I’ve always liked laptops for their portability and compactness, but my typical gaming laptop was associated primarily with heavy (over 4.5 kg) and very expensive models. Not an option that you can easily take with you on a trip so as not to part with your favorite games for a long time. But then Acer Nitro 5 arrived in our editorial office – budget, gaming and, as the list of characteristics assured, relatively light. Curiosity got the better of it, and I volunteered to check how this laptop would behave in the field – or rather, how convenient it is to write articles on it and (of course, after hours) run all the games.
Acer Nitro 5 exists in several versions – the configurations differ in the processor, discrete graphics card, SSD size and RAM. I got a variant with AMD Ryzen 5 3550 H, GTX 1050i graphics card, 512 GB SSD and 8 GB of RAM. It will be unusual for someone to see an AMD processor in a laptop, but let me remind you that in the desktop market, the company has done the impossible in recent years and is now creating some of the most productive gaming processors in the world. The Ryzen 5 3550 H is the company’s second generation mobile processor based on the Zen + architecture. It is 10% faster than its predecessor, which is enough to provide high-quality graphics in games and good performance in multimedia tasks.
Acer Nitro 5, back view
Acer Nitro 5 side view
Acer Nitro 5 side view
As for the lightness, the list of characteristics was right: when I unpacked the laptop, I was convinced that it was really light – with a diagonal of 15.6 ”it weighs a little more than 2 kg (the power supply adds about 400 grams more). It’s really easy to take such a person on a trip, but to move around the house with him (for example, because the neighbors suddenly began to drill a wall and urgently need to work in another room) – no problem at all. The charge of the Acer Nitro 5 consumes sparingly – it was enough for me for about 7 hours of alternating games, surfing the Internet, watching videos on Youtube and working in Word.
The design hits the heart right away – if, like me, you like devices in the high-tech military style more. Stingy lines, black plastic with delicate red inserts and a red backlit keyboard (you can turn it off through the proprietary utility). No overly smooth lines, no silver plastic, which is so much loved to put on laptops and which quickly loses all its gloss. Most importantly, it doesn’t have the clunky stuff that sometimes makes gaming laptops – it’s just a pretty, well-designed device.
The keys are large and pleasant to the touch, with easy movement. It is pleasant to type on such – you feel every press, but there is no loud clicking. Due to the fact that the keyboard also has a number pad, it took some time to get used to a slightly different finger placement compared to my work laptop, but when switching to a new keyboard, this is to be expected. Someone may get tired of the red backlight – in this model it cannot be replaced with other colors, but I just like everything.
The Acer Nitro 5 has a matte Full HD-screen (1920×1080) diagonal of 15.6 “, with an IPS-matrix and good contrast – because of the narrowed frames, it seems even larger. The dullness was a pleasant surprise for me – historically I do not like glossy screens in laptops, because they give too many unnecessary reflections.
In normal mode (web surfing, working with text editors) Acer Nitro 5 runs almost silently. But as soon as the turn of games comes, the fans, of course, become audible, although not so much that they drown out the sound. The pre-installed proprietary utility Acer NitroSense allows you to influence the noise level by changing the fan speed. At the same time, it offers to set the battery consumption mode (I left the “balanced” option marked by default), gives access to the Coolboost option disabled by default (improves cooling) and shows the system load.
The Acer Nitro 5 is best suited for multiplayer gaming. All popular online games run perfectly on it – from World of Tanks and War Thunder to PUBG and DotA 2. Even when the system is loaded to the maximum, the computer does not even think to overheat – the table under the upper right corner of the laptop only warmed up a little.
I, of course, could not resist, and tried not only PUBG, but also more demanding games in terms of system parameters, using the Gamepass Ultimate subscription. The GTX 1050 Ti, of course, imposes its own limitations, but both Control (no ray tracing, at medium settings) and Doom Eternal (at medium settings) ran stably, without stuttering. In short, you will not feel completely deprived of modern gaming (even though both games produced 28 FPS on average). The laptop copes well with cooling, and in this case – no overheating.
For the sake of interest, I tried to connect a tablet for drawing – Acer Nitro 5 and copes with this task well, allowing you to work calmly in Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint There are enough ports in the laptop to connect a tablet, a mouse, and an Xbox controller (one USB 2.0 port , 2 USB 3.1 ports, one USB Type-C port).
The Acer Nitro 5 is a great budget option for those who do not want to spend a lot of money on a computer (especially considering the wildly jumped prices for video cards), appreciate portability and want a machine suitable for both work and play. The most impressive thing about it is the cooling, but the nice looking design is also a nice bonus.
