hi i'm gideon from technologyman.com
ace's nitro 5 is a gaming notebook with
an attractive price
the appeal of these laptops is their
higher end spec also make them a great
option for photo and video editing on
the move or just a fast everyday
computer
it's still not cheap at around 800
pounds or 800 you can pay a lot more for
a laptop far less capable
this model comes with 144hz 15.6 inch
full hd ips screen
512 gigabytes of fast ssd storage eight
gigabytes of ram
and an nvidia gtx 1650 ti graphics card
this price is not perfect battery life
is not great the screen is only average
and it's mostly made of plastic
but it can handle most current games at
its native resolution and it's no slouch
editing your videos in adobe premiere
pro
or your photos in adobe photoshop feel
free to use the video chapters in the
timeline
or the time stamps below to jump to the
section you're interested in if you
don't want to watch the complete video
could this be the perfect budget gaming
or performance laptop let's find out
inside the box you get the laptop itself
a beefy 135 watt charger
and a couple of brief getting started
guys you can download a complete user
manual which i'll provide a direct link
to below
the left side of the laptop has a
kensington lock slot a cooling vent
a gigabit ethernet port two usb 3.2 gen
one ports
and a combined headphone microphone jack
the right side has a usb 3.2 gen 2 type
c port another usb 3.2 gen 1 port
and a full size hdmi port and another
vent i would have liked to have seen an
sd card slot
but it's great to see a full speed gen 2
usb type-c port
that supports speeds up to 10 gigabits
per second double that of the 5 gigabits
of other gen 1 ports
this is particularly useful for gaming
or video editing which i'll come back to
later
you can't use this port for charging the
laptop or for output to a display
the back of the laptop has the charging
port with further cooling vents
on either side the lid can just about be
opened with one hand
revealing a full sized chiclet star
keyboard with a number pad
the keys have red edges and lettering
and there's also adjustable red back
lighting
the track pad also with the red trim
measures 106 millimeters by 78
millimeters
and is offset to the left the laptop is
made almost entirely of plastic the type
that does attract fingerprints
but it feels fairly robust especially
around the keyboard and palm rest
the lid does have a little flex
especially down towards the hinges which
won't offer a huge amount of protection
for the fragile led panel behind it
unlike some gaming laptops apart from
its angular design and red protrusions
around the vents at the back
it doesn't look too much like a gaming
laptop when closed the red keys red trim
around the trackpad
and red keyboard backlighting show off
its credentials when you open the laptop
but it's not too overdone if you wanted
to use it as an everyday laptop as well
the base of the laptop feels rigid with
four rubber feet and further venting
i'll discuss removing this bottom panel
to upgrade the laptop later
the laptop is 363 millimeters wide 255
millimeters deep
and 28 millimeters thick including its
feet it weighs 2
176 grams a little less than listed
you need to ensure the ac adapter is
completely inserted into the charging
port
it will firmly click into place if the
charging led doesn't light up it's not
fully seated you need to push a little
harder
the right angle adapter also needs to be
parallel to the back of the laptop
otherwise it can interfere with the lid
with its fast nvme ssd
finishing off the windows install took
around 10 minutes
there is some junk ware that i
uninstalled including software from
norton
but i've seen a lot worse i let the
laptop use a free built-in windows
defender for anti-virus
if you need further protection i'd
usually recommend malwarebytes
there's also acer care center to update
drivers and guide you through backup and
recovery that i also left installed
as well as acer's nitro sense with its
own dedicated key for configuring and
monitoring the laptop's performance
there's a nine millimeter bezel around
the size of the 15.6 inch display
the top bezel is 16 millimeters but
includes a 720p webcam
and dual microphones the bottom bezel
with the acer logo measures 30
millimeters
i particularly like the keyboard which
has over 1.5 millimeter of travel
and is very comfortable to type on even
for longer periods and it's fairly quiet
too
there is a little flex in the middle and
i'm not a huge fan of the accentuated
gaming wasd
and arrow keys at least you can turn
down or off the red back lighting
it's not too bad and this is primarily a
gaming laptop
but i would have preferred the emphasis
on these keys being achieved with
lighting that could be switched off for
everyday use
need to hold down the function keys by
default to access the various hotkeys
for example to turn down or off the back
lighting brightness
if you rarely use the function keys and
want easier access to these hotkeys
you can switch this behavior in the bios
hold down the f2 key
when you start up the laptop to enter
bios and change the function key
behavior to media key
under the main tab the trackpad is
plastic but still feels fairly smooth as
far as windows trackpads go
and has positive clicks if you choose
clicks over taps
i still much prefer using the laptop
with a mouse and it's a little too much
off center for my liking
the laptop has a full hd 1920 by 1080
ips screen
it's not a touch screen that does mean
it can have a nice non-reflective matte
finish
the hinges feel fairly solid let it tilt
back a decent 150 degrees
without too much wobble the panel looks
fairly sharp and has decent viewing
angles
my display did have a single bright
green sub pixel which is quite
noticeable
on a dark background there isn't an
awful lot you can do about it and asa
doesn't consider it a warranty issue
unless there are more than two it has
144 hertz refresh rate which can be an
advantage for gaming which i'll come
back to
but it also makes scrolling and moving
around windows super smooth
it has a listed response time of 3
milliseconds it's difficult to confirm
this claim precisely
but in the tests i ran it seems
plausible it's less than 5 milliseconds
and i didn't notice any ghosting either
and it supports variable refresh rate
via freesync using an xrite i1 display
pro monitor calibrator
i measured a maximum brightness of just
over 330 nits
which is bright enough indoors would be
okay outside if it's not too sunny
this was with a laptop charging and at
maximum brightness
but dropped to around 246 nits when on
battery even with a brightness slider
still at maximum more often than not
you'd want the extra brightness
available and you're not near a plug
socket
luckily there is a way to disable this
behavior open the amd radeon software
and under the display tab disable very
bright the brightness should jump back
up to its full brightness again
this is not really a laptop intended for
critical color work
but i was a little disappointed that it
could only display 59
of the srgb color space the spectrum of
colors that most devices conform to
from phones to tvs to monitors and
around 40
of the adobe rgb and p3 color space
i also measured the color accuracy or
delta e of the screen
delta e is a metric for understanding
how the human eye sees color difference
with a value of less than one being not
perceptible to the human eye and a value
between one and two being barely
perceptible
i measured an average delta e of 2.85
which is acceptable
and an improvement over the 4.95 i got
before calibration
these aren't hugely impressive results
but for general use it's more than
adequate
and the brightness was fairly uniform
across the screen in a final uniformity
test
the laptop has a 57.48 watt hour battery
which is a little on the low side for
its intended use it charges with 135
watt 19.5 volt 6.92 amp ac adapter
with a five and a half millimeter pin
gaming laptops always need hefty charges
this one is slimmer and lighter than
many others i've come across
a full charge takes around two and a
half hours with a charging led changing
from amber to blue
it doesn't support fast charging a 30
minute charge from just below 20
with a low battery warning only brought
it up to 34
acer claims the battery lasts up to 10
hours but don't list any details as to
how they achieve this
i ran pc mark 10's range of battery
tests which simulate
various usage scenarios with the screen
brightness set to 200 nits
and the laptop power mode set to better
battery with lighter office use
it did get between six and a half hours
and nine hours 41 minutes which is not
too bad
but in the gaming test the laptop only
managed one hour 17 minutes
if you want further information on these
tests i'll provide a link down below
i also conducted a few real life tests
as a worst case scenario i ran forza
horizon 4 in benchmark mode continuously
until the battery ran out starting out
with a battery at 100
the screen brightness was 246 nits the
laptop lasted just 53 minutes
i was hoping for a little more watching
a full hd youtube video full screen on
continuous loop with a screen at 60
brightness or around 200 nits
the laptop managed almost three hours in
general light use
the screen at around 60 brightness
browsing the web watching youtube videos
and writing documents
i got between four and six hours i did
connect the ravpower powerhouse ac
portable charger i reviewed a while back
to try and extend the battery life
particularly for gaming i wasn't
expecting it to work since the laptop's
watt charger exceeds the power pack's
100 watt maximum capacity
but in my testing it was able to charge
a laptop even running the intensive
3dmark time spy benchmark
there are a few iterations of this
laptop this model comes with an amd
ryzen 5
4 600 h three gigahertz hexa or six core
processor
eight gigabytes of ddr4 memory a 512
nvme ssd and a discrete nvidia geforce
1650 ti graphics card
for everyday use it's a western digital
sn530
nvme ssd that makes it feel quick using
crystal disk mark to test the speed of
the drive
i measured 2 488 megabytes per second
read speed
and 1 797 megabytes per second write
speed
this is comparable to the xbox series
x's built-in ssd
windows boots in less than 10 seconds
and waits from sleep in less than three
seconds
games load pretty quickly as do larger
applications
shadow of the tomb raider is in 26
seconds fortnite in just over a minute
adobe premiere pro starts up in around
14 seconds
games still load a little faster on an
xbox series x fortnite took around 50
seconds to load
there's not a huge amount in it running
the pc mark 10 benchmark which measures
the computer's overall performance
for a range of office and productivity
tasks gave a score of 5117
which compares well against similar
machines in the benchmark database
running the geekbench 5 cpu benchmark
gave a single course score of 1053
and a multi-core score 49.69 which are
both decent results
its compute score for its graphics
capabilities was 44801
the user benchmark test gave the laptop
a high 90 desktop score
with a 1650 ti getting a gaming score 41
this is a useful test that you can run
on your own machine to see what benefits
upgrading to this laptop might bring
gaming laptops should also make good
photo and video editing machines
ideally you'd want to upgrade the ram to
at least 16 gigabytes which i'll come
back to
but i was still able to edit a complex
sequence in adobe premiere pro
these were 4k clips and 1080p timeline
and i had created proxies or lower
resolution substitute files
as i do even on my powerful video
editing desktop pc
i could play and scrub the timeline
without any dropped frames which is
quite a challenging task
unfortunately i couldn't get the
sequence to export using the 1650 ti
hardware encoding and software encoding
using the cpu took over an hour
this sequence exported in seven minutes
on my desktop pc with an i7 8700
processor
an nvidia rtx 2070 video card and 32
gigabytes of ram
more ram would certainly help here i
also ran the ul pro seon photo
and video editing benchmarks which are
real-life tests using adobe lightroom
and adobe premiere pro you can see how
the laptop fared
i'll discuss upgrade options shortly but
even without opening up the machine
the usb type-c port supports fast
external drives which are an excellent
addition
not only for fast loading storage of
additional games but also as a separate
media drive
fast enough to use for video editing
it's always a good idea to have your
media on a separate drive to your system
i attached a 500 gigabyte sandisky
extreme pro drive
which measured 971 megabytes per second
read and 920 megabytes per second write
speed
in crystal disk mark almost its maximum
spec 1050 megabytes per second
premiere pro was happily editing
directly off this external storage
this usb-c port also supports charging
up to 5 volts of 3 amps or 15 watts
if you have cable devices this is a
useful feature
in general use the laptop is
surprisingly quiet fan noise
is barely noticeable until you start
pushing the laptop a bit and then you
can definitely hear it
it's loud as playing games as you'd
expect but most of the time you're
probably wearing headphones anyway
the 720p hd webcam did a pretty good job
and would be more than acceptable for
video chats
and the two mics either side do a decent
job too there's no privacy slider but a
green led lights up just beside the
camera to let you know it's active
this is how it compares to the popular
full hd logitech c920
you can also hear the differences in
microphone quality the stereo speakers
sit just under the race front section
on either side of the laptop you can use
a nitro sense software to switch their
eq
preset this works a lot better with
headphones attached
they don't sound great like most laptop
speakers with very little bass
but would again be okay for video chats
[Music]
got me upside down
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
for anything else i'd want to use
headphones or external speakers
the integrated wifi card impressively
supports the latest wi-fi six
with speeds of up to a theoretical 2.4
gigabits per second
if you are lucky enough to have wi-fi
six in your house
even over 802.11 ac or wi-fi five as
it's now
known i get a very good connection
around the house connected to my unified
access points
matching my iphone 11. this intel module
also supports the very latest bluetooth
5.1 standard
with its extended range i got a reliable
connection to several devices
including my xbox series x controller
even if you don't have wi-fi six
or any compatible bluetooth 5.1 devices
it's great to see these new standards
that will become commonplace soon
already implemented in relatively
affordable laptops
this is a gaming laptop first and
foremost and it handled most of the
games i tried a decent frame rate at its
full 1080p
native resolution with at least high
graphic settings
you should be able to play even new and
upcoming games you might just have to
settle for medium or even low settings
sometimes
depending on the game and what frame
rate you're after you've got a 3d mark
score
the time spy benchmark a 3948 which is
respectable
3dmark also predicts how the laptop may
fare in real games fortnite played fine
in its maximum epic settings
averaging around 45 frames per second
and around 70 frames per second in high
mode
there was the occasional stuttering
where the frame rate dropped briefly
forza horizon 4 looked like it wasn't
going to play with an error message
about the hardware not meeting minimum
specs even though it does
but ignoring the messages it played very
well averaging a smooth 55 frames per
second with ultra graphic settings in
its benchmark mode
upgrading the ram to 16 gigabytes i
would imagine would overcome the initial
warning
shadow of the tomb raider averaged a
decent 46 frames per second with a high
preset
which still looked great i also played
doom eternal with high settings which
average around 50 frames per second with
no stuttering
there's only four gigabytes of video
card ram or vram which isn't enough for
higher graphics settings
i also tried it with my cycling turbo
and the zwift cycling app
it's not the most demanding game and it
ran smoothly as i alluded to earlier the
fan is noisy when playing games
but it does keep the laptop cool the
exterior of the laptop barely got above
40 celsius
for all the games i use nitrosense to
put the laptop in high performance mode
in nitrosense you can adjust cooling
yourself and monitor the temperature
and loads of the cpu and gpu you can
also turn on cool boost mode which
increases the fan speed to increase
cooling
i generally found auto mode worked fine
it's nice to be able to turn down the
fans
if they're too noisy for you for general
tasks although it will most likely
throttle the speed of the laptop and i
wouldn't recommend that when gaming
the laptop has some excellent upgrade
options if you're happy removing the
bottom cover
unfortunately it's held on quite
securely and it's not particularly easy
if you've not done this sort of thing
before unplug the ac adapter
and remove the 11 screws with a phillips
number one screwdriver
and then very carefully unclip the cover
ideally using a spudger or pick
i started from near the hinges and
worked around from there
the battery is not glued in and it's
easily replaceable when it gets the end
of its life if you can get hold of one
there are two screws and two tabs
holding it in
there's a single eight gigabyte ddr4
3200 megahertz memory module
the laptop supports up to 32 gigabytes
this is the easiest upgrade
and you could just add another 3200mhz
module
for the best performance though i'd
remove and sell the existing memory
and insert a matched pair of eight
gigabyte modules
there's a 512 gigabyte western digital
m.2 nvme
drive already installed there's space
for another one and you should be able
to set them up in raid 0 for even faster
performance
that's not something i've tried yet on
top of that there's even space for a two
and a half inch drive either an ssd
or mechanical drive acer even supply the
required motherboard cable
and set of screws which are often quite
hard to get hold of so don't lose them
if you plan to upgrade the laptop in the
future
if you wanted the laptop as a video
editing machine you could add a second
m.2
nvme drive your media and then add a
large cheaper two and a half inch drive
for archiving
the acer nitro 5 is a well thought out
budget gaming laptop
it can play most games at decent
graphical settings at its native 1080p
resolution
its fast 512gb nvme ssd makes the laptop
feel quick in general use
and it's big enough for a few larger
games there's also the gen 2 usb c
port to easily add additional fast
external storage
and the upgrade options are even more
plentiful if you're happy removing the
bottom cover
if you are i'd recommend upgrading the
memory to 16 gigabytes
battery life for gaming was a little
disappointing as was a limited coverage
of the srgb color space and the graphics
card while capable
doesn't really do justice to the 144hz
screen
you won't be able to play many games
approaching those refresh rates without
dropping graphical settings a fair
amount
but jumping up to a model in the range
with an nvidia g4 1660 ti
or 2060 also pushes the price up
significantly
for most people these shortcomings and
it's all plastic build are acceptable
considering it's asking price
and overall if you're after a budget
gaming laptop or a fast general purpose
laptop that can handle gaming or video
editing
i'll definitely add this model to your
list of contenders but i'd love to know
your thoughts
are you considering this laptop is there
another model in your shortlist i should
take a look at
please let me know down below and as
always if you have any questions please
ask
i read every comment and i'll do my best
to respond
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you