The Acer Nitro 5 is a mid-range contender for the list of the best gaming laptops on the market at the moment. In particular, it brings with it ray tracing capabilities (a key measure of modern graphics power) to a more-affordable-than-normal price point.
To reach that price point, Acer has had to make some compromises here, but we’ll explain them all to you in our comprehensive Nitro 5 review. By the time you’ve finished reading, you should be able to work out whether or not this is the right gaming laptop for you.
From battery life to benchmark scores, we’ll explain everything you need to know about the Acer Nitro 5. When you’ve finished reading up on this laptop, you might want to check out our guides to the best gaming mice and best gaming keyboards available right now.
Acer Nitro 5 brings with it quite a chunky, angular design – if you like black plastic with distinctive edges, then this could be the gaming laptop for you.You can get the Acer Nitro 5 in several configurations.
Our review unit came fitted with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H processor, 16GB of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPU and 1TB of internal storage. More powerful CPUs and GPUs are available with this laptop, but the model we had strikes a good balance between price and performance: the laptop managed to achieve a 3DMark Time Spy score of 7,369 when we ran the benchmark, between the averages for a standard gaming laptop (5,730) and a gaming PC (9,216).
At a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080, we were getting frame rates of 40-60 frames per second on Red Dead Redemption 2 at medium (“balanced”) graphics quality, 110-120 fps on Grand Theft Auto V at medium graphics quality, and 40-50 fps on the newer and more demanding Cyberpunk 2077 at a good (“ray-tracing medium”) graphics quality. In other words, you can play all the latest and greatest games on the Acer Nitro 5, but you might have to make some compromises in terms of graphics settings.
What’s more, the noise and the heat the laptop made in these scenarios wasn’t too much, although both the volume level of the fans and the warmth of the chassis were definitely noticeable. The cooling technology called CoolBoost that Acer has deployed here – two main fans intended to adapt efficiently to heavy loads – seems to do a good job of pushing out warm air from the back of the chassis.
When it comes to battery life, when it comes to basic video streaming over the web, with the display set to maximum brightness and the volume at a low level, we saw drops in the battery level of 18 percent or so per hour. Having a gaming laptop that can do 5-6 hours of video between charges is relatively impressive, although doing anything more demanding (like actually running games) is obviously going to drain the battery more quickly.
