Customer Ratings & Reviews

Out of the box it looks great and has an amazing feel. Very sleek and has a great heft to it. Not too much though that its heavy, just feels solid and well built. Well I put it straight to work right away and ran it through the paces with zero issues as far as gaming goes. I love the matte screen, also it has great color and contrast. Keyboard is crisp and quiet. Speakers sound tight and clear, but as usual a nice headset will always be a better option. Battery time is typical of most laptops unless you coverclock it. When clocked and gaming it still runs cool, while others feel like you could cook a meal on them. My real only gripe is the fact that the keyboard lights turn off after 30 seconds and I am unable to find a setting to keep them on. It is quite annoying for me and why I took off the one star. All in all its a nice laptop and has great gaming capabilities, runs cool, fast and has a great feel and quality to it.

I got this initially because it was on clearance and i was just starting off with PC gaming switching from console. I love the red backlit for the keys because red is my favorite color. Plays games smoothly for me. I love this laptop. Not super heavy and came with a laptop case.

Would not recommend. Did not last. Only used at home and it didn’t even last the year.

Not with the price laptop runs slow and screen quality is not as I had hoped

Okay so when you think Acer you think cheap quality throw away after a year or two type brand, right? Well, wrong!! Acer has really stepped up their game with this Nitro 5 AN515-53 laptop. Yes, I know its the i5, 8GB DDR4-2400MHz, GTX 1050 4GB, 1 TB version laptop, but holy cow this thing is awesome, and it doesn't get super hot on full till. I ran PUBG on Ultra-Settings at a steady 45 FPS for the most part and it got warm but not super hot. Acer has an awesome little Nitro App that allows you to throttle the CPU and GPU fans as it gets warm, so Crank them up and bam a decent gaming experience without burning your lap/desk. The screen on this thing is great too, yes its not a touchscreen and not high gloss (thank god), but it is sharp and crystal clear. The speakers are okay but its a laptop, I have yet to find great sounding speakers on a laptop. The brushed gun metal look with the red Nitro accent strip gives it that sport flare but doesn't over do it, and the red and black accented back lit keys are awesome. I Cloned the 1TB over to a 512 GB Samsung 960 Pro M.2 SSD that I took out of my Dead Gaming rig and ran the 1TB as a secondary drive. This laptop now boots in about 8 seconds, which is awesome for a Gaming laptop that I only spent $700 for. The RAM is expandable up to 32GB as well if you decide to keep this guy a while. All in all, if you are looking for a decent gaming laptop on a budget, this is the guy to get.

Has broken 2 times. Had to return this item for a new one 2 times now.

The Acer Nitro 5 is a decent mid-range gaming laptop computer. Most games I can play on High settings and a few on Ultra with little drop in frame rate. It runs solidly on Medium settings. The Nitro 5 struggles with physics performance however, causing some of my games to chug along. It really suffers when trying to connect to an external monitor through both the HDMI out and Bluetooth connections. The design is pretty cool, but some parts feel a little cheap. For gaming on the go, this machine will get the job done, but leaves a lot to be desired.

Graphics card wasn't working, so it kept crashing.

Pros: Big screen Big track pad Backlit Keyboard Ample ports Cons: Slow hard drive Odd freezes Mediocre battery life Cramped number pad Some light bleed at the top of the screen I love the Acer Nitro 5 laptop a lot. It hasn't improved my gaming performance at all, but it's a joy to play on. First, this laptop is an absolute beast. It's a 15.6 inch screen, but the body is so bulky that it's frame is more akin to a 16.5 inch. Your average 15.6 inch laptop bag will not comfortably fit this device. I actually just ordered a 17 inch laptop bag to house this. I'm hoping that the included sleeve in conjunction with the padding of the bag will be enough to keep this safe. The laptop is glossy black plastic with red accents. The lid has a brushed look to it, but it's obviously plastic as well. The chassis is a little creaky, but it's solid enough that I don't think the laptop is going to fall apart in my backpack. The keyboard has well spaced letter keys, but the number pad to the right is more than a little cramped. The keyboard is back-lit with red lighting. The screen is nice and big. Viewing angles are good, and color is "not bad." I personally would have preferred a more saturated display as some of the colors look a little washed out, but the color certainly isn't bad. It should be noted that this model is a traditional laptop and doesn't have a touchscreen or swivel hinge. I also noticed some light bleed in the upper right hand corner of my display. This could be a QC issue with my particular unit though. I did encounter some odd freezes and stutters when I first got this laptop. I think it might have been because Windows wasn't done updating in the background yet. I was also surprised that the dedicated graphics card didn't appear to be doing anything at all. Going into the Nvidia settings and adjusting the global 3D options to default to the graphics card (instead of "auto") appears to have fixed this. There was a noticeable boost in game performance after this, but some of my older titles suddenly stopped working. Adding them to the exception list (and forcing them to use the Intel integrated graphics instead) appears to have fixed a lot of the issues though. Battery life was awful at about 2 and a half hours of active use with the power mode set to "performance." I'm not too surprised by this as this is fairly customary for gaming laptops. Charging is done via a proprietary charging cable and not through the USB type-C port. This was a little bit of a disappointment. Fortunately, the charging cable is quite long. The hard drive is nice and large, but it's a little slow. Switching from a SSD (or even an EMMC) to this is an adjustment. The laptop takes a few minutes longer to boot up than I'm used to. All in all, I'm quite happy with this laptop. Once you're past the initial setup and a brief adjustment period, it performs quite nicely.

Overall happy with this purchase. The model I received only had a 1tb hdd and no ssd along with the gtx 1050. At first glance I was not happy with the performance of the laptop it seemed slow for a "gaming" laptop. I searched all through the documentation and could find no mention of a m2 port anywhere. So being a tinkerer I took off the back case and discovered there was one on the mobo. Once I installed a 500gb ssd m2 form factor the laptop really started to shine and feel speedy. Came with 8gb DDR4 I ordered another 8 2 slots total. The keyboard is red backlit but is annoying because its only lit after you hit a key making it hard to see and use in the dark. Tip* If you are planning on adding a SSD m2 form factor you will want a spudger tool to help remove the back case just work your way around carefully. Also becareful of the small ribbon cable connecting the hdd via sata to the mobo easily torn away. Once you install the drive it wont show up in the bios as bootable you will need to use something like aomei backupper, drive copy to copy the hdd partition to the SSD partition and then it will show up as a bootable UEFI drive. I haven't tried to really stress it yet but temps seem reasonable, the laptop itself is lightweight and I prefer to my alienware 17R4 in weight and ease of use. Removed a star for the keyboard and the fact that Acer thinks a gaming laptop without an SSD is a good idea this day, at least 128gb SSD for OS is bare minimum in my opinion.

An excellent purchase that has not given me any problems, I have been able to install high-end games and they have worked perfectly. Recommended device.

So I bought this laptop on sale for about $650 and I think it's an alright gaming laptop for someone who needs portability. You'll be able to play many PC games at acceptable performance with a good looking IPS screen. 60HZ only sadly, but for the price it's fine. Right away, I suggest buying an extra 8 gigs of Ram to improve loading times and general system responsiveness. This is especially true if you are planning to play VR with WIndows MIxed Reality. If not, you will be experiencing frequent system hangs and extremely slow load times. Installing more ram fixed and immediately improved performance. Keyboard feels soft, yet tactile. Very silent which I think is a plus. Overall, if you are looking for a cheap gaming laptop, this is a pretty good choice! Try to get the 1050Ti version if you can spend a little extra. With the ram upgrade, I feel the 7200RPM HD is fast enough. :)

Super easy to setup. Took only a few minutes to run through the setup process. Love how easy the set up is. I even found it kind of cool that it talked to me and read the instructions. Ever since it has been super fast. Easy to boot up from sleep. Not a huge fan of windows 10 but the machine is powerful quiet and awesome. Love the keyboard. I like the a s d keys are colored differently. For gaming that is nice. I love the keys light up. Makes it easier to see them. They feel awesome and very responsive. Way to go.

I am very pleased with this laptop. It is not too heavy, and a great size. I found it very quick and easy to set up. Instructions were not really needed. The laptop walks you through set up. I was able to quickly set up all of my files. My kids were excited to load their games. This laptop performs very well on their games. They did not have any problems with freezing or lagging. The battery performed a lot better than expected. Overall, we are very pleased with this laptop.

I needed a laptop for photo and music storage; having the 1TB hard drive is great for that. However, it seems to be the slowest hard drive known to man. First upgrade - swapped out the existing RAM for 2x8GB Corsair DDR4 memory; that increased performance quite a bit. In the next couple of weeks, going to swap out the 1TB SATA drive for at least a 512GB SSD. Graphics performance is stellar. Battery life, however, is abysmal. Granted, I'm coming from a Dell machine which lasted 6-8 hours on a charge, so I'm spoiled. This battery, unfortunately, has a hard time lasting 4 hours.

Let's just say I'm not the master race type. I've had Playstation and Xbox consoles through the years, and my gaming "roots" take me back to the days of Atari and Nintendo (the latter, a majority of the time), and while my love for gaming has persisted through the years it's never been a top-5 hobby of mine. Just as much as the next guy, I'll wait for certain titles to hit and will buy them immediately on whichever console is my "current" at the time--Halo, Assassin's Creed, etc., but beyond that, I wouldn't call myself an avid gamer. And maybe because of that primarily, the notion of a budget gaming laptop was appealing to me. But I'm not completely new to the PC gaming space; I recognize that the hardcore master race guys and gals out there are building their own machines with the best specs and saving serious dollars by rolling their own (versus buying something off the shelf called a "gaming" PC), and even more recently with more mini-PC cases being made in a way that makes home-building easy for novice DIY-ers, I've been watching (and waiting) for the right time to build my own. Unfortunately, cryptocurrencies have pushed up PC internal prices in the last several months which has dropped this down a few spots on my "to-do" list. And while building your own gaming PC has been the cheapest way into the game for some time now, there's still a temptation for the more mobile, more social among us to have access to a more compact way of taking gaming with us (man oh man do I miss LAN parties). Enter gaming laptops, which we've seen more and more of as time has gone on. This particular review is on the Acer Nitro 5, which hit the market somewhat officially several months ago but has been upgraded to Intel's 8th Generation Coffee Lake processors. A quick rundown of the specs here: • 1TB 7200RPM Hard Drive • Intel Core i5-8300 Processor • GTX 1050 Dedicated Graphics • 8GB DDR4 RAM • 15.6" FHD IPS display • I/O: 3x USB Type A, 1x USB Type C, Full-size HDMI Out, Ethernet, SD Card Slot, Headphone Jack Being that I'm not an avid gamer, I'm going to leave the benchmarking to the more in-depth reviews you will find all over the internet…what I'm most concerned about, as with any gadget, is the experience…especially in light of the specs above. First and foremost--I had a few concerns about the spinning hard drive, but like it over the 256GB NVMe SSD option because of the storage required for a library of games. I recognize that external hard drives (and especially USB-C ones) exist and can alleviate this quite easily, but there's nothing more convenient than having access to more games without worrying about more attachments. From a performance perspective, aside from slower boot times and possibly slower game load times, the spinning hard drive did the job fine…but, if you wanted to buy an additional SSD and add it to this machine, you could do that pretty easily and with limited impact to your wallet. (Not that you want to buy a machine just to upgrade it, but that still puts you under $850 after upgrade). And while the hard drive is a decision that you don't have to stick with long-term, choosing your graphics card is something that you have to decide up front. The Nitro 5 comes with either the 1050 or the 1050Ti, the latter being the better performer, but I found the 1050 to do an adequate job at processing video without stutter or lag. And, not that Rocket League is the most video-intensive game, it pushed 60FPS consistently without fail every time I played. Just upgrading to the model with the 1050 Ti and keeping the spinning hard drive adds only $30, so if you're looking to squeeze every bit of juice out of this it's almost certainly worth the investment. RAM was another big concern of mine; fortunately, this is easily upgradable to a max of 32GB, but as with the lower-spec graphics card I didn't see any performance lags during gameplay running with only 8GB. And the display was good, not great. On a "budget" gaming machine, I wasn't expecting much here--decent viewing angles and got the job done; a 4K display would have too drastic an impact on price tag and performance, so there's not much here that is a surprise. Stepping away from the specs, the design is one that I found to be pretty attractive and not too overstated. Gaming peripherals and PC cases and monitors and the various other gaming-related gadgets are usually far too gaudy for my liking, but the Nitro 5 does a good job balancing the traditional "red" gaming components with an almost stealthy look for the rest of the device. The keyboard was good, although I don't like the backlighting at all, as the backlights are more visible from the front of the device (with light bleeding out from beneath the keys) than it is on the keycaps themselves. I feel like this is a design flaw--making the keycaps just a bit taller can cover up these lines of light and add to the stealthy profile. The touchpad is fine (although a bit "loose" feeling to me) and uses Windows Precision drivers, although I would imagine most folks would be connecting an external mouse to this during long-term use. Accessibility to the internals is no issue; the SATA drive and RAM are both accessible through their own ports and the back cover comes off pretty easily for those who want to upgrade (or in my case, ADD) an SSD. The device comes in at over 5 pounds, which is not unreasonable for a gaming machine, and is primarily plastic. There are a couple final points to make in this review. First, the master race PC builder isn't going to waste their time reading a review like this, or even considering this purchase. But for someone like me, a not-so-serious gamer that wants to occasionally play some PC games, I think this machine is a really good choice. I think the intense gamers will probably be dissatisfied with something like this unless they're looking specifically for a mobile-friendly rig to complement their already awesome home-built PC. Second, there is a fair amount of competition at this price point. I would fully expect a little bit of a discount for the entry-level, budget-conscious gaming laptop, so keep your eyes out for that. Specs will all be about the same, so it may come down to price or design that makes you pull the trigger. Third, if you're not a gamer but plan to get serious about it, I wouldn't spend the money here. There's a lot of draw to having a gaming laptop, but in most cases, you're going to be playing in one place--and at $700, you can build a pretty great starter machine that will be far more customizable and upgradeable for you in the years to come. But all that considered--I had a lot of fun with this machine. If a budget gaming laptop is on your shopping list, given that the Nitro 5 is available in a few different configurations (swapping out the spinning drive for an SSD or the GTX 1050 for a slightly-more-capable GTX 1050Ti), figure out where you think you'll get the best bang for your buck and go for it. I think the sweet spot is probably the better graphics card with the larger hard drive, but that's entirely subjective. Overall it's a decent machine that will provide some good entertainment for my family. I'm not a huge fan of the materials, but the design is solid and performance at the price point is good enough to get you started in the master race.

TL;DR: decent spec gaming laptop that doesn't scream L33T gamer. I'm a working adult now, and I can't carry an Alienware laptop to my workplace. I'd get lots of funny looks, to say the least. But that doesn't mean I've given up on games. I still really enjoy playing games, and now, I don't have the luxury of building a dedicated gaming rig. I've got a toddler that likes to rummage, and the LEDs on most gaming cases would paint a giant target for him to play with. The Nitro, in my configuration of a 1TB hard drive and GTX1050 handled all of the games I currently play. Witcher 3, Overwatch, the framerates stayed pristine. However, I had to turn the settings usually to medium to keep the best balance between visuals and framerates. That being said, the best part is, it's a decent enough system that let's me play anything without having to worry about compatibility, and furthermore, it comes in a case that looks subdued enough to pass as a "grownup" laptop.

Great laptop for the price until I upgraded it to windows 11.

Bought this laptop for school and it’s still work flawlessly to this day!!!

This laptop is great for gaming. The keyboard is very sturdy and holds up when gaming gets intense. The red back light is alright, but I think something could have been done better so I would not have to rely on the light to see the keys. Had no problems playing my games on this with the i5 processor. The laptop itself looks cool for a gaming laptop, but I wouldn't use it for business. It wouldn't look right in a professional environment. Overall, I am happy that I have a dedicated gaming laptop.