Acer's Latest Pre-Built PC: A Mixed Bag

The latest pre-built PC from Acer has shown decent performance, but it's far from perfect. One of the things that stood out during my testing was how well some games ran, even at high settings. Fortnite, with its competitive settings, ran smoothly and consistently, as did most esports titles. However, these results are not unique to this system, as many games can run well on lower-end hardware.

Unfortunately, the one percent lows for the majority of games were still pretty bad, meaning that the gaming performance was stiffer than it should have been. This is likely due to the single 8 gig stick of RAM in the system. If you look at escape from tarkov running here, it's clear that this is a system with some issues. The stuttering and lag were noticeable even on lower settings.

To address these issues, I decided to upgrade the RAM to 16 gigs and see how much of a difference that would make. While escape from tarkov ran slightly better, it still struggled with one percent lows. However, battlefield 5 and gta 5 ran significantly better, with noticeable improvements in performance and smoother frame rates.

One area where this system excelled was in its standard configuration, which came with an SSD instead of a hard drive. This made for a much more responsive and user-friendly experience, especially during everyday tasks.

However, there is one major issue that Acer still needs to address: the temperatures on this system are a major concern. Despite cutting out holes in the case, it's clear that this system will overheat easily, even with moderate gaming sessions. I witnessed firsthand how quickly the temperature can spike to 83 degrees Celsius during a single match of battlefield 5.

Considering the ambient temperature was around 22 degrees Celsius, and the system is brand new and dust-free, it's clear that these issues are not going away anytime soon. As time goes on, dust will accumulate, and temperatures will rise even further, making this system less than ideal for long-term use.

The cherry on top of this pre-built PC's shortcomings is an unexpected issue: the presence of "Aunt Alma" or whatever Acer calls it - a seemingly benign feature that has been plagued by problems in the past. It's as if these machines are possessed by some kind of malevolent force, which is certainly a conversation starter.

In conclusion, while this pre-built PC from Acer shows signs of improvement over its predecessors, there are still many areas where they need to improve before recommending this system to potential buyers. The temperatures, RAM limitations, and mysterious "features" all contribute to a frustrating experience that will leave you wondering if it's worth the investment.

If you're in the market for a pre-built PC, you may want to look elsewhere. While Acer has taken steps in the right direction, there is still much work to be done before this system can live up to its full potential. Until then, I'll be keeping an eye on these systems and providing updates as more information becomes available.

If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to the channel for more content like this. For more information about my streams and other projects, check out the description below.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enseveral months ago i did a video on what i then proudly termed the acer loser nitro suckface edition pre-built gaming system and there was a hell of a lot wrong with that pc chief of which is the fact that there was so many weird software crashes performance glitches and blue screens of death that i'm still convinced that system was haunted it was so haunted in fact i actually had to move to a different apartment to escape the ghost that was unleashed after turning that pc on so when i saw that acer released a new supposedly refined version of the nitro suckface edition i just had to buy one and see if they fixed their alma problem i really hope they did because moving is hard but before we get to that today's video actually has a sponsor to help me with my weird pre-built addiction today's video is kindly sponsored by skillshare an amazing online learning community of learning if you want to just get better at doing things or develop new skills skillshare is a great place to go skillshare classes cover multiple topics like animation design illustration photography film business and writing most classes are under 60 minutes long which means that if you have a short attention span like me this will still work very well for you a specific class that recently caught my eye was from plant to cup brew an amazing cup of coffee by michael phillips which is perfect for those of you that loves to caffeinate yourself but you want to get a better taste out of the process skillshare is also affordable at around 10 a month with an annual subscription and the first 1000 people to click on the link in my description will get a free trial of skillshare premium membership so thank you again skillshare for sponsoring this video and remember keep on learning and here we have it they've clearly updated the box with the new acer nitro 50 with what i hope is a properly licensed mech warrior gameplay screenshot very nice the box is actually weirdly light for one of these pre-built systems so luckily today i'm not going to throw out my back which is exciting in here we've got a bag with some stickers and then as is tradition this pre-built also comes with some e-waste peripherals some more e-waste and then down here we have the whole pc the packing foam is some of the worst quality that i've seen and it means it probably won't hold up very well to a delivery man having a bad day hmm this actually seems to be reasonably different to the old one i don't mind the way it looks now straight off the bat it's not super promising it doesn't seem like they've done anything about the terrible front airflow with these cases yeah there's there's a little bit of ventilation here but i mean that basically doesn't count and then under here they've got that red lip that they've carried over from evga and the previous one i guess it's the same thing on the top panel there are also these but at least we tried gaps the front i o is pretty similar we've got a usb 3 uh type c port and then a microphone headphone jack so it's reasonably useful and then a massive power button look at how long that is on the side as far as airflow goes it's looking way better i mean that's a lot more ventilation than on the previous case and it looks like this one may actually come with an exhaust fan which is new yeah there is actually an exhaust fan real fancy uh when it comes to the rear i o it is super basic but it's very functional you've got four usb 3 ports two usb 2 ports you've got ethernet you've got your audio jacks here and then you've got your dvi port for some reason and then hdmi and uh displayport another big change is they've actually swapped the orientation of the power supply so it's in the basement now as opposed to the top which actually really worries me because look there's like basically no clearance under the case like what the hell where is it gonna get oh do you know what it's probably it's probably fan up which that's also a terrible idea let's let's get in here and see what's going on oh wow there's a there's a lot going on in here now first things first this power supply is actually facing down that's a terrible idea where is it supposed to get air flow from that's a real choking hazard down here but at least it's not going to affect the gpu thermals too badly now this is actually a gtx 1660 super so this is a reasonably powerful graphics card but it is a pretty wimpy looking version of it which has a huge back plate for some reason i guess that's the reduced gpu sag it's actually screwed down into the base of the case over there that's very interesting and as you can see it does mean that the gpu's not going anywhere and then over here we've got actual ventilated cutouts in the front of the case which you know the previous version of the acer nitro 50 it was just one solid metal panel as far as the cooler goes it's the standard pre-built affair the cpu under there is an i-510 400f which is not a super hot cpu but it'll still be interesting to see what kind of temperatures we get with that cooler and then there's the huge pain in my pre-built ass honestly i'm just sick of complaining about it at this point but don't do single 8 gig sticks single channels bad okay the motherboard unfortunately still looks like it's real poo poo garbage just like the last time and if anything the power delivery actually looks worse somehow but the pcb is black as opposed to green so that's better i guess i really want to see what power supply this is but i'm going to have to take it out so just give me a moment the power supply is not the worst thing ever it's a 500 watt 80 plus gold rated psu i am just very worried about how hot it's gonna run with this vent just face down being choked out all day long when it comes to the rest of the layout it's actually a huge improvement over the previous version of the acer nitro 50. i mean the fact that you have really easy access to the m.2 slot for an ssd upgrade is really nice with the previous version it was just tucked in the bowels of the system the hard drive cages are also much more easily accessible the fact that they also have a case fan included is also a nice touch so yeah i'm very interested to see how this new acer nitro 50 performs so let's put it back together fire it up and see how it runs so now let's fire it up see how it performs how much venereal disease it actually has on it and if it's possessed in the way that the previous acer nitro 50 was i really hope i don't have to move to a different apartment again after switching this one on but yeah i'm willing to take that risk ooh it lights up on the inside as well fancy oh it's a new stock background they have your amazon shopping cart set in the bottom here and mozilla firefox that's interesting uh let's have a look at what kind of bloatware we're looking at here first off there's a bunch of acercrap booking.com that's that's weird and then sound based stuff so that's for the for the built-in sound card on the the poopoo garbage motherboard um linkedin that's annoying i mean it's not okay yeah there's even like photo stuff power director yeah there's there's quite a lot on here this is this is fairly standard acer affair they just load these down with venereal disease oh okay so it does actually come with geforce experience preloaded so it means that you can update your drivers and stuff yeah i actually need to plug it into the internet now in terms of the gaming performance it's okay i guess i don't know maybe i was being a bit overzealous with the settings that i used for all of the games but like battlefield 5 for example runs decently well at the settings that i used the thing that you have to bear in mind though is that the one percent lows for all of these games were pretty bad which means that the gaming performance and the results were a lot more stuttery than you wanted to be which is which is not amazing although fortnite with competitive settings and pretty much all of the esports titles ran really well even the one percent lows but all of those games can run pretty well on your grandmother so you know that's not that big an achievement i think the main reason that the one percent lows were so bad on the rest of the games is because of that single 8 gig stick of ram i mean if you look at escape from tarkov running here like it's not an amazing experience and it is a lot more stuttery than it normally is so what i decided to do was drop 16 gigs of ram in there to see how much of a difference that makes and with escape from takov with 16 gigs of ram you're still sitting pegged at 16 gigs of ram so even that kind of seems like it's not enough but battlefield 5 and gta 5 ran significantly better and one of the biggest differences was the one percent lows assassin's creed valhalla didn't seem to care about the extra ram though so if i was unfortunately in the position where i had no other choice but to buy one of these i would definitely consider upgrading the ram to two 8 gig sticks but bear in mind this system is a real fussy little when it comes to ram if your ram isn't ge dec compliant then it's just gonna run at its base frequency of 2133 megahertz which was the case with the tridizi ram that i used for the the 16 gig tests so that's a very important thing you need to look out for but now we get to what is still one of the big problems with this pre-built the temperatures they went through all of the effort to cut a bunch more holes in the case but it doesn't matter if you have so little cooling surface area on both the cpu and the gpu so yeah you can have airflow up the butt but it's still gonna overheat it doesn't take very long of playing battlefield 5 for you to hit that 83 degree celsius limit and it just sits there throughout the entire match and bear in mind this is in a room with an ambient temperature of 22 degrees celsius like if you're in a hotter country it's going to overheat really badly and it's a brand new system with no dust in it so considering the airflow patterns that they used in this case dust and temperatures are just going to get worse and worse over time and then there's the final nail in the coffin of this pre-built unfortunately it is still possessed by aunt alma or whatever like i don't i don't understand it but acer really has a problem with weird ghosts and gremlins in their machine maybe they need to have like an exorcism at their factory or something granted i haven't been using this system very long and considering the fact that it's got an ssd in it as standard as opposed to a hard drive means that the day-to-day usability was much better than the previous version it just still has a couple of telltale signs of those gremlins to come but i'll keep you up to date about that i don't know if it's like a motherboard firmware issue but they need to fix that before you can get even close to recommending one of these systems so after all of the changes that they made unfortunately acer your pc still retains the title of acer loser nitro suckface edition don't get me wrong it's definitely an improvement in a step in the right direction but yeah you really need to sort out those gremlins i don't know what the hell is going on there but anyway if you like this video like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one i actually have an even more ridiculous pre-built video coming up on saturday so do subscribe if you don't want to miss that check out my stream and other stuff in the description below and until the next video bye youseveral months ago i did a video on what i then proudly termed the acer loser nitro suckface edition pre-built gaming system and there was a hell of a lot wrong with that pc chief of which is the fact that there was so many weird software crashes performance glitches and blue screens of death that i'm still convinced that system was haunted it was so haunted in fact i actually had to move to a different apartment to escape the ghost that was unleashed after turning that pc on so when i saw that acer released a new supposedly refined version of the nitro suckface edition i just had to buy one and see if they fixed their alma problem i really hope they did because moving is hard but before we get to that today's video actually has a sponsor to help me with my weird pre-built addiction today's video is kindly sponsored by skillshare an amazing online learning community of learning if you want to just get better at doing things or develop new skills skillshare is a great place to go skillshare classes cover multiple topics like animation design illustration photography film business and writing most classes are under 60 minutes long which means that if you have a short attention span like me this will still work very well for you a specific class that recently caught my eye was from plant to cup brew an amazing cup of coffee by michael phillips which is perfect for those of you that loves to caffeinate yourself but you want to get a better taste out of the process skillshare is also affordable at around 10 a month with an annual subscription and the first 1000 people to click on the link in my description will get a free trial of skillshare premium membership so thank you again skillshare for sponsoring this video and remember keep on learning and here we have it they've clearly updated the box with the new acer nitro 50 with what i hope is a properly licensed mech warrior gameplay screenshot very nice the box is actually weirdly light for one of these pre-built systems so luckily today i'm not going to throw out my back which is exciting in here we've got a bag with some stickers and then as is tradition this pre-built also comes with some e-waste peripherals some more e-waste and then down here we have the whole pc the packing foam is some of the worst quality that i've seen and it means it probably won't hold up very well to a delivery man having a bad day hmm this actually seems to be reasonably different to the old one i don't mind the way it looks now straight off the bat it's not super promising it doesn't seem like they've done anything about the terrible front airflow with these cases yeah there's there's a little bit of ventilation here but i mean that basically doesn't count and then under here they've got that red lip that they've carried over from evga and the previous one i guess it's the same thing on the top panel there are also these but at least we tried gaps the front i o is pretty similar we've got a usb 3 uh type c port and then a microphone headphone jack so it's reasonably useful and then a massive power button look at how long that is on the side as far as airflow goes it's looking way better i mean that's a lot more ventilation than on the previous case and it looks like this one may actually come with an exhaust fan which is new yeah there is actually an exhaust fan real fancy uh when it comes to the rear i o it is super basic but it's very functional you've got four usb 3 ports two usb 2 ports you've got ethernet you've got your audio jacks here and then you've got your dvi port for some reason and then hdmi and uh displayport another big change is they've actually swapped the orientation of the power supply so it's in the basement now as opposed to the top which actually really worries me because look there's like basically no clearance under the case like what the hell where is it gonna get oh do you know what it's probably it's probably fan up which that's also a terrible idea let's let's get in here and see what's going on oh wow there's a there's a lot going on in here now first things first this power supply is actually facing down that's a terrible idea where is it supposed to get air flow from that's a real choking hazard down here but at least it's not going to affect the gpu thermals too badly now this is actually a gtx 1660 super so this is a reasonably powerful graphics card but it is a pretty wimpy looking version of it which has a huge back plate for some reason i guess that's the reduced gpu sag it's actually screwed down into the base of the case over there that's very interesting and as you can see it does mean that the gpu's not going anywhere and then over here we've got actual ventilated cutouts in the front of the case which you know the previous version of the acer nitro 50 it was just one solid metal panel as far as the cooler goes it's the standard pre-built affair the cpu under there is an i-510 400f which is not a super hot cpu but it'll still be interesting to see what kind of temperatures we get with that cooler and then there's the huge pain in my pre-built ass honestly i'm just sick of complaining about it at this point but don't do single 8 gig sticks single channels bad okay the motherboard unfortunately still looks like it's real poo poo garbage just like the last time and if anything the power delivery actually looks worse somehow but the pcb is black as opposed to green so that's better i guess i really want to see what power supply this is but i'm going to have to take it out so just give me a moment the power supply is not the worst thing ever it's a 500 watt 80 plus gold rated psu i am just very worried about how hot it's gonna run with this vent just face down being choked out all day long when it comes to the rest of the layout it's actually a huge improvement over the previous version of the acer nitro 50. i mean the fact that you have really easy access to the m.2 slot for an ssd upgrade is really nice with the previous version it was just tucked in the bowels of the system the hard drive cages are also much more easily accessible the fact that they also have a case fan included is also a nice touch so yeah i'm very interested to see how this new acer nitro 50 performs so let's put it back together fire it up and see how it runs so now let's fire it up see how it performs how much venereal disease it actually has on it and if it's possessed in the way that the previous acer nitro 50 was i really hope i don't have to move to a different apartment again after switching this one on but yeah i'm willing to take that risk ooh it lights up on the inside as well fancy oh it's a new stock background they have your amazon shopping cart set in the bottom here and mozilla firefox that's interesting uh let's have a look at what kind of bloatware we're looking at here first off there's a bunch of acercrap booking.com that's that's weird and then sound based stuff so that's for the for the built-in sound card on the the poopoo garbage motherboard um linkedin that's annoying i mean it's not okay yeah there's even like photo stuff power director yeah there's there's quite a lot on here this is this is fairly standard acer affair they just load these down with venereal disease oh okay so it does actually come with geforce experience preloaded so it means that you can update your drivers and stuff yeah i actually need to plug it into the internet now in terms of the gaming performance it's okay i guess i don't know maybe i was being a bit overzealous with the settings that i used for all of the games but like battlefield 5 for example runs decently well at the settings that i used the thing that you have to bear in mind though is that the one percent lows for all of these games were pretty bad which means that the gaming performance and the results were a lot more stuttery than you wanted to be which is which is not amazing although fortnite with competitive settings and pretty much all of the esports titles ran really well even the one percent lows but all of those games can run pretty well on your grandmother so you know that's not that big an achievement i think the main reason that the one percent lows were so bad on the rest of the games is because of that single 8 gig stick of ram i mean if you look at escape from tarkov running here like it's not an amazing experience and it is a lot more stuttery than it normally is so what i decided to do was drop 16 gigs of ram in there to see how much of a difference that makes and with escape from takov with 16 gigs of ram you're still sitting pegged at 16 gigs of ram so even that kind of seems like it's not enough but battlefield 5 and gta 5 ran significantly better and one of the biggest differences was the one percent lows assassin's creed valhalla didn't seem to care about the extra ram though so if i was unfortunately in the position where i had no other choice but to buy one of these i would definitely consider upgrading the ram to two 8 gig sticks but bear in mind this system is a real fussy little when it comes to ram if your ram isn't ge dec compliant then it's just gonna run at its base frequency of 2133 megahertz which was the case with the tridizi ram that i used for the the 16 gig tests so that's a very important thing you need to look out for but now we get to what is still one of the big problems with this pre-built the temperatures they went through all of the effort to cut a bunch more holes in the case but it doesn't matter if you have so little cooling surface area on both the cpu and the gpu so yeah you can have airflow up the butt but it's still gonna overheat it doesn't take very long of playing battlefield 5 for you to hit that 83 degree celsius limit and it just sits there throughout the entire match and bear in mind this is in a room with an ambient temperature of 22 degrees celsius like if you're in a hotter country it's going to overheat really badly and it's a brand new system with no dust in it so considering the airflow patterns that they used in this case dust and temperatures are just going to get worse and worse over time and then there's the final nail in the coffin of this pre-built unfortunately it is still possessed by aunt alma or whatever like i don't i don't understand it but acer really has a problem with weird ghosts and gremlins in their machine maybe they need to have like an exorcism at their factory or something granted i haven't been using this system very long and considering the fact that it's got an ssd in it as standard as opposed to a hard drive means that the day-to-day usability was much better than the previous version it just still has a couple of telltale signs of those gremlins to come but i'll keep you up to date about that i don't know if it's like a motherboard firmware issue but they need to fix that before you can get even close to recommending one of these systems so after all of the changes that they made unfortunately acer your pc still retains the title of acer loser nitro suckface edition don't get me wrong it's definitely an improvement in a step in the right direction but yeah you really need to sort out those gremlins i don't know what the hell is going on there but anyway if you like this video like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one i actually have an even more ridiculous pre-built video coming up on saturday so do subscribe if you don't want to miss that check out my stream and other stuff in the description below and until the next video bye you