Customer Ratings & Reviews

Good performance, bad power port. I started having problems with the connection within a few months, which became serious within six. It died completely before the first year. I got it fixed under the manufacturer's warranty, but almost immediately started having the same problem again. (No, I'm not rough on the cord. I do my best to be careful, but it doesn't seem to matter.) It is almost dead again and I am now looking for a new laptop. Maybe I got a lemon, maybe not. Either way, I have never been more unimpressed with a laptop!

Awesome, incredible, the most enjoyable laptop, I have ever owned... except that it died after one year and three months. The Nvidia card died, and it turns out that it is soldered into the mother board, and a new board is more than the price of a new Nitro. Yes, with one month till the end of the school year, my laptop died. And it turs out that it is a common problem with this type of laptops. It was fun, but for 1 1/2 year of use, after the one year warranty runs out...not a good deal.

We purchased this to run the Oculus Rift and the headset would not work. We took it back to the Geek Squad 3 times. The first time We were told it was the headset so we drove to another Best Buy to exchange it. Same thing. Took it back the second time and after 1 1/2 hours was told the computer is probably not strong enough to run the Oculus, even after adding HDMI adapters to give it more juice. Finally after 3 weeks, 2 phone calls to Acer, 2 emails to Oculus (because there is NO phone number for them), and 3 weeks we exchanged it for a Lenovo. Of course more expensive but at least open box.

Everything with the laptop is fine except it won't connect to Wi-Fi. No matter how many times I turn it on and off it still struggles to maintain a connection or even recognize a network.

The Acer Nitro 5 AN515-53-55G9 gaming laptop packs some good features inside it at a very good price, but also has some issues that hold it back. I fall on the side of recommending this laptop, barely. I will start with the features I liked. The Intel 8th generation CPU is very powerful and handled everything I threw at it very well. I expected nothing less. The GPU is also quality, and it is nice to see a nVIDIA 10 series dedicated graphics card at this price in a gaming laptop. Games, including VR games, worked very well with this unit. I also liked the look and feel of this laptop. Usually, gaming laptops have bright colors and shiny logos that mark them out as gaming rigs. This laptop has a matte black lid with a metallic black logo, and has a deep burgandy accent color. The lid felt very sturdy. The rest of the body felt like typical laptop plastic, but seemed durable enough. It booted up very quickly with a minimum of bloatware. I was impressed that it came with fan control software from Acer right out of the box. The keyboard was very typical, if maybe a little tight for larger hands, and the letters are backlit in red. The plate does come off of this unit very easily, which would allow for easy access to upgrade the laptop if desired. Now for some features that I did not like about this unit. It became very hot in a quick amount of time under normal conditions, and I am not certain why. It has 2 cooling fans, which were operating quite loudly, but they didn't seem to make an impact. This can be mitigated with a cooling pad to some degree, but it is something for which to be aware. I used a cooling pad after a little bit of usage, but the unit still became hot enough that I had to set it aside after about an hour. Another issue with the loud fans was that the speaker location toward the bottom of the unit became drowned out by the loud fan usage. Again, this could be mitigated with noise-cancelling headphones but is quite irritating if you don't use headphones often. The display looked very nice but was a bit dim even on high brightness settings. This would be OK in a dim environment but it was hard to see the screen when used outside. Finally, the battery lasted an unusually short time. Gaming laptops rarely have great battery usage due to the power-hungry components, so I took that into consideration. But even doing mundane tasks and internet surfing drained the batter in about 5 hours. Obviously, when gaming the battery drains even faster, about 90 minutes. In summary, this laptop has some great components inside and has an excellent price but as an experienced laptop gamer there were some serious issues to contend with, too. If you often game while using a cooling pad, headphones, and while plugged in, these issues might not be a big deal. Unit Specifications: Display: Diagonal 15.6" IPS Resolution: 1920×1080 CPU: Intel Core i5-8300H Graphics: Integrated- Intel UHD Graphics 630 Discrete- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti RAM: 8 GB DD4, with the capacity for 32 GB Storage: 256 GB Intel PCIe SSD Wi-Fi: Intel Wireless-AC 9560 CRF 2x2 802.11ac Wave 2 Wi-Fi module Bluetooth: 4.x USB: 1 USB 3.0 Type-A 2 USB 2.0 Type-A 1 USB 3.0 Type-C Other features: HDMI 2.0a, webcam, TRRS connector for audio, speakers, microphone, SD card reader

So far this has been a pretty good gaming laptop for the price. I’ve been looking into gaming laptops before, but never wanted to spend over 1k for one. The speed of it is amazing. I’m able to do a cold boot up in about 5 seconds. The trackpad is pretty solid, and the keys have a unique clickiness to it. Has somewhat a soft feel, but feels good to type on. There are a few cons though. The speakers are decent, but not great. The screen pixel quality isn’t the best. However the screen has a matte finish that will reject most glare. The rear of the laptop has large air vents. I assumed the fans would kick on only when doing intense gaming. Unfortunately it comes on when surging the web, and most light tasks. It can be pretty loud at times. It’s not the best gaming laptop out, but for the price it’ll get the job done.

I just bought this laptop 1 week ago when i started to play games or watch videos.There's a loud noisy sound make me uncomfortable

I picked up this laptop a few months back for gaming now and then, the first month everything seemed to work okay for the price but now it resets all the time after an “oops something went wrong screen” I can’t believe I’m running into issues like this half a year in...... absolutely unacceptable

We bought this for my son for Christmas. About 1 week after the return window closed, wi-fi stopped working. Geek Squad found a hardware issue, and it has now been with them for over a week waiting on replacement parts. A brand new computer that needed a new motherboard less than one month after being opened.

The case is made very poorly. The top case separates at the seam making it impossible to open without increasing the damage. The screen is black on both edges coming to meet in the middle. It is a very inferior laptop, and not worth the price it cost.

STRENGTHS - Very quick setup compared to other recent new computer set ups; only two windows updates hit instead of the usual myriad which slows down actually using computer. - Surprisingly little bloatware – usual free games - Once computer was set up, five second boots were usual. Very fast - Power brick actually has a cord running to the brick from the power outlet/strip – so nice not to consume two outlets for a brick like on some other laptops. - Plays games well with no stutter or dropped frames in my tests. I will be adding more games later and adding an external monitor (HDMI output available). - .I also was able to play several HD movies at the same time without lag via usb external hard drive. Would have been nice to play actual DVD’s without an external drive though when I played movies via external drive, there was no issue. WEAKNESSES - Keyboard is “backlit” but it really is of little effectiveness – you see more of the key surrounds than of the actual key alphanumeric caption – it is actually no better than an unlit keyboard. I also never found the keyboard comfortable to use; this is not really particular to Acer as I’ve added external keyboards to recent laptops to overcome uncomfortable standard laptop keyboards. - Trackpad – I prefer separate and distinct buttons under the pad and not built into the pad itself. I never found this trackpad to be comfortable to use. - Much slower in processing videos than on my Desktop – could be I need to match the 16 gb that is in my Ryzen 7 desktop or it could be the i5 8th generation is not as effective as the Ryzen 7. OTHER COMMENTS Some might downgrade this for the plastic case, but this is less than $800 – money well spent on the equipment. This computer does not have a DVD drive. Nice enough laptop for gaming; light video work; memory can be upgraded to 32 gb. Also ran an external data hard drive with this and it worked flawlessly moving several gb files. While this is not a lightweight, it does offer good portable performance if you travel. And remarks about the weight are really not compelling since five pounds is nothing for a computer this size with this much gaming power. At this price point this laptop is competitive with others by competitors who don’t offer this much performance. Excellent overall performance masks keyboard and trackpad weaknesses (those can be overcome with external keyboard and mouse). Video editing likely will be improved with upgrade to 16 gb of ram.

I bought this "Oculus Ready" laptop with the intention of getting a Rift to play VR games. However it's a bit low powered and doesn't meet the minimum requirements for most VR games. ALSO is not compatible with Oculus Rift S or any newer VR headsets that use Display Port instead of HDMI. Honestly, I'm planning to attempt a trade-in for a better laptop.

Good lap top and boots good just has bad USB ports they both went out quick and don’t work half the time

I bought this almost exactly 6 weeks ago and just got a bsod for memory management. Now it won't boot

Went with this model over the cheaper version for two reasons: 8th gen processor vs 7th gen and SSD vs HDD. I figured I have tons of external drives laying around so no big deal on an only 256gb ssd. Get this laptop home and looking it over, open up the panels, and wouldn't you know -- an empty bay for a sata hdd. Went right back to the store and bought a 1tb ssd to expand the storage. Works awesome! Can't beat the price for the specs. Battery life could be better, but you're not buying a laptop like this for its battery. Also wish "gaming" models would lose the whole black/red color scheme, but it's a personal nitpick. I kind of thought the display would look better, but I haven't played with settings much or run anything of note visually so take that with a grain of salt. Also good to know for potential buyers, the 8gb RAM is a single stick and you have an empty slot available. This was an equally pleasant surprise to the hdd bay. Acer really nailed it with this model.

The screen broke when i rested it slanted over night. Customer support blamed me. Who knew you could rest it slanted? It gets pretty hot too. Cant hold much charge and heavy

Without a doubt, the biggest selling point of Acer’s new Nitro 5 notebook is the solid state drive - in fact, Windows 10 has become increasingly infuriating as an operating system on any standard (mechanical) hard drive. Windows starts up in seconds here and any applications that depend on rapid data transfer within the machine are lightening fast. The physical notebook is a little on the heavy side but it feels solidly built. The screen is very clear and thankfully is more matte than shiny so reflections are not a problem - many Acer machines have screens that are distractingly shiny so this is a welcome change. And it operates very quietly - when the fan is running, it is barely audible. Initial setup was a breeze because Windows was mostly installed - but it took a while to adjust the Windows installation to my liking. I wanted to replace the fully installed 30-day subscription to Norton with my own antivirus and utilities program. I removed the games and Skype. And I needed to keep all the various Acer utilities from loading into memory at startup. I was most annoyed by the Acer utilities - there were several of them to mute and they were taking up all the top spots in terms of RAM usage - and with a solid state drive, having them pre-loaded into RAM serves no practical purpose. The body of the laptop has a nice dark gray metallic finish. But the keyboard is very annoying - Acer decided on black keys with red letters and numbers - and unless you change the settings to generate backlighting for the keys, the markings all but disappear in any reduced lighting. I find backlit keys to be a terrible distraction and I will never choose to have that enabled - so when I go to type something in dimmed lighting, I need to feel around for the little marks on the “F” and “J” keys to help me navigate to the home keys - if you are a hunt-and-peck typer then you would be totally lost. So the keyboard matches the color scheme of the computer but is a terrible annoyance in all but full lighting. For anything that involves data transfer, though, this laptop is a gem. I have found it particularly useful for running Adobe Photoshop and Premier Elements (and the data transfer to-and-from an SD-card and the hard drive is crazy fast). But I also had to spend a lot of quality time getting the installation adapted to suit me and I still maintain that the keyboard design was a terrible choice for Acer. Overall, it’s a very good laptop - but I think that between the keyboard design and some of their Windows installation choices, Acer missed the opportunity to make it a great laptop. But I would still take this laptop any day over a laptop without a solid state drive.

Expected much better performance from a machine labeled gaming

No good. Not enough storage. Subpar frame rates on new titles.

*** Buyer Beware *** Neither Acer or Bestbuy stand behind their products. It’s was broken in less than 3 months. Turned computer on and screen went dark. Acer wanted 450 to replace it. Done doing business with both of these companies!!!