Customer Ratings & Reviews

Last year I reviewed the Acer Nitro 5 and was entirely impressed by its high performance and design while coming in at a Sub $1000 price point. This year's Nitro 5 is no different and has some minor improvements that resolved most of my complaints over the previous iteration. Starting with Design, one of my complaints about the previous version of this laptop is that it was very bulky and just overall felt like it was cheaply made. Although the materials used to make the laptop remained unchanged it has a great feel to it. This laptop has reduced the overall foot print significantly by reducing the bezels around the screen. This gives the laptop a much more premium and modern look while reducing both wait and size. The WASD keys are still outlined in red which is an awesome feature when gaming. The keyboard remains almost unchanged from last year's model and still seems to be a bit over crowded which I believe is a downfall of incorporating at 10 key into such a small body. One major upgrade is the track pad. The previous model’s track pad was so horrible I could not even use it but this year is much sturdier and usable. I also like that now all the legacy USB ports are USB 3.0 rather than including USB 2.0. It also still has a USB C port which allows the use of both new technology and old with the older USB 3.0 ports. I was a little disappointed that this laptop no longer includes an SD card slot but it probably has to do with a smaller form factor and is not the end of the world. As far as upgradability, this laptop still allows for most of the internal parts to be switched out. Technology goes out of style extremely fast and having the ability to change out components to make the laptop faster is a must have for gaming laptops. This laptop does not allow easy access to the HDD and RAM but there are less screws holding on the bottom of the laptop making it not too difficult to remove and access everything. A nice addition to this laptop is the ability to add two M.2 PCIE SSD storage options along with a 2.5 in SDD or HDD. When it comes to storage this laptop is limitless. Although the drives it comes with are decent, I would recommend switching them out for something large and faster. I have currently upgraded mine to house 3 SSD drives. There are also two slots for RAM so that you can upgrade the ram. Last thing I would like to discuss is Performance. When it comes to gaming laptops, the amount of money you can put into a computer is crazy. However, this laptop offers great performance at a low price. I believe that out of the box it has good enough performance to run any of the modern-day games. If you plan to play more graphic intensive games, I would recommend a few upgrades to memory and storage and then this laptop would offer the best mix of performance, portability, and affordability you can get. Although it runs a core i5 processor it is faster than many i7 processors and with the latest generation it should be able to outperform a lot of other processors. Battery life is to be expected out of a machine like this but it should get 5+ hours easily running on power saver settings. If using a lot of power, I would recommend plugging into a power source regardless. This is not the type of computer someone will buy if they want or need a laptop with all day battery life. Overall, I think this is a great performing laptop for the price. I would recommend this to someone who already has a gaming desktop and wants to be able to have a portably laptop for on the go. Or someone who simply wants to get into the gaming world but does not have a lot of money to invest in a gaming PC. This laptop will not disappoint right out of the box. Although it is a gaming laptop at heart, I have also used it for video and photo editing and it handles these processes with no issue.

8gbs of ram is just not feasible anymore. The game I bought this to play on it was 7 Days To Die and it needed an immediate ram upgrade to handle the demands of the game but fortunately it was incredibly easy to open it up and install the new ram and it's running perfectly! Everything else is great on it, although there's a little nitro sense button where the numlock key usually is (the numlock is still there, there's just 4 buttons squeezed there rather than the usual 3) but it's completely fine once you get used to its existence. I'd recommend it but just be prepared to upgrade that ram.

Got this to replace a dying Dell. Nice look, runs great. So far no issues. Bottom comes off pretty ready to upgrade RAM if needed. That's a great thing to know.

Got for my daughter to have a computer with better speed and capacity for college. So far, she is enjoying it for playing various "virtual reality" based games.

I recently purchased the laptop as the reviews I was reading were pretty good and I liked the ability to customize it. I am currently playing Guild Wars 2, CoD Warzone, and Smite on it. I haven't experienced much stuttering and have been able to hold 60 FPS pretty easily on medium to high to max settings depending on the game. The problem and why I can only give it two stars at this time is that the cooling design on this laptop sucks. Under load the CPU is usually in the high 80'sC, sometimes in the 90+ for extended times (and I just bought it). This is with fans at Max, Coolspeed on, Underclocking the CPU -115, and almost every other way I know how to cool the laptop down. I will revisit this review when I am able to add another 8GB of ram and new thermal paste. As I said the laptop games run well but I have serious concerns for the overall ability for this laptop to last more than a year or two with the heat it puts out. Acer - Nitro 5 15.6" Gaming Laptop - Intel Core i5 - 8GB Memory - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 - 1TB Hard Drive + 128GB SSD - Black AN15-54

Very good computer. Have had no problems at all. Graphics card is still able to run demanding games at a high quality. Very good purchase for the price.

This laptop is great. I got it because it was a little cheaper than others and its awesome. It runs extremely smooth and it is very sleek compared to other gaming laptops I've seen.

Bought a year ago and still is running like a charm. Daughter is a gamer and it stores all her files with ease and never slows down.

I was iffy on the 1650, but it turns out the real bottleneck in this system isn't the video card, but it only coming with 8GB of RAM. Buy this, and then spend another $45 to double it to 16GB as I did. The 1650 can handle pretty much everything that doesn't require RTX at 1080p without significant frame drops at ultra settings, and it's got enough VRAM to deliver. Also consider replacing the HDD with a SSD, but be prepared for a bit of delicate work in doing this, as you'll be dealing with some really small Philips-head screws. As a plus, the SSD is an M.2 drive, so bootup is more-or-less instantaneous once you get past the POST screen.

This years new edition to Acer's gaming laptop lineup has many improvements over last years mid range options. The design is almost exactly the same, with the sporty aerodynamic look , red highlights, and red back light keyboard. Except that this model is slightly smaller, they have trimmed the design for a smaller bezel around the screen. Keeping the same size screen, but tailoring the rest of the laptops size to match that. Which gives the design a sleeker look. The screen resolution is still 1080p, but offers a better color spectrum over last years models, The ports are pretty much the same 3 usb, 1 usb type-C , HDMI , Ethernet, and headphone jack. Sadly this model does not have a memory card reader. The speakers are stereo but don't seem to be as loud as last years R5ED model, but still sufficient. With that said, everything else seems to be an improvement. The combination of the SSD and the 1TB hard drive is a good mix of both worlds. Achieving virtually instant on, and quicker load times for windows and important system apps, while still keeping a large hard drive capacity giving gamers the ability to keep several high capacity games loaded and ready to go. The combination of the i5-9300H and GTX 1650 , produces excellent results for a mid range laptop. Almost everything was twice as fast as the R5ED with the Ryzen 5 and RX 560X. Most games ran at 60fps, including Mortal Kombat 11, and Call of Duty, with some of the more intense games like the Witcher 3 running around 46 to 50fps. But all games ran smoothly with no apparent jitter or lag. This gaming laptop ran almost all games perfectly, expect for the new Doom demo, as this graphics card is not capable of producing the real-time ray tracing effects that the RTX series of graphics cards are. So, stay clear of any real-time ray tracing games, as they will just not load. ( Which at this point is only a handful of games. ) Novabench scored this laptop at 2084, which is pretty fair for most mid-level gaming pc's. Battery life is still good at about 8hrs on the right power plan, but I prefer to use the laptop on highest performance setting, so that drops the time frame down a lot. For intense games, it's just easier to stay plugged in, so as not to worry about power consumption. The Nitro 5 features still include easy access to the graphics card features and Nitrosense (which now has a dedicated key by the backspace bar), giving you manual control over the cooling fan, and quick access to power plans. LCD overdrive and True-harmony settings. The LCD overdrive feature, provides a smoother more detailed look during action sequences, to get you a better eye on the competition. It really does reduce the motion blur, and haziness experienced with slower refresh rates. True-Harmony settings include EQ presets to cover most game genres , including FPS and sports, as well as offering movies, music and voice settings. Overall this is a very capable gaming laptop with a lot of features. I have been impressed with it's performance so far.

This is the best bang for the buck laptop. Not loaded with bloatware and is fast, powerful, and has plenty of storage. Best purchase I have made in a long time

I purchased this computer for my grandson to practice for a coding competing. He was thrilled with the computer's speed, easy to use and "cool" looking computer.

Love the speed and sharp graphics on this laptop...just what I was looking for. Easy to set up, and very cool lighted keyboard which comes in handy in low light.

With the SSD it has a fast startup time. With SATA garden drive there is plenty of storage. No complaints withers graphics card that is installed with this model.

Great for distant education. My 8th grader daughter takes live classes, and has demand for other software support for other classes. Her speeds are great and she now has no problems engaging in special features of her classes. Her only complaints are trying to play live on Minecraft or other video games. Not good for live gamming and streaming. The speeds are not able to keep up making it almost impossible for her to play with others online. We are very satisfied overall.

The computer is lightening fast. The dual storage is amaizng. Brilliant display. Great for gaming and movies. Its a great entry level gaming laptop.

My 18 year old daughter is now less than a month from starting college. She had never owned a brand new computer. My wife and I knew that we needed to buy her a computer for school but she is also a big gaming person. We have been pleasantly surprised at the efficiency of this computer and we read some of the reviews that provided invaluable insight. We also talked to a Best Buy customer service rep who was very helpful. This computer may be on the lower price end for gaming but has been perfect for my daughter.

Best laptop I've owned. Runs super fast and is perfect for gaming. Handles fortnite and Minecraft like a champ. Great for the price.

Awesome laptop for college. It’s an added plus that it has a great graphics card. Will run games without an issue. Definitely worth the $$

I love this laptop. It does everything I need it to do, and plays the games I've wanted to be able to play at high quality settings. I did upgrade the RAM to 32GB, but that was b/c I wanted to do more video editing and thought it would help. The dual Drives with the one HDD and the on SSD is real nice... this thing boots up very quickly. I got it while it was on sale, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this to anyone looking for a budget gaming laptop.