Customer Ratings & Reviews

I upgraded from an Acer computer which was only an 8. So this new gamer edition is so much faster, has great color photos and way more capacity than I was limping along on. The larger screen is really helpful and is much brighter. I know I am going to enjoy every new feature I discover.

Acer - Nitro 5 17.3" Gaming Laptop First thing to consider is this is an $800 gaming laptop. There are going to be drawbacks and while the cons listed below are significant, you do a get a lot for your money. This is one of those products to set the proper expectations and you will be happy. Pros Power and speed – When I say power, I mean the overall power for the money. That being said, you will be hard pressed to find another laptop with i5-9300H processor and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 in this price range. There is no game nor program that I threw at it that it could not handle. 8GB should be enough for most games but I would really want 16GB. Storage – 512 GB of PCI-E SSD hard drive? Fantastic. There are two types of SSD hard drives – SATA and PCI-E. The PCI-E is the latest and fastest. Very nice. I’ve seen some other reviews that state it is a M-Sata drive but that is incorrect, look at the specs . Also, I benchmarked the hard drive, it clocked in over 1 GBPS whereas M-SATA will be less than half that. To confirm, I found the drive to be a Western Digital SN520 SDAPNUW-512G-1014, it is definitely PCI-E. Sound – I was never a fan of the sound on Acer laptops so I was not expecting the best. However, to my surprise, the sound is pretty good for a 17 inch laptop in this price range. Decent power ( I would not call it loud) but very crisp and clear. Connections – For a budget machine, the Nitro 5 has a wealth of ports. On the right side you'll find a 3.5mm headphone/mic combo jack, two USB 2.0 ports and a power port. You have an HDMI out and even an ethernet jack. Excellent. Neither Pro nor con- Display – not great but not bad. I found it not as bright as some other displays in the same price reange. In fact it was a bit dim compared to some. It is completely usable but rather unremarkable. But you do get 17.3 “ of real estate so there is good bang for the buck. Cons Keyboard - So the Acer has a major annoyance that , frankly, will not let me recommend this laptop to anyone. The backlight keyboard will shut off after 30 seconds and then you have to fumble to press a key for the backlight to turn on. According to what I read, it is written into the BIOS and there is no way to change it. What possible good reason would Acer have this feature? There is none. One may guess it is to save battery life. Good assumption but that is not the case. First the energy savings is minimal. Second, the keyboard goes dark regardless of whether you are on battery or plugged in. Typing is okay but it is spaced a little odd for me. Can’t really say that is con, I am used to typing on smaller keyboards that lack numeric keypad. Construction and build quality – While I do not have issues with something being made of plastic, it is clearly evident that the plastic used on the Acer Nitro 5 is budget quality. Lots of flex and give, really not what I expect in today’s day and age. What I really do not like in the construction is the gigantic bezel around the screen. Just good awful, what was Acer thinking? I know they made it smaller this year but I do not like it. Take a look in person to see how truly large it is - the bottom bezel is 1 ¼ inches, the top bezel is ¾ of an inch and each side bezel is 3/8 of an inch. Now to be fair, most of the competition has large bezels in this price range but there are a few with much smaller. Part of it is to give stability to a large screen , particularly since the Acer is an all plastic design ( which is to be expected in this price range.) There has to be a better design, even at this price point. I separated out this from the display section above because it is not truly a con of the display, just the design holding the display in place. I saw some other review that list this as a “ BEZELESS IPS panel.” It is not bezel-less by any means Inconvenient power adapter place – Right in middle of the right side of laptop. It partially obstructs either the vents or a USB. Uggh. Nearly all the competition places near the top edge for a reason. Battery life – I got 3 to 4 hours of average use the less than 2 hours of intensive use. This is below average compared to other laptops. I think if you are going to have a laptop with this much power, it should have a bigger battery. In other reviews, I have seen 5 to 6 hours of battery for casual use but I did not experience the same. Conclusion – This is a no frills laptop that will give bargain hunters the best bang for the buck. If you upgrade the ram , you will have a laptop that is a true powerhouse capable of handling photo editing and even the most intensive games. While the build quality and screen is not great, it realty does matter if you output to a monitor and rarely move it around ( at nearly 6 lbs , it is not exactly lightweight.) So would I recommend it? No, and that is for one reason. I cannot stand that the keyboard backlight does not stay on. I cannot find any adjustment and it is just too annoying for me. If you are a person that it would not bother and looking for the most power for a bargain, then this is laptop you should look at.

The computer really does run great and the overall specs for the price are great. I have seen a lot of complaints about the speakers but personally they sound great to me. The worst software aspect of this is probably the processor, the graphics card is capable of a lot but it seems like the processor holds it back in some areas. My other problem was that the computer came with some drivers installed incorrectly. I had to uninstall all of my graphics drivers and re-install them before the card would work properly. I also had problems with the audio jack not picking up my headphones, but it seems to work fine now, though I'm not entirely sure why that changed. The BIOS on this laptop is also extremely limited, and unlike other Acer computers does not have an expanded advanced version. This isn't really a deal breaker for everyone as a lot of people don't go into BIOS much, but it was very irritating for me. However, overall, it's definitely a great laptop and one of the best deals for the price. I just feel like the driver problems I've run into shouldn't be something I should have to deal with.

I wanted a modest gaming laptop, this purchase is fantastic. I love the backlit keyboard and the number pad. Battery doesn't last too long, but we mostly use it for gaming so it is assumed that drains the battery quickly. My only other complaint is the max. volume of the speaker, but it's meant for gaming so are a solid alternative.

Great color and sound. Good quality build and very fast. Computer starts up in less then 5 seconds. Will be upgrading the ram from 8 to 16 GB soon not that it’s even needed but only because it costs $45 and is do it yourself easy. so, great machine!

This was really hard for me cuz I'm an acer fan. the acer predator was awesome and didn't give me the problems this laptop gave me. where to start this is hard for me but because like I said I'm a big acer fan. pros: 1) this laptop looks awesome! 2) love the keyboard 3) screen size 17.3 now for the dirty Cons: 1) where you plug the power cored in is a bit hard. 2) the screen frame is not thick. 3) after a few weeks it stop charging 4) due to the frame not being a little thicker you get presser marks every time you open or close the screen. 5) for the price it should of been better built. its not a 200 or 300 dollar laptop. its a 800-900+ dollar laptop. so yeah. I would not recommend this laptop to anyone unless they recall this line and fix the issues. im really disappointed in Acer for this. I got lucky I bought mine at the being of the holiday. for my first one I bought stop charging after like 3 weeks or so and so I traded it out for another one thinking it might of been just that one but it wasn't the second one also was hard to plugin but I didn't have the charging problems they both had presser issues around the screen but the second one was worst in that area. by the camera there was 2 big brown marks you can see and it was worst on black screens and so i returned it to get my money back.

Great extra gaming computer for the go. I recommend getting a desktop for pc gaming. But if your like me and don't want to take apart your everyday gaming pc when you travel, this is a great gaming laptop to take with you. It is an i5, so it isn't designed to be your main gaming machine. But I've been playing the new call of duty and star wars battlefront 2 with it with no problem.

With so many entry level gaming laptops and releases of next generation GPU's and CPU's, I would consider the option of waiting. If you need something right now and you don't expect ultra settings on AAA titles, this is an ok option. It all depends what you're looking for. I use it for light gaming and my main pc. Can get hot, however with an undervolting it's not as bad.

Great laptop for conducting online classes with video. The 3 USB ports are a great feature. It may be larger and heavier than others but the performance is excellent. An additional 8GB of Ram would be nice but you can always add on. Very happy with this purchase.

We actually needed this due to Covid-19 and had to have staff work remote. We used it as a business computer but needed the large screen. Processor is fast and the computer has been great for the price.

This laptop runs older games (I use it for SW:TOR) on ultra super smooth (60 FPS). However I need dual monitor support and the USB-C port in this only supports USB so you can’t run a usb-c to mini-DisplayPort adapter. But if you want good performance at a good price this is a solid choice.

Bought the computer because it best fit my gaming needs! It’s super fast, does not lag at all! It also works great for non gaming needs as well. Finally finding a laptop that has a number pad was a great plus as well! Highly recommend!

Decent specs good buy for money entry level runs most games

I usually stick to HP for my work computers but wanted an affordable gaming computer and the price was right on this one. Just added 8GB of ram and guild wars2 and many other games are running flawlessly on it, Quite happy wi5h my purchase.

I really liked my Toshiba however, all things must keep up with technological advances. This Acer Nitro is pure. Fast, great graphics and reasonably priced. I am still transitioning from Windows 7 to Windows 10, but so far, I love this computer.

I would highly recommend this gaming laptop. I am a nursing student and it not only is awesome for school and powerful enough to operate the programs but also powerful enough to play games that i enjoy when i take a break from studying.

Brought it for my wife to work from home. No bloatware and easy to set it up. The gaming performance score is above average-hight. It's better than the one my son built for himself with GTX1550Ti. Best value for the money.

I set it up and it was working perfectly, and I had already downloaded a few games and gave them a try. All of them worked well, and then a few hours into using it, the screen froze and I had to force shutdown. Once I turned it back on, the keyboard lit up, and it sounded like it was booting up, but the screen stays black. I had to try to force shutdown and reboot multiple times before the screen came back on, and a few minutes of normal use, it froze again. It was after the second time I decided to return this item. I have no doubts that this is a good product, and I probably just got a defective device, but reading on forums and the reviews of other people who got this laptop, many of them had the same issue as I did. I would not recommend this item just because of the screen issue, but if you're willing to take the chance, it is a very good laptop in terms of performance.

Works great for all of my daughters needs she isn’t much of a gamer so I can’t judge to that however I have played games on her laptop works just as good as my other daughters Alienware graphics wise but again can’t judge for overheating an what not when playing long times I get in a few races on a game she has

We did a good amount of research before deciding on this machine. My son has had laptops since he was about age 6 and started school. As time passed his love for programming and video games has increased. After going through about 3 entry level ($300 range machines) and always running them for a lot more than they were worth, we decided to buy him a machine that he could use for schoolwork but would also keep up with him when playing, running design programs and maybe even get to edit videos and animate on. It’s got a great GPU and the machine’s been running smoothly while he plays online, runs Adobe suite apps and listens to Spotify all at the same time. He’s 11 now, but I’m sure this machine will give him a good 3-5 years of use before needing an upgrade.