Buy this laptop (on sale) - Acer Nitro V (2023)
The Acer Nitro 5 is a laptop that checks all the right boxes for gaming enthusiasts. The display on this device is its crowning achievement, with a high refresh rate that makes it perfect for fast-paced games like Rocket League and Valheim. I had the opportunity to test out the laptop's speakers, which were surprisingly underwhelming. They're not terrible, but they're definitely not something to brag about. The soundstage is disorienting and collapses in on itself, making it feel more like a mess than a cohesive listening experience.
In contrast, the Nitro 5's keyboard is a different story altogether. While it may not be the most comfortable keyboard for typing, it excels when it comes to playing games. The laptop's fans can get quite loud at times, but with the right headphones, that's hardly an issue. Overall, I think this laptop is excellent for gaming, and its high refresh rate display makes it a joy to use.
One area where the Nitro 5 falls short is in terms of its design. The battery compartment is small, and the battery itself is only 57.4 Wh. This means that the laptop can only get around 5 hours of endurance testing, which isn't bad but also not great. In comparison to other gaming laptops on the market, this is a bit underwhelming. However, it's worth noting that the Nitro 5 does have some nice upgrades, such as two SSD upgrade slots and an upgradeable RAM module.
I was also impressed by the laptop's cooling system, which features heat pipes and dual fans. This means that the GPU stays at a stable temperature even during long gaming sessions, making it perfect for those who want to play games for hours on end. The Wi-Fi card is another nice touch, featuring Wi-Fi 6 connectivity.
In terms of specs, the Nitro 5 comes with an i7-4050 processor, 16 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB SSD. This configuration should be plenty enough for most users, but it's worth noting that laptops like this often go on sale, making it a good idea to wait for a discount if possible.
One last thing I want to mention is the webcam, which can be a bit finicky to set up. It requires some calibration to get right, and even then, it may not always produce perfect results. However, once you've got it dialed in, it's quite capable of capturing decent video quality.
Overall, the Acer Nitro 5 is a solid gaming laptop that checks all the right boxes. Its high refresh rate display, excellent keyboard, and efficient cooling system make it a joy to use. While it may not be the most well-designed laptop, its specs and features more than make up for any design flaws. With a bit of patience and some research, you can find this laptop on sale for a fraction of its original price.
In contrast to the Nitro 5, I took out my Lenovo Loq, which is available now for $800 with similar specs. That's a much better value than what we're getting here.
In terms of comparing laptops, it's like comparing apples and oranges. The Acer Nitro 5 is in its own class when it comes to gaming laptops, while the Lenovo Loq is more of an all-around laptop. But hey, if you're looking for a deal on a high-end gaming laptop, now might be the time to act.
So there you have it, folks. If you're in the market for a new gaming laptop and you can get your hands on the Acer Nitro 5 at the right price, I say go for it. It's a great machine that will provide you with hours of entertainment and fun.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enoh ew what what did you do with this laptop B look at this thing that's attached to our Acer Nitro 5 we're going to unbox it here today it is a budge is gaming laptop are you allowed to say budget I'm actually asking what what what do we call it budge is is fine budge is the Nitro 5 when it first came out was an absolutely incredible laptop and Acer haven't really improved it a whole lot since then all right your laptop you can go to the side for a second here we have got a question about your new device ask us don't go to Best Buy go straight to Acer anything else oh what's this oh just oh we got stickers these are really cringe have you seen these stickers good look gamer I never stop wasda anyway we also have our power brick here it looks exactly like it did 5 years ago that's right here is 135 wats coming from a little purple Barrel Jack look at that and the final thing in here we have a little is it a lyard if it's this big a little keychain thing do you want it Belle yeah yeah do you think I can rug pull this yes we're confident there oh this actually looks good the last time that I looked at the Acer Nitro 5 it was uh not this good looking like not even close is this some new Nitro branding it's actually really neat how this is like holographic I love holographic things wouldn't it be a shame if the included stickers there we go sick all right but having a legitimate look here we have headphone microphone combo Jack usb3 type A around the other side we have have our Barrel Jack in gigabit Ethernet HDMI 2.1 two more USB type A's and Thunderbolt 4 so this is actually really quite good iio although one thing that I do see that's missing that I would kind of expect on a gaming laptop is a display port out that is attached to a MX now this right here is the kind of price point where you don't really expect something like that but it can give you like 10 is% more FPS if you're playing on an external Monitor and there are some laptops the the Lenovo Legion icon something like that has it we looked it up and it is the Lenovo Legion L loq something like that that does have Nvidia Optimus at around this price point the back cover was greatly improved since the last time I looked at this what's it like on the inside not bad not bad at all ooh the track pad's gotten a lot larger and we have another numpad there are so many people that just cannot live without a numpad and this right here it's one of those laptops that you can have okay A little bit of a squish test really good around the trackpad even in the center here if you're like full sending it you can get a little bit of Squish but nothing concerning I've seen stiffer keyboards before but this is like pretty acceptable up here she's a bit squishy but like whatever you're not touching that it's promising very promising I don't think it's new this year but the last Nitro 5 that I looked at had these really awful bezels that went like up and then across and up again it was strange and would look very bad fortunately this does not they have really improved the screen to body ratio here but they haven't done anything stupid and make it so that like your hands fall off the back here like some alien wear ones have one problem that I potentially see with the heat sink being here is that if it's trying to shoot the air out this way it might get different performance performance depending on where your screen is I've seen this on a couple laptops before where if you have it like out like this then the air is able to just travel out and around and it's fine but then if you have it more at like a 90° angle you can lose performance as it's just hitting the screen and pushing back and creating a bunch of bad stuff nexo thanks to nexo for sponsoring today's video if you're working from home and are in need of a new webcam nexigo has a wide variety to choose from to keep you looking sharp on conference calls whether you're on a budget and need high quality video or just want the best possible webcam regardless of price their selection of webcams and webcam accessories will help you look and sound your best even if you're looking for something more in the middle nexo has got you covered take your webcam setup to the next level and getting nexo webcam using the link down below are you guys excited finally get to turn it on let's go yeah power button first and very important thing that you have to do when you get a new gaming laptop enhance pointer Precision turn it off don't need it it turns on mous acceleration makes it harder to be accurate with your mouse in games next thing uh this screen doesn't look very good it looks very bad actually I have had Acer in the past send me laptops that had backgrounds that were just visually unappealing and then when you changed it it like looked good okay this this background seems pretty reasonable to me this display I do not believe is very accurate but at the same time I am not super concerned because it is at least High refresh rate so we have 144 htz it's a sort of thing where compared to another laptop that has a 60 HZ display you will just be better at games on this one that that that's kind of just a fact all right I've got the actual screen specs here now 15.6 in 144 Herz and 1920x 1080p which means it is 16x9 I do much prefer 16x 10 in laptops iser does have their Nitro 516 but that's not this one so maybe look into that one the brightness is not fantastic as I'm sure you can tell from the top down right here it is currently cranked but it was able to get up to 304 nits which is better than the 250 that is advertised not so great though is 67.4% coverage of srgb that's really bad color space just to give you guys an idea of what that is like editor can you please just take the saturation and put it to 67.4% that is essentially what you're are getting here oh that's bad someone's going to be watching on their Acer Nitro 5 and be like huh that's why the entire world has seemed so Bland so if the display is not good why would you want this well the main reason is that the power is pretty good when you consider the price so in this guy right here we have an Intel i7 13 620h so that's a 10 core processor with 16 logical cores we also have 16 GB of RAM at 5200 megat transfers per second a 1 tbte nvme SSD WiFi 6 and an Nvidia RTX 4050 this is the laptop version this one is able to get 75 Watts which is actually quite substantial for a 4050 I was about to check out the Nitro space cuz this thing is hecking loud we are currently updating windows and installing a game and this thing sounds like well it sounds like this you can hear it you can definitely hear it right now all right I put it into balanced mode which has helped a little bit but it is still a touch on the loud side so maybe we'll go into quiet mode although I do have to bring up a thing that's pretty strange about this device so you aren't allowed to change the power modes when the battery is below 40% now I have seen laptops where they will lock you out of performance mode when you have the battery low and this can make sense cuz like 135 Watts from the wall charger maybe you have to grab a little bit of power from the battery when you have really intense things happening and your GPU and CPU are hit at the same time but you also can't go into quiet mode when you're below 40% battery which is silly because that would for one probably save you battery and two just like I want my laptop quiet a lot of the time I don't want my battery to have to be full for that to happen really stupid all right let's see if I can be okay at Rocket league for this so This overall though like the display feels responsive the motion Clarity is good it's just the fact that it's about as beautiful as I don't know um something that's really not pretty this is running the game currently at uh 270 FPS so that's pretty good like I'm playing fine I'm not playing great but that's like a me problem not a this laptop problem so Labs tested this out and in cyberpunk on Ultra without dlss and that stuff enabled we able to get 58 FPS average and 48 as a 1% low that means that knock it down to high you are going to have no problem and this also since it is a 4050 if you have games that support Nvidia dlss frame generation you can take advantage antage of that which will be just so good compared to if you had a 3050 in this also f123 72 FPS Total War 51 FPS and the geom mean of 60 means that uh 1080p Ultra she does it perfectly one thing I did just notice is that I've been using a mouse and a controller the whole time instead of telling you about how good or bad this keyboard and trackpad is so let's have a little go here ooh this isn't a good good keyboard not at all it's pretty soft it's pretty soft I said it was like okay before but once I'm actually typing on it you can she's a a bit like a water bed on here so kind of on my left hand the feel is a lot better than on my right hand because there's just so much Flex over here cuz I don't know they didn't do a very good job of supporting the chassis or something but that said if your intent is gaming it's not all that bad the key travel is really short and it's really fast which means if what you're doing is primarily like wding around you're going to be having a pretty good time overall one individual key I can hit really fast no problem that's the sort of stuff that you want when you're gaming but the typing experience overall if that's what you're looking for is not as great one thing that is good though is the trackpad I wouldn't fault it it's not incredible like it isn't glass topped it isn't massive massive but it's large enough that I can very easily get across the screen no problem most acceleration I did turn off earlier there still is a little bit cuz the track bad but overall it's quite good click feels solid no sort of weird stuff I'm not accidentally hitting the click at the same time I'm not hitting two clicks at once when I don't mean to good job there you sir I wonder how the speakers are oh what why does it sound so awful it's actually atrocious it's like disorientating it has dtsx Ultra which I think is some sort of a spatial thing and it seems like it's trying to create a large Sound Stage but it's breaking up and collapsing in the strangest way that I've ever heard like I oh these aren't laptops that you should compare to each other they're in completely different classes and this one's way way more expensive but at the same time let's let's just let's just let's just do this for a sec here is the Nitro 5 oh it's all right dragonfly okay okay okay one one one one more one more test Nitro 5 pixel 8 pixel 8 sounds way better is louder and is this those are some of the worst speakers I've ever heard on a laptop like $300 laptops sound better than this like you need to invest in a Bluetooth speaker all right we're here looking at the webcam of the Nitro 5 and it is is very dependent on you to figure out the focusing and exposure so I just clicked on my face and now I am okayish I'm really blotchy this uh 720p not fantastic but I do prefer being able to just choose where it's going to expose for instead of it deciding that it should be like over here and now suddenly I am not even a person I am just a ghost but we bring it back over here and it's able to Fig figure it out well enough uh it's fine right getting into the Nitro 5 was very simple it was all Philips head screws and they're all the same size so you don't have to worry about accidentally putting one in the wrong spot and I don't know putting a screw through your keyboard or something like that in here uh wow that's not a very large battery it uh really looks like there could have been quite a bit more battery in there what we have here is a 57.4 w hour battery and it was able to get us a little bit over 5 hours in our endurance test which is okayish for a gaming laptop I'd say that's on like the borderline of acceptable for something like this if you have it fully loaded this will only get you an hour but I think that's pretty expected now the layout in here some of it I like some of it like we're able to have two SSD upgrade slots right here awesome love to upgrade my SSD but also would I trade one of these upgrade slots for a larger battery probably yes or would I just put battery where there's literally nothing definitely not even think about it I would just put more battery there we also have our Ram here which is upgradeable which is awesome it means that if you go super duper cheap and get one of the like 8 gab ones you can upgrade it later like if one of those goes on sale might be pretty sweet and also we have our heat pipes here so it looks like CPU here GPU there GPU gets one extra heat pipe that wraps all the way around to there and two fans that are pretty nice and thick one last thing that's upgradeable in here is your Wi-Fi cart although it is Wi-Fi 6 so you probably won't have to upgrade it anytime soon here we've got our speaker on a lot of nicer laptops you'll be getting six speakers eight speakers something like that here is just this one little guy although honestly I don't care that much like they can cheap out on that and I'll just buy a Bluetooth speaker that sounds better than a Macbook anyway so then the Acer Nitro 5 this thing right here I think for gaming is excellent it has the high refresh rate display that I actually was quite enjoying in rocket league and valheim the keyboard isn't great for typing but it is really good for playing games and even though it's a little bit on the loud side with the fans put on some headphones who cares doesn't matter the config that we have here with the i7 4050 16 GB of RAM and 1 TB SSD comes at $1,000 and I think you should absolutely not buy it for that ever laptops like this go on sale all the time so if I have 1,000 buckery Doodles I am not spending it on one of these for that amount of money oh do you remember the Lenovo loq that we talked about that's available for $800 right now with similar specs wow just like you're available to watch something else cuz this video is over hit like get subscribed and just have a great old day see you lateroh ew what what did you do with this laptop B look at this thing that's attached to our Acer Nitro 5 we're going to unbox it here today it is a budge is gaming laptop are you allowed to say budget I'm actually asking what what what do we call it budge is is fine budge is the Nitro 5 when it first came out was an absolutely incredible laptop and Acer haven't really improved it a whole lot since then all right your laptop you can go to the side for a second here we have got a question about your new device ask us don't go to Best Buy go straight to Acer anything else oh what's this oh just oh we got stickers these are really cringe have you seen these stickers good look gamer I never stop wasda anyway we also have our power brick here it looks exactly like it did 5 years ago that's right here is 135 wats coming from a little purple Barrel Jack look at that and the final thing in here we have a little is it a lyard if it's this big a little keychain thing do you want it Belle yeah yeah do you think I can rug pull this yes we're confident there oh this actually looks good the last time that I looked at the Acer Nitro 5 it was uh not this good looking like not even close is this some new Nitro branding it's actually really neat how this is like holographic I love holographic things wouldn't it be a shame if the included stickers there we go sick all right but having a legitimate look here we have headphone microphone combo Jack usb3 type A around the other side we have have our Barrel Jack in gigabit Ethernet HDMI 2.1 two more USB type A's and Thunderbolt 4 so this is actually really quite good iio although one thing that I do see that's missing that I would kind of expect on a gaming laptop is a display port out that is attached to a MX now this right here is the kind of price point where you don't really expect something like that but it can give you like 10 is% more FPS if you're playing on an external Monitor and there are some laptops the the Lenovo Legion icon something like that has it we looked it up and it is the Lenovo Legion L loq something like that that does have Nvidia Optimus at around this price point the back cover was greatly improved since the last time I looked at this what's it like on the inside not bad not bad at all ooh the track pad's gotten a lot larger and we have another numpad there are so many people that just cannot live without a numpad and this right here it's one of those laptops that you can have okay A little bit of a squish test really good around the trackpad even in the center here if you're like full sending it you can get a little bit of Squish but nothing concerning I've seen stiffer keyboards before but this is like pretty acceptable up here she's a bit squishy but like whatever you're not touching that it's promising very promising I don't think it's new this year but the last Nitro 5 that I looked at had these really awful bezels that went like up and then across and up again it was strange and would look very bad fortunately this does not they have really improved the screen to body ratio here but they haven't done anything stupid and make it so that like your hands fall off the back here like some alien wear ones have one problem that I potentially see with the heat sink being here is that if it's trying to shoot the air out this way it might get different performance performance depending on where your screen is I've seen this on a couple laptops before where if you have it like out like this then the air is able to just travel out and around and it's fine but then if you have it more at like a 90° angle you can lose performance as it's just hitting the screen and pushing back and creating a bunch of bad stuff nexo thanks to nexo for sponsoring today's video if you're working from home and are in need of a new webcam nexigo has a wide variety to choose from to keep you looking sharp on conference calls whether you're on a budget and need high quality video or just want the best possible webcam regardless of price their selection of webcams and webcam accessories will help you look and sound your best even if you're looking for something more in the middle nexo has got you covered take your webcam setup to the next level and getting nexo webcam using the link down below are you guys excited finally get to turn it on let's go yeah power button first and very important thing that you have to do when you get a new gaming laptop enhance pointer Precision turn it off don't need it it turns on mous acceleration makes it harder to be accurate with your mouse in games next thing uh this screen doesn't look very good it looks very bad actually I have had Acer in the past send me laptops that had backgrounds that were just visually unappealing and then when you changed it it like looked good okay this this background seems pretty reasonable to me this display I do not believe is very accurate but at the same time I am not super concerned because it is at least High refresh rate so we have 144 htz it's a sort of thing where compared to another laptop that has a 60 HZ display you will just be better at games on this one that that that's kind of just a fact all right I've got the actual screen specs here now 15.6 in 144 Herz and 1920x 1080p which means it is 16x9 I do much prefer 16x 10 in laptops iser does have their Nitro 516 but that's not this one so maybe look into that one the brightness is not fantastic as I'm sure you can tell from the top down right here it is currently cranked but it was able to get up to 304 nits which is better than the 250 that is advertised not so great though is 67.4% coverage of srgb that's really bad color space just to give you guys an idea of what that is like editor can you please just take the saturation and put it to 67.4% that is essentially what you're are getting here oh that's bad someone's going to be watching on their Acer Nitro 5 and be like huh that's why the entire world has seemed so Bland so if the display is not good why would you want this well the main reason is that the power is pretty good when you consider the price so in this guy right here we have an Intel i7 13 620h so that's a 10 core processor with 16 logical cores we also have 16 GB of RAM at 5200 megat transfers per second a 1 tbte nvme SSD WiFi 6 and an Nvidia RTX 4050 this is the laptop version this one is able to get 75 Watts which is actually quite substantial for a 4050 I was about to check out the Nitro space cuz this thing is hecking loud we are currently updating windows and installing a game and this thing sounds like well it sounds like this you can hear it you can definitely hear it right now all right I put it into balanced mode which has helped a little bit but it is still a touch on the loud side so maybe we'll go into quiet mode although I do have to bring up a thing that's pretty strange about this device so you aren't allowed to change the power modes when the battery is below 40% now I have seen laptops where they will lock you out of performance mode when you have the battery low and this can make sense cuz like 135 Watts from the wall charger maybe you have to grab a little bit of power from the battery when you have really intense things happening and your GPU and CPU are hit at the same time but you also can't go into quiet mode when you're below 40% battery which is silly because that would for one probably save you battery and two just like I want my laptop quiet a lot of the time I don't want my battery to have to be full for that to happen really stupid all right let's see if I can be okay at Rocket league for this so This overall though like the display feels responsive the motion Clarity is good it's just the fact that it's about as beautiful as I don't know um something that's really not pretty this is running the game currently at uh 270 FPS so that's pretty good like I'm playing fine I'm not playing great but that's like a me problem not a this laptop problem so Labs tested this out and in cyberpunk on Ultra without dlss and that stuff enabled we able to get 58 FPS average and 48 as a 1% low that means that knock it down to high you are going to have no problem and this also since it is a 4050 if you have games that support Nvidia dlss frame generation you can take advantage antage of that which will be just so good compared to if you had a 3050 in this also f123 72 FPS Total War 51 FPS and the geom mean of 60 means that uh 1080p Ultra she does it perfectly one thing I did just notice is that I've been using a mouse and a controller the whole time instead of telling you about how good or bad this keyboard and trackpad is so let's have a little go here ooh this isn't a good good keyboard not at all it's pretty soft it's pretty soft I said it was like okay before but once I'm actually typing on it you can she's a a bit like a water bed on here so kind of on my left hand the feel is a lot better than on my right hand because there's just so much Flex over here cuz I don't know they didn't do a very good job of supporting the chassis or something but that said if your intent is gaming it's not all that bad the key travel is really short and it's really fast which means if what you're doing is primarily like wding around you're going to be having a pretty good time overall one individual key I can hit really fast no problem that's the sort of stuff that you want when you're gaming but the typing experience overall if that's what you're looking for is not as great one thing that is good though is the trackpad I wouldn't fault it it's not incredible like it isn't glass topped it isn't massive massive but it's large enough that I can very easily get across the screen no problem most acceleration I did turn off earlier there still is a little bit cuz the track bad but overall it's quite good click feels solid no sort of weird stuff I'm not accidentally hitting the click at the same time I'm not hitting two clicks at once when I don't mean to good job there you sir I wonder how the speakers are oh what why does it sound so awful it's actually atrocious it's like disorientating it has dtsx Ultra which I think is some sort of a spatial thing and it seems like it's trying to create a large Sound Stage but it's breaking up and collapsing in the strangest way that I've ever heard like I oh these aren't laptops that you should compare to each other they're in completely different classes and this one's way way more expensive but at the same time let's let's just let's just let's just do this for a sec here is the Nitro 5 oh it's all right dragonfly okay okay okay one one one one more one more test Nitro 5 pixel 8 pixel 8 sounds way better is louder and is this those are some of the worst speakers I've ever heard on a laptop like $300 laptops sound better than this like you need to invest in a Bluetooth speaker all right we're here looking at the webcam of the Nitro 5 and it is is very dependent on you to figure out the focusing and exposure so I just clicked on my face and now I am okayish I'm really blotchy this uh 720p not fantastic but I do prefer being able to just choose where it's going to expose for instead of it deciding that it should be like over here and now suddenly I am not even a person I am just a ghost but we bring it back over here and it's able to Fig figure it out well enough uh it's fine right getting into the Nitro 5 was very simple it was all Philips head screws and they're all the same size so you don't have to worry about accidentally putting one in the wrong spot and I don't know putting a screw through your keyboard or something like that in here uh wow that's not a very large battery it uh really looks like there could have been quite a bit more battery in there what we have here is a 57.4 w hour battery and it was able to get us a little bit over 5 hours in our endurance test which is okayish for a gaming laptop I'd say that's on like the borderline of acceptable for something like this if you have it fully loaded this will only get you an hour but I think that's pretty expected now the layout in here some of it I like some of it like we're able to have two SSD upgrade slots right here awesome love to upgrade my SSD but also would I trade one of these upgrade slots for a larger battery probably yes or would I just put battery where there's literally nothing definitely not even think about it I would just put more battery there we also have our Ram here which is upgradeable which is awesome it means that if you go super duper cheap and get one of the like 8 gab ones you can upgrade it later like if one of those goes on sale might be pretty sweet and also we have our heat pipes here so it looks like CPU here GPU there GPU gets one extra heat pipe that wraps all the way around to there and two fans that are pretty nice and thick one last thing that's upgradeable in here is your Wi-Fi cart although it is Wi-Fi 6 so you probably won't have to upgrade it anytime soon here we've got our speaker on a lot of nicer laptops you'll be getting six speakers eight speakers something like that here is just this one little guy although honestly I don't care that much like they can cheap out on that and I'll just buy a Bluetooth speaker that sounds better than a Macbook anyway so then the Acer Nitro 5 this thing right here I think for gaming is excellent it has the high refresh rate display that I actually was quite enjoying in rocket league and valheim the keyboard isn't great for typing but it is really good for playing games and even though it's a little bit on the loud side with the fans put on some headphones who cares doesn't matter the config that we have here with the i7 4050 16 GB of RAM and 1 TB SSD comes at $1,000 and I think you should absolutely not buy it for that ever laptops like this go on sale all the time so if I have 1,000 buckery Doodles I am not spending it on one of these for that amount of money oh do you remember the Lenovo loq that we talked about that's available for $800 right now with similar specs wow just like you're available to watch something else cuz this video is over hit like get subscribed and just have a great old day see you later\n"