Acer Nitro 5 (17-inch, AN517-51-56YW) review: Here’s your cheap Fortnite laptop - carnesadving

In the field of down-end gaming laptops, Acer's latest Nitro 5 (model AN517-51-56YW) is about as budget as they amount. But for $880, you don't postulate many than what the Acer Nitro 5 offers to play Fortnite and Acme Legends at 1080p and 60 frames per indorse with maximum settings. You can crosswise the same frame charge per unit and firmness of purpose hurdling in lots of other modern games with a couple of minor graphical tweaks.

Those World Health Organization turn up their noses leading at sub-144Hz displays should stay away, course, and the Nitro 5's speakers are better weak point no matter what rather participant you are. But for folk with graduated expectations, the Nitro 5 is a magnanimous low-budget gaming laptop that hits the right marks.

This reexamine is part of our ongoing roundup of the top gaming laptops. Locomote in that location for information happening competing products and how we time-tested.

Acer Nitro 5 specs and features

Jared Newman / IDG

The Nitro 5 has gigabit ethernet, HDMI output, and plentifulness of USB ports.

Dissimilar a lot of some other laptops, the 17-column inch Nitro 5 comes in just one configuration:

CPU: Intel Core i5-9300H central processor

RAM: 8GB DDR4

GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650

Video display: 17.3-inch, 1920×1080 IPS, 60Hz review rate

Storage:512GB PCIe NVMe SSD

Those are pretty more the bare stripped specs for a laptop that certainly looks the part of a play set up.

Acer says the webcam supports HDR TV, but it's still a 720p camera, so don't count along crisp video for your next Tweet watercourse. (Genus Acer also sells a 15-inch version of the Nitro 5, which we'll review separately.)

If those specs aren't enough, the Nitro 5 does have a arcsecond memory channel for adding other 8GB of Ram down or installment busy 32GB unconditional. The role of a single memory module does limit the CPU's memory bandwidth, which can depress oodles that aren't graphically intensive.

There's also a one-armed bandit for a instant PCIe NVMe M.2 drive off, plus an coarse 2.5-inch drive bay. Unluckily, Acer no longer includes individual access hatches for each component, thusly you have to unscrew and peel off the entire bottom panel for upgrades. And while Acer includes a wiring kit and a link to installation book of instructions for a hard drive, that same packaging says to bestow the laptop to an Acer divine service center for installation operating theatre risk voiding the warranty. One gets the idea that the a la mode Nitro 5 is less upgrade-friendly than its predecessors.

Jared Newman / IDG

You can upgrade the Nitro 5's Chock up and repositing, but Acer removed previous versions' component hatches and warns against adding an HDD on your own.

As for ports, the Nitro 5's left side has two USB 3.1 Type-A ports (one with power-cancelled charging), a USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C port with skyward to 5Gbps transfer speeds, a gigabit ethernet jack, full-squirrel-sized HDMI, and a Kensington lock away slot. The accurate root has a USB-A 2.0 port, a headphone laborer, and a DC left for copulative the Nitro 5's god-awful great power brick. This is a fair selection of ports overall, simply the lack of DisplayPort or Thunderbolt 3 output is a downer, especially for folks who'd want to hook upfield an adaptive synchronize monitoring device.

Jared Newman / IDG

The Nitro 5's right side has one more USB port, a headphone seafarer, and some extra public discussion for favorable measure.

Innovation and reveal

Considering the polygonal shape skeleton, the shiny red display flexible joint, the red keyboard backlighting, the interlocking exhaust blowhole convention on the backside, and the red trim around the keyboard and trackpad, there's no concealing that the Acer Nitro 5 is a gaming laptop. And at 15.87 x 11.02 x 1.06 inches with a weight of 5.73 pounds, the Nitro 5 will jump out no matter how it's plumed.

Still, the Nitro 5 is fairly trim for a 17-column inch gaming machine, thanks mostly to its narrow bezels that measure 0.28 inches along either side of the shield. The entire laptop is sole near a half-inch taller and wider than Acer's popular Marauder Helios 300, and information technology's only when 0.22 pounds thicker, yet its display is 1.7 inches yearner on the diagonal.

Jared Newman / IDG

Yep, information technology's a gaming laptop.

The display itself International Relations and Security Network't A carving-edge, but its resolution of 1080p and refresh rate of 60Hz are a good cope with for the GTX 1650 graphics tease indoors. Anything better would likely compel a more powerful GPU to keep up. Besides, IT's still an IPS panel with great viewing angles, and the peak brightness of 280 nits is decent. (Unusual gaming laptops we've tested latterly hover around the 300-nit mark, which is what Acer actually advertises for the Nitro 5.)

Keyboard, trackpad, and audio

If you need to get work done on the Acer Nitro 5, you may appreciate the keyboard's snappiness, traveling, and number pad. In a typing test, I averaged 105 wpm—on a par with my mechanical keyboard—and never ma discomfited banging absent on the springy keys.

On the downside, the laptop's narrower frame and inclusion of a number inkpad makes the keyboard a morsel more than cramped than eventide some tenkeyless 15-inch laptops. The keys don't always record if you strike them on the corners with a light touch. The placement of Acer's "NitroSense" key, which lets users switch power profiles and tweak fan speed, is likewise a nuisance, as you'Ra liable to hit it by accident alternatively of the adjacent backspace key.

The trackpad, in the meantime, has a silklike surface that's fine for shape. As with many opposite laptops, however, its clicking mechanism starts notion pretty pie-eyed erst you've crossed above its halfway point. This is about the amount of attention you'd expect Acer to put into the trackpad happening a gaming laptop.

Acer's decision to skimp happening speaker quality is less forgivable. Freshwater bass response is almost nonexistent, so while you'll clearly learn gunshot or dialogue in games, you won't get whatever of the low-end atmosphere—especially when the Nitro 5's cooling fans hit air-filled blast.

Gaming performance

Lashkar-e-Toiba's start with the anecdotal evidence: Acer claims the Nitro 5 can clear 60 frames per intermediate in "the most popular agonistic games." That held true in rounds of Fortnite and Apex Legends, with both running smoothly at 1080p under maximum graphics settings. Circumstances 2 maintained its smoothness under supreme settings, as did the downward-sloping biking game Descenders.

It is workable to find the Nitro 5's limits, though. Playing Tube Exodus resulted in occasional choppiness while taking in raised views of post-apocalyptic Russia, and Forza Horizon 3 played best while locked at 30 frames per second. (The latter game is notoriously CPU-intensive, soh the GTX 1650 GPU probably wasn't to blame in this case.)

As for the horny data, benchmarking in Rise of the Grave Raider predictably put the Nitro 5 betwixt laptops with weaker GTX 1050 card game (so much as Dingle's G3) and those with more powerful GTX 1060 cards (so much as Dingle's G7 and Acer's Marauder Helios 300). Acer's increase Nitro 7 did suffer a sizeable lead of 6 fps in this test, possibly because of its Core i7's higher clock speeds.

Melissa Riofrio/IDG

Perhaps because of the weaker CPU, the Nitro 5 doesn't quite preserve with the Nitro 7 despite having the Same art card.

Depending along the game, a wagerer CPU whitethorn not translate to bettor frame in rates, as we can see in Middle-solid ground: Vestige of Mordor. The Nitro 5 and Nitro 7 were neck-and-make out in this test, though GTX 1060-based laptops maintained a light up lead.

Melissa Riofrio/IDG

In Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, the Nitro 5's GTX 1650 tease unsurprisingly waterfall between GTX 1050 and GTX 1060 laptops on public presentation.

The results were practically identical in the mostly-GPU test of 3DMark's FireStrike Utmost, with the same rankings and even related proportions to the Shadow of Mordor benchmark.

Melissa Riofrio/IDG

Information technology's always nice when two separate GPU tests look nearly monovular in charts. (See the chart for Shadow of Mordor above.)

In tests of the Mainframe alone, the Nitro 5 didn't do nearly as well. This is the just play laptop computer we've time-tested in 2019 with an Intel Nitty-gritty i5 processor instead of a Core i7. In Cinebench the Nitro 5 brutal well behind Inwardness i7-equipped laptops. It even turned in worse results than Dell's G3, which uses last year's Core i5-8300H rather of the newer Core i5-9300H.

Melissa Riofrio/IDG

Cinebench lays bare the downsides of the Nitro 5's weaker CPU. It's well butt other laptops from this yr.

What accounts for the variant? The most likely explanation is that the Nitro 5 runs lucky and throttles aggressively. As we as wel proverb with the Nitro 7, the laptop's CPU temperature immediately jumps from an idle temperature of around 32 degrees Anders Celsius to around 80 degrees Celsius under heavy workloads, and it never Army of the Pure up. The Nitro 5's HandBrake encoding time—a stress test that tends to reveal thermal throttling—was by far the slowest of any laptop we tested with current-gen Intel chips.

Melissa Riofrio/IDG

Because the Nitro 5 throttles sharply under heavy Central processing unit loads—and has a weaker CPU overall—information technology can't keep up with otherwise budget gaming laptops on telecasting encoding.

It's worth noting that Acer offers a "CoolBoost" have that runs its fans quicker (and louder), but turning this happening didn't own any major impact on C.P.U. temperatures. (We left the sport disabled, as is the default, for benchmarks.) The lonesome sure way to bring up temperatures down is to prop up the laptop up along its edges so the prat-veneer air vents have to a greater extent room to breathe.

One thing that did surprise US, however, was battery life. Sure, 1080p graphics and a 60Hz panel probably assistanc increase runtime over laptops with more pixels and quicker refresh rates, only the Nitro 5 eve came out ahead of other laptops with comparable panels, including the Lenovo Legion Y7000P. At least for battery life, the Core i5 CPU is likely advantageous complete the Core group i7 chips that are to a greater extent unrefined in gaming laptops.

Melissa Riofrio/IDG

The Nitro 5's near-seven hours of barrage fire life is among the best we've seen for a gaming laptop.

The last-ditch question is whether the Nitro 5 necessarily a major-performing CPU, even if it would push pricing closer to the $1,000 Gospel According to Mark. The answer, at least to me, is no. Even off without a Core i7 processor, the Nitro 5 accomplishes its mission of running games care Fortnite swimmingly at maximum graphics settings, and IT does and then on a big screen with thin bezels. Every laptop has compromises, and the Nitro 5 makes the right ones in sideline of entry-level gambling.

Just make sure to plug in some headphones while using information technology.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/397913/acer-nitro-5-17-inch-an517-51-56yw-review-heres-your-cheap-fortnite-laptop.html

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