The Acer Nitro 5 Review: Renoir And Turing On A Budget

Final Words

So how much of a gaming laptop can you get for $669.99 USD? It turns out, you can get quite a bit. Acer’s Nitro 5, with a refreshed look, and upgraded internals, offers a surprisingly competent gaming system for targeting 1920x1080. The combination of the Ryzen 5 4600H with NVIDIA’s Turing-based GTX 1650 can handle most modern games at or near peak settings and still be playable at 1920x1080. On a few of the more demanding games, you may have to sacrifice the graphical fidelity to achieve the best framerate, but considering how little of your wallet you need to sacrifice, that is going to be an easy trade-off for many.

The new Nitro 5 design is a definite improvement over the older model. Gone is the faux carbon fibre, replaced by a cool to the touch metal top and keyboard deck. You will not be fooled into thinking this is a top-tier premium gaming system with the changes, but it does improve the looks and in-hand feel of the Nitro 5.

Acer has long been one of AMD’s strongest partners, and that partnership has reaped some large benefits for Acer in 2020. AMD’s Ryzen 4000 series laptop processors offer a tremendous value, with strong performance from the Zen 2 cores, and without the burden of the high idle power draw of past designs. Despite this device shipping with “only” the Ryzen 5, it is still a six-core, twelve-thread processor, and offers plenty of power for most tasks. Acer does sell this laptop with the Ryzen 7 as well, with an upgraded GPU, but for a significant price jump, so really the Ryzen 5 is a solid value. Some will lament the lack of dual-channel memory in the Nitro 5, but for a lot of consumers, it is going to be a more cost-effective way to upgrade to 16 GB if necessary, since they can simply add one SODIMM, rather than replace two. Since the Nitro 5 ships with a GPU with its own memory, the dual-channel is less important as well, since that really impacts the integrated graphics more than CPU compute.

NVIDIA’s GTX 1650 is a really nice step up as the new entry point on low-cost laptops. In our tests, it was mostly able to maintain the 60 FPS mark in most games, although some tweaking may be required. The real sweet spot for 1080p gaming is the GTX 1660 Ti, but that card is much larger, more power hungry, and far more expensive, so for the cost difference, the 1650 really held its own.

There is really not a lot missing on this system, despite the low entry price. It offers the current best Wi-Fi option, with the Intel AX200 Wi-Fi 6 NIC. There is USB Type-C, although no Thunderbolt support. There is Gigabit Ethernet, if you would prefer to run a wired connection, and there is enough USB to keep most people happy.

If there was a sore spot on the Nitro 5, it would be the less than stellar display. Although a 1920x1080 IPS panel, Acer has cost-cut the backlighting significantly, so the display does not reach even close to the sRGB color gamut. This was a concern on previous models of the Nitro 5 as well, but it has not been addressed. The higher-tier models of this laptop do offer a 144 Hz display, compared to the 60 Hz in the base model, and it is possible it is an overall better display, but it is also possible it offers the same poor backlighting and just a higher refresh rate, so don’t count on that fixing anything.

The chassis is nice, but clearly inexpensive, since it is plastic. The display is mediocre at best. But, if you are looking for a gaming laptop and are on a serious budget, the Nitro 5 delivers where it matters. It offers good performance, ships with just enough RAM and storage, and offers the upgradability that is lacking in almost all thin and light notebooks. At $669.99 USD, the Acer Nitro 5 is definitely a great value.