherboard that provides zero available PCIe slots. If you want a more powerful graphics card in the future then you’ll probably need to upgrade the 500W power supply too. There’s good news, though, in that Acer uses a separate expansion slot in the motherboard to fit a Wi-Fi 6 Intel card (which also adds Bluetooth); wires trail across the top of the case to a single external antenna. Unlike most Wi-Fi cards, you can’t fiddle with two antennae to fine-tune your connection, but this proved solid in our tests.
Curiously, Acer includes a line of red LEDs inside the case too, but unless you open up the side – secured by a pair of Philips crosshead screws – you won’t see them. There’s no tempered glass here, just boring old metal. Note that while the photos make the Nitro’s front look metallic, with splashes of red for extra vigour, plastic is its medium of choice.
The plus side of Acer’s chassis is that it’s so compact and light: 6kg is nothing for a gaming PC. I half-expected to find a handle built into the top to make it easier to carry to LAN parties, but no such luck. It also offers plenty of 3D acceleration thanks
“Move away from games and flight simulators and you’re buying a fast PC, even with the supplied 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD”
to Nvidia’s GTX 1660 Super graphics chip. hip. This is at its strongest at 1080p, where here the Nitro proved capable of playing aying Hitman 2 at 108fps once we dropped ropped super sampling from 2x to
1x. . The far less demanding Dirt: Showdown howdown reached 134fps at 4K, while hile Metro: Last Light returned 51fps at 4K and 182fps at 1080p.
I wouldn’t recommend this PC for Microsoft icrosoft Flight Simulator as you’re reliant liant on the hard disk; it took an age to start, but it ran smoothly at Medium settings ttings at 1440p once we had lift off.
Move away from games and heavyweight eavyweight flight simulators and you’re ou’re buying a fast PC, even with the supplied upplied 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD. A score of 209 in our benchmarks underlines nderlines the fact that this machine can an crunch numbers when necessary, and nd in day-to-day usage the only hurdle urdle you’ll hit is when that 8GB of RAM AM becomes saturated. The Nitro scored a creditable 1,080 in Geekbench 5’s single-core test and 5,889 when all six cores were called into action.
One thing you’ll notice if you start to push the Nitro is fan noise. There’s no space for a big rear-mounted fan, so Acer uses a 9cm unit that – together with the fan keeping the CPU cool – results in a mid-range hum when it gets going. On a more positive note, this drops down to a barely noticeable whirr during less intensive times. You can also take more control of the fan using Acer’s NitroSense software, and I was pleased to see a general lack of “bloatware” here. Less experienced users will appreciate Acer’s Care Centre software, which offers a handy central location for customer support and basics such as backups and driver updates (even if the latter simply points to Windows 10’s built-in tool).
There are plenty of reasons to like the Acer Nitro N50-610. If you’re looking for a decent amount of power now with the option of upgrading, and appreciate that your upgrade options are limited to RAM and storage, it’s fine. I would, though, recommend speaking to British PC manufacturers first to see what they can provide for this price. They’ll probably offer a better warranty than one year of return-to-base cover too. 6-core 2.9GHz/4.3GHz Intel Core i5-10400F processor custom Acer motherboard 8GB 2,666MHz DDR4 RAM 6GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super graphics CPU air cooler 256GB Kingston M.2 PCIe SSD 1TB Western Digital hard disk Wi-Fi 6 Bluetooth 5 custom Acer chassis 500W PSU Windows 10 Home 175 x 386 x 392mm (WDH) 1yr RTB warranty part code DG.E1ZEK.002