I already have an Acer Predator 17” gaming laptop, but the thing is huge and not really portable. I wanted a new laptop that I could use for some light gaming, have around a 15” screen “14” and less are just too small for me”, and not cost an arm and a leg. This new Nitro 5 seems to fit the bill, “almost”. Unpacking and first thoughts: The laptop comes well packaged in a closed cell foam frame, “most do anymore” along with the power supply, paperwork and surprisingly a nice neoprene sleeve. The power adapter is rated at 135w and is much smaller than the brick sized power hungry 230w one that comes with the predator. The outside of the lid is brushed plastic, and the palm rest area is just plain matte plastic with just a little bit of shine to it. The bezel around the screen is in matte black and has no reflection but is fairly wide. The Predator has a rubbery coating around the palm rest, keyboard area, and while it feels nice it’s a lot harder to clean off compared to the hard plastic of the Nitro. The keyboard itself is smaller than the one on the Predator and the num pad is right up against it with no spacing in between. The direction keys are not separated from the keyboard at all like the Predator and the keys lettering is all done in a dark red font with the WASD keys outlined in red. The touch pad is about the same size as the one on the Predator but the L/R buttons are integrated in the bottom of the pad. Weight wise, this Nitro is a lot lighter than the Predator, it’s just shy of 6lbs where the Predator is around 9.25lbs, big difference, but then again they are completely different machines. The Nitro itself is very sturdily built, the LCD has a little flex to it, not as much as compared to some of the ultra-books I’ve used and the base is very solid with really no flex to it at all. Outside looks: Around the outside of the machine there are a good number of ports available. On the left side there’s an Ethernet port, “which is getting rarer lately and nice to see”, 1 USB “C”, a HDMI out, a full sized USB 3 port and a card reader slot, “also disappearing on ultraportable units lately”. On the right side there the power port, 2 standard USB ports and an audio port. I do like that the power plug on the adapter is a 90 degree angle plug, it lets you get the power cord out of the way easily. The back of the machine only has cooling vents and, the front has nothing. Running for the first time: This model came with 8gb of DDR4 2400 memory and a single 1tb regular spindle type hard drive. I set the unit up for the first time. You won’t be able to turn on the device the first time if you don’t plug in the adapter first, this is normal for any of the Acer laptops I’ve used for quite a while now. I setup my windows account, let all the updates run “there were quite a few actually and also required a few reboots. I always make it a point to create the recovery thumb drive right away after getting a system. This took the longest, a good hour or so to complete. After that was done I started testing the system out. Screen quality: The screen is an IPS screen like the one on the Predator, and just like that one and most other IPS screens I’ve seen, there is a little light bleed around the edges in black areas of the screen that you will notice while it’s booting up. After booting into windows I really don’t notice the light bleed and it never really bothers me anyway. The screen is nice and clear and the viewing angles are very wide, nice to see in this price range of laptop. The 1080 resolution is more than plenty on the 15.6” screen, and I wouldn’t want it any higher personally. The screen is a little dimmer than the one on the Predator and I had to set the brightness a little higher to get it to match up, but there’s still plenty of room left to crank it up if needed. Gaming performance: I installed Steam and then installed Fallout 3 & 4 and The Witcher 3. All three games ran fine, with Fallout 3 needing a little tweaking in the compatibility mode to get it to run under Windows 10 but that’s normal for it on all my machines. I set both Fallout 3 & 4 to high on the graphics settings and they ran very smoothly, “so far I’m pretty impressed with the new AMD devices. The Witcher 3 with the settings set on 1080 and ultra have a little stutter to them but not horrible, turning the graphic settings to medium or high really smooths out the gameplay, “I haven’t had time to tweak all the individual settings but the game looks great and very playable on the smaller screen “I’m use to the 17” on the Predator or the 27” on my desktop gaming rig. Overall speed for the system is really good if you are web surfing, playing videos and simpler tasks. The laptop only has one 8gb stick installed so it’s running single channel. At least the spindle drive is a 7200rpm drive, still no were near as fast as an SSD. Internals and upgrading: I decided to open this up and see just how upgradeable the system is. On the bottom of the unit there are two service hatches, one for memory access and another for the hard drive. Opening these up revealed that there is an open memory slot and another 8gb stick could easily be added. The only thing visible under the hard drive hatch is the hard drive, so I went ahead and took the bottom cover off. It’s actually fairly simple with this model. Just remove all the screws, use a plastic spudger or guitar pick and run it around the perimeter “I started at a front corner” to release all the clips holding the bottom to the palm rest and lift the bottom cover away. Inside I was pleasantly surprised to see an open M.2 slot and I happen to have a spare 256gb Samsung SSD around so I installed it, unplugging the original hard drive to make sure I could use the recovery thumb drive to set it up the SSD. After installing the SSD, “it even had a screw in the hold down so I didn’t have to search for one of those”, and putting the bottom cover back on. Oh, and with all the Acer’s I’ve owned you have to be sure to install one screw in the middle of the bottom or it won’t turn on. I booted up the system and went into the bios, the Samsung SSD was there “woohoo”. I inserted the backup thumb drive and booted up the system in recovery and let it do its work. It took about 30 minutes for it to re-install everything and windows was back up and running. Wasn’t hard at all installing the M.2 SSD and getting that setup, much easier than I expected. I also went ahead and ordered one stick of Crucial “Vengeance” DR4 2400 memory so I could upgrade that too, but with the new SSD boot time is cut way down and the system runs much faster now. I also took the original 1tb drive, completely wiped it and set it up as a secondary drive, “I may install a larger SSD there but really not needed at this point, the spindle drive is plenty fast for storage”. Negatives and heat: I now have the extra 8gb of ram installed and that combined with the SSD main drive this laptop runs great. The games are all running very fluently and I’m more than happy with the performance. There are a couple things I’ve noticed though. There aren’t any led indicator lights for drive activity or caps lock, I did like having those on the Predator. The heat while gaming is perfectly acceptable, the areas around the WASD keys and direction keys stay pretty cool, the warmest area is above the keyboard right below the screen. “I have a thermal camera and added a picture of the heat after playing for about 30 minutes. The fans to get noticeable after the system heats up but I use a headset and never noticed it, and they weren’t so loud my wife noticed them sitting across the room from me. But overall the system is a lot warmer and louder than the Predator while gaming. The body of the laptop just holds in more heat in comparison. The bottom of the unit has very large heat vents, you really don’t want to be gaming with this sitting on a bed or anything that will block those vents. The speakers sound good, just don’t try to max them out, the sound becomes a little distorted on the high end. The power switch is also part of the keyboard, “top right” and it’s pretty easy to accidentally hit it, I would have preferred that to be separate. Final thoughts: Overall this is a very good entry level gaming laptop, the price is about right for someone that wants a decent gaming laptop but doesn’t want to spend much initially. Upgrading it to 2 sticks of RAM to enable dual channel “not a big difference in overall performance but on lower end systems anything helps”, and installing a SSD in the empty M.2 slot really make this a very capable machine. It’s not going to match the higher end models of the Nitro line but it’s not intended to, it’s an entry level machine that works really well, especially for the casual gamer. Using it for office work, web browsing, email, and movies it’s on the top end for doing those things.

The Acer Nitro 5 AN515-42-R5ED is a solidly low-mid range gaming laptop. It packs enough power to handle most E-sports titles (CS:GO, Overwatch, LoL) at high settings. It also has no problem with games like Fortnite and Minecraft at high settings (and with good FPS), as well as AAA titles at med-high settings (with average, but playable FPS). Specs Processor – AMD Ryzen 5 Pro 2500U with Vega 8 Graphics - CPU 4C/8T @ 2.0 GHz with boost to 3.6 GHz Graphics – AMD Radeon RX 560X 4GB [Discrete] / Vega 8 iGPU 8 cores Memory – 8GB DDR4 2400 Single Channel (17-17-17-39) Storage – 1 TB HGST 7200 RPM HDD with 32MB Cache Buffer Display – 15.6” 1920 x 1080p LED IPS screen (no freesync) Network Adapter – 802.11AC WiFi adapter with MU-MIMO support / 1X Gigabit LAN Port Ports – 1X USB-C / 1X USB 3.0 / 2X USB 2.0 / 1X SD Card Reader / 1X HDMI / 1X TRRS 3.5mm for Headset and mic Battery – 48Wh (long enough for 4-5 hours of browsing) The Nitro 5 comes with and all AMD loadout with their stellar Ryzen processor and Radeon graphics card. This laptop may come in priced cheaper than the Intel/Nvidia combos, but that belies the potential of this setup [Full disclosure I am an AMD fan with an R7 1800X/Vega64 powered tower]. The R5 sports 4 cores with 8 threads and performs roughly on par with an Intel i5-7300HQ. The RX-560X graphics card performs similarly to an Nvidia 1050, while both fall behind a 1050ti. It is still a perfectly good card that can play AAA games, and still deliver an enjoyable gaming experience. Also you can connect to an external Freesync display via HDMI and bump up your gaming experience. Like most Nitro 5’s, this laptop comes with a single 8GB DDR4 RAM stick. This, for the most part, is enough RAM to play most games without becoming a bottleneck. Storage comes in the form of a 1TB 7200RPM hard drive. Unlike most laptops with HDD’s, this drive is not the slow 5400RPM variety. While not nearly as fast as a SSD, the 7200RPM drive is at least serviceable and provides enough storage space for games. The display is a 15.6” 1920 x 1080p 60 HZ IPS screen. I couldn’t find any listed response times for the monitor, so I would assume it would follow the default IPS times of about 5ms (I may be wrong on this, so if you find it drop a comment). It’s not the best display out there, but still a solid panel that fits the budget. I only had to do some minor color calibration out of the box (for my personal tastes), but otherwise I am happy with the display. Picture reproduction is at least clear, colors are decent, and text is sharp. 1080p is the sweet spot for budget gaming builds, so this panel makes sense. The first knock I have on it is the lack of Freesync. I know this display is also used with other Nitro models that carry an Nvidia card, which likely is the reason for the omission. The second knock is the color reproduction. Pictures came out clear, but the colors weren’t quite right. I compared the screen side by side with my 24.5” Acer XF251Q monitor, and the picture on the 24.5” screen was noticeably brighter and more vibrant. Games and Benchmarking I ran the Nitro through a series of benchmarks to test its various capabilities. I ran the benchmarks with and without Norton running since I wasn’t sure what its impact would be. Tests included Cinebench R15, 3DMark Time Spy and Skydiver, PC Mark 10, GeekBench, and CrystalDiskMark 6. I have included a screenshot of my raw results table. The results show, when compared to other gaming laptops, that the Nitro is solidly mid-range. It’s not going to set any records, but it will perform well with most things thrown at it. I made sure to run it through the 1 game I know will be played on it – Fortnite (ugh). I was able to achieve mid 40’s to low 50’s with V-sync enabled on high (not customized) settings with a long draw distance. When I do play Fortnite, I tend to play it on console (original XBONE) when my friends pressure me into it. The Nitro not only looked better than I expected it to, but it allowed me to actually play better. Sure, I could have customized the settings and squeaked out a few more FPS, or dropped down to medium, but for my purposes I was pretty happy with the performance playing at high settings. I also made sure to put in a couple of hours in a AAA title. I chose Shadow of War since it’s a game I bought last black Friday, and I still hadn’t played it yet. I ran the game at high settings with V-sync on. I played for several hours, and the whole time I thought it played great. When I ran the in game benchmark with my settings it record the gaming running at only 32fps. I was surprised it was so low because it really didn’t feel that way at all. Maybe I’m just used to the console experience? Regardless, the game was easily played at high settings, and looked great. Design The Design of the Nitro surely plays the part of looking like a gaming laptop. The entire body of the laptop is all plastic save for some hinge components. This keeps the cost down on the laptop, and maybe helps with weight. The exterior plastic has a brushed metal look to it, giving it a little more upscale appearance. The red accents around the body really set it off and give the Nitro a cool look. The angled corners add to the look in a meaningful way, and again help with that cool gamer look. Oddly one of my favorite little features is the spring loaded expanding ethernet port. The port collapses down when no cable is present and maintains a smooth body profile. The laptop comes in at roughly 5.5 lbs and a little over an inch thick. It’s a little meaty, but then again so are most gaming laptops. Where the lightweight plastic shell fails though is the structural rigidity of the laptop. The palm rest is a little flexible, but the biggest offender is the lid. It has a lot of flex to it, so much so that I can see the display flex with it. I would have liked to have seen the Nitro be a little sturdier in this area. Keyboard and Touchpad The keyboard has a red LED backlight that is on by default when the laptop is plugged in to wall power, and it toggles off on battery when keys are not being pressed (30 sec after last keystroke). The keys are low profile and have a pretty decent throw length. They have a soft actuation – no real clack to them, so you can hammer out keystrokes fairly quietly. The WASD buttons have an additional red ring around them to help them stand out a bit. I wish the arrow keys got the same treatment, but that’s just my navigational button preference showing through. Under full light the keys are easy to read and decipher even without the backlight. In the dark though, if you don’t have the backlight on – forget it. This isn’t such a big deal when you are plugged into the wall, but under battery power you cannot force the keyboard backlight to stay on. You also cannot adjust the brightness of the LED’s, so gaming in the dark you may be faced with the red glow or hunting for the right key. The keys low profile design makes it difficult to feel for the keys if you lose your place in the dark. The touchpad is a single piece clickable surface with multipoint touch. It seems fairly responsive, and easy to use. When it comes to gaming though – pick up a mouse. I actually can’t stand track pads, and anxiously yearn to use a mouse whenever I have to use one. However, for standard navigation and browsing this trackpad is certainly adequate. Upgradability The biggest knock on gaming laptops compared to desktops is their diminished upgradability. The same holds true for the Nitro 5, but that doesn’t mean you can’t improve your rig down the line. There are 2 upgrades were performing on this laptop at some point in time – RAM and an SSD. As the machine sits now, it is perfectly capable to handle what you throw at it, but over time it will show its age. The Nitro 5 sports a single RAM stick as a factory default. Unfortunately for Ryzen processors, single channel RAM hampers performance a decent amount in some workloads – more so than Intel. Most of the Nitro 5 models come with a single 8GB stick, so this really applies to the broader lineup as well. I plan to toss another stick of DDR4 2400 into the it – the going rate is about 60 bucks for this upgrade. If you want to wait to upgrade in the future – that’s fine too! Having an available, and easily accessible RAM slot is the easiest upgrade you can do, and it can help prolong the life of your investment. The Nitro 5 has a max RAM capacity of 32GB DDR4 2400 (2 x 16GB). The next, and probably most beneficial upgrade you can do to this particular Nitro is add an M2 NVME SSD drive. This upgrade is a little more involved – it requires taking off the entire bottom cover (21 screws!), installing the drive, and reinstalling windows onto the new drive. It is without a doubt the biggest performance boost you can get, and NVME drives are pretty affordable ($40+). Mechanical drives are so much better as just being large capacity storage, and really bog down a PC when they are used as a boot drive. As an SSD user for the last 8 years, this is a must for me long term. Final Thoughts This version of the Acer Nitro 5 comes to the market at a pretty affordable price point for a mid-range gaming laptop. I like that it comes with some more budget friendly options like the 1 TB HDD. You can add an M2 SSD further down the line and spread out the cost. The same goes for the RAM. There are only a couple of areas that could use some improvement – lid rigidity, better spec’d display, control over the keyboard LED’s, and no preinstalled Norton trial. I am happy with the Nitro as a whole, and I think it would be a great pickup for the casual/new gamer. I know a few coworkers of mine are looking into the Nitro for their kids’ Christmas presents this year – a move I would support. Overall, I give it a 4 – 4.5/5 – it would have been 5/5 if the issues I had above weren’t present.

I play a few games and I like the visual graphics on it.

Great graphics! Kids love it. Wonderful. Awesome. I will recommend this to my friends and family.

The Nitro 5 case is brushed plastic, kind of looks like the matte finish on a Grand Piano, pretty classy and it comes with a Folio case to prevent the case from getting scratched. The build quite firm (non-ultrabook), the lid (screen) has hardly any give and the base is very solid, making it a firm typing platform. The screen is a IPS HD (1920x1080) panel, with what Acer calls ComfyView, which to me is a matte finish a which is not exactly crisp, but very bright. Viewing from any angle is excellent, from extreem angles a slight amount of light bleed can be seen at the edges (acceptable). It include the latest AMD Ryzen™ 5 with 4 cores and 8 logical processors. This version comes with 8GB memory and a 1TB HDD (7200 RPM). Now I have to say I'm spolied, as I've upgraded all my notebooks to have SSD drives. Once set up, the Nitro took 1 minute 10 seconds to completely boot up. Not what I'm used to, after turning off Norton, the boot time was still 1 minute. But once running the speed did not see that bad , the Ryzen CPU certanly seemed snappy. Opening multiple brower windows was a breeze (after 10 tabs it started to studder). This notebook is built for gaming, it includes the AMD Radeon RX 560X graphics processor with 4GB GDDR5 RAM, I loaded my photoshop app and did some edititng, it felt very snappy even with multiple photos open and appling effects across multiple images. Played some video clips they were very smooth, I transcoded some videos I had stored in the cloud to a more compact format, here I could tell the CPU was really working as the fans kicked in, not too loud, but quite noticable, but it took a fraction of the it takes on my notebook without a dedicated graphics procesor (like 1/10th the time). A good start. Now for some games. The first game I tried was Fortnite, something was wrong, I was only seeing about 8 FPS. The problem, the computer was using the integrated GPU instead of the discrete RX 560X GPU. I tried several things to fix the problem but only disabling the onboard graphics adapter did the trick. The frame rate then jumped to over 60 fps, and the game play was very smooth, But the sound was somewhat muffled, this was due to the computer setting a soft surface (placemat). Once I put it on a hard surface the sound was much improved, but not great (but pretty loud). All the sound output is from downward firing speakers, the red bar at the bottom of the screen is cosmetic, it would be better if some sound came out (forward) from here. But I usually play games with headphones (jack is on right side) or external speakers so I just note this in passing. I did try to load a newer graphics driver to see it if would correct the detection problem, but I failed and went back to the original. Frustrating. I hope Acer get a new drivers posted to correct this problem. The notebook has a nice assortment of output ports, 3 USB-A (2*USB 2.0 & 1*USB 3.0), 1*USB C 3.1 (No Thunderbolt), 1*HDMI, 1*Gigabit Ethernet, 1*Headphones/mic, 1*Kensington Lock and Wireless support for 802.11a/b/n/ac and a SD card slot. The keyboard is backlighted with a red glow (with the WASD keys highlighted). It has a really with a nice feeling to the keyboard, the trackpad is fairly large and works well, supporting all the multi-touch gestures I threw at it. The screen is not a touch screen. I then decided that I was pretty happy with what I'd found, and thought I'd investigate increasing the memory and adding a M.2 SSD (the maching has a open M.2 slot (that requires removing 17 screws). The memory update was a breeze, a added another 8GB DDR4, single Channel (DDR4 PC4-21300) no problems. The M.2 slot is M keyed, which would lead one to believe it supports a PCIE NVMe drive, I looked at Acer Specs online and found conflicting information, one place said NVMe was supported, another said SATA (M+K key). I called their tech support and was told NVMe was supported. So I tried a EVO 970 Pro 1TB drive...it was not recognised by the Bios, talked to their tech support again and they said they had a Nitro 5 with the EVO 970 1TB in front of them working, So I exchanged the 970 Pro or the 970 and tried again, Still not recognised, more calls to their tech support, more inconsiatant information, eventually saying that I should a use SATA drive <500MB. I still doubt the size limitation, but ended up replacing the HD with a Samsung 860 1TB SATA drive (cheaper than M.2 SATA which would have performed the same). All good now, still waiting to hear back from their tech support on what exactly is supported (I did mentioned the graphics driver problem to them and was told a new version would be posted soon (like they knew about the problem)). But now system boots in about 20 seconds. Wish I could have used M.2 but only had so much time to get it running as I wanted it. BTW: adding the additional memory allowed me to open many more browser tabs without any noticabe difference. Now it really flies, and total cost still under $1K, tought to beat if all worked properly. If Acer gets their BIOS/drivers updated to correctly recognise games and properly documents the avaliable m.2 slot this is a great buy, Having owned other Acer notebooks I have no doubt the probelms will get resolved.