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In Shadow of the Tomb Raider’s in-game benchmark running on its highest settings, the Nitro 5 hit 75 fps at 1080p and 51 fps at 2560 x 1440. That’s definitively better 1080p performance than the ROG Zephyrus M16’s 69 fps and slightly more frames at 1080p than the Alienware’s 73 fps. At 2560 x 1600, which is admittedly a slightly more taxing resolution than 1440p, the ROG Zephyrus M16 puts out 42 fps, which is plenty fewer frames than the Nitro 5 at 1440p. Meanwhile, the Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition was the only laptop to beat the Nito 5, hitting 88 fps on the benchmark at 1080p Our final performance tests involve real games. We use the built-in 1080p benchmarks in Far Cry 5 (at its Normal and Ultra image-quality presets) and Rise of the Tomb Raider (at its Medium and Very High presets). Far Cry 5 uses DirectX 11, while we flip the Lara Croft adventure to DirectX 12. I hit 63 words per minute on the 10fastfingers.com typing test, which is slightly below my 68 words-per-minute average. I haven’t typed on a 15-inch laptop keyboard in a while, but the keys are well-spaced and there’s plenty of room on the palm rests for most people. There’s no point beating about the bush, since this thing goes like the clappers. Our standard 4K media-processing test returned the second-highest score we’ve ever seen from a laptop, with a total of 323 points. These three things we’re lukewarm about. The camera, which offers video recording at 720p 30fps at its highest setting, is grainy. It’s just fine for web chats, but don’t expect much quality imagery produced here.
According to our colorimeter, the Nitro 5 covered only 45.4% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, which doesn’t even cover the budget gaming laptop average (52%). It was slightly more colorful than the Katana GF66 (43.9%), but the Inspiron 16 (67.9%) and HP Victus 16 (77.1%) were more lively. Next up is a pair of CPU-crunching tests: Cinebench R15 stresses all available processor cores and threads while rendering a complex image, while in our Handbrake test, we time systems while they transcode a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution. The absence of per-key RGB is a bit annoying and the battery life is short, but I’d take those shortcomings given the performance per pound on offer here. I listened to Lil Nas X’s Montero (Call Me By Your Name) to test these speakers, and the first thing I noticed was how quiet the song was. This got a little bit better after the beat dropped, but even so, I had to pump the volume up to 70% to have a comfortable experience. Even at 100%, the song wouldn’t extend far outside of my office.
We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Two more tests from GFXBench 5.0, run offscreen to allow for different display resolutions, wring out OpenGL operations. As for look and feel, there’s a lot to be desired with the Acer Nitro 5. That’s not to say it’s plain bad – in fact, there are things we appreciate about it. Upgradability is one of the Nitro 5's strengths. Behind the bottom panel are two M.2 slots (one occupied by the 1TB solid-state drive) plus a 2.5-inch drive bay; screws for the latter are in the box. As I noted, the memory is also upgradable; both SO-DIMM slots are occupied in my unit by DDR4-3200 modules. (Photo: Molly Flores) In the trailer for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, I could make out some detail in the hundreds of faces staring at the lich-like being during the craned camera shot. But in the wide angle shots of the chaotic cities, lush forests, and volcanic caverns, it looked lifeless. On the Geekbench 5.4 overall performance test, the Nitro 5 scored 9,148), nearly doubling the 5,480 budget gaming laptop average. Each with an Intel Core i7-11800H CPU, the Katana GF66 (8,897) and Inspiron 16 (8,031) couldn’t keep up, but somehow the Victus 16 (9,426) excelled.
As for the 4.2 x 3.1 inch precision touchpad, it had just a bit more friction than I’d like. Still, I was able to input multi-touch gestures like two-finger scrolling and three-finger app switching without struggle. Audio on the Acer Nitro 5 I booted up Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and ran through the roaming fields of England, but the greens and yellows of the land looked as dull and dry as the place that Eivor tried to escape. However, it didn’t look so bad when I had to climb into dark areas, as the bright display guided me through. And the high refresh rate made combat smooth as a Kinder chocolate when I turned down the graphics. Acer’s 512GB SSD features a transfer speed of 1,241 megabytes per second, which outmaneuvered the 955-MBps category average. It left the SSDs in the Katana GF66 (651 MBps), Inspiron 16 (638 MBps) and Victus 16 (161 MBps) shaken in place. Acer Nitro 5 (2022) battery life Finally, the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 will show you what paying up for a smaller, more powerful system will do, and whether the performance gap is worth hundreds of dollars more. Expect it to lead most if not all of these tests, as it's the most expensive contestant. Productivity Tests That’s about it for direct competition with an RTX 30 series GPU. Over at HP, you’ll find a choice of Omen gaming laptops, but they all come with the previous-generation RTX 2060 GPU (which admittedly still supports ray-traced visuals). Acer Nitro 5 (AN515-45) review: Design and key featuresThe Nitro 5’s potent combination of a 3.2GHz Ryzen 7 5800H octa-core CPU and an Nvidia RTX3060 GPU is frankly astounding for the price, and it came out rather well in our usual array of laptop benchmarking tools. Make no mistake, the Nitro 5 redefines the sort of gaming performance you can expect for less than a thousand pounds. Combine that with the plethora of upgrade options, the surprisingly efficient and quiet cooling system and a pretty good keyboard, and the Nitro 5 is a surefire success. The battery life is a definite plus for this laptop, even if some of the alternatives lasted longer. Budget systems and larger laptops are often either short on runtime or power-hungry, but the Nitro 5 clears a long enough threshold to be a positive. Seven hours off the charger (though your runtime will vary, especially if you play games on battery power) is enough to keep you from worrying about the next time you'll be near a wall outlet. Far Cry: New Dawn’s ultra benchmark also saw the Nitro 5 in first place. 1080p performance was at 84 fps and 1440p performance was at 55 fps. The Alienware ran at 82 fps, and the Zephyrus ran at 86 fps at 1080p and 50 fps at 1600p. The ROG Strix G15 Advantage was towards the lower end of performance here, hitting 81 fps.
I’d rate the Nitro 5’s stereo speaker system as good rather than great. I’d like a little more bass, but definition and separation are both more than acceptable. There’s a decent amount of volume available, too, the system producing an average of 80dB at one metre from a pink noise source and peaks of 84dB from a music source. It gets a little spicy under the hood of these two Acer Nitro 5 laptops, especially the stronger one. After 15 minutes of gaming, the RTX 3050 Ti model hit 94 degrees Fahrenheit on the underside, sitting comfortably below our 95-degree threshold. The center of the keyboard and touchpad reached 96 and 73 degrees, respectively. However, it got the hottest on the rear underside, beneath the fourth vent from the right, hitting 123 degrees. Powering everything is the Acer Nitro 5’s Intel Core i5-12500H processor with 16GB of RAM. It easily cruised through 40 Google Chrome tabs and five YouTube videos without so much as a hiccup.The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. These games have become largely CPU-limited even at the more demanding presets, so the differences among this group are minimal. That said, the numbers suggest that the Nitro 5 will have performance to spare for running games at its native 1440p resolution. Battery Rundown Test I listened to Ross Lynch’s cover of “Teenage Dirtbag,” and the entire sound was low. Even the chorus couldn’t fully encompass my small office space. Despite that, the guitar, vocals, and drums were distinguishable from one another. However, there was little to no bass to be found. The bass guitar felt like a regular guitar.
We use two gaming simulations to measure the 3D performance potential of a PC. In UL's 3DMark, we run two tests: Sky Diver (lightweight, capable of running on integrated graphics) and Fire Strike (more demanding, for high-end gaming PCs), both of them DirectX 11-based. Unigine Corp.'s Superposition is the other; it uses a different rendering engine to produce a complex 3D scene. As this is an early hands-on, we weren’t able to test out the performance, but Windows 10 felt snappy while we used it. The included components certainly suggest that the Nitro 5 in any configuration will offer a great gaming experience, and we can’t wait to really put it through its paces. Oddly, our review unit was equipped with a 1TB Samsung PCI-E NVMe SSD, although the retail model only comes with 512GB of space. Regardless, the SSD I tested performed well in our sequential read and write test, with speeds of 2,127MB/s and 1,615MB/s respectively. On the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark (Highest, 1080p), the Nitro 5 hit 52 fps (74 fps with RTX 3060), falling short of the category average (59 fps) as well as the Katana GF66 (69 fps) and Victus 16 (67 fps).The Acer Nitro 5 took the lead in Grand Theft Auto V’s very high benchmark, running at 93 fps at 1080p and 55 fps at 1440p. The Alienware only hit 82 fps at 1080p, while the Zephyrus ran at 86 fps at 1080p and 50 fps at 1600p. The ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition actually found itself bringing up the rear here, with an fps of 71. Turning our attention to the Nitro 5’s gaming benchmarks, it became clear that the GTX 3060 is an ample performer, but it’s a long way from the output offered by its bigger brothers, the RTX 3070 and 3080. The Nitro 5 achieved 79 fps (85 fps with RTX 3060) on the Far Cry New Dawn benchmark (Ultra, 1080p), which sped past the category average (72 fps). However, neither model could outpace the Katana GF66 (94 fps) or HP Victus 16 (93 fps). Acer Nitro 5 (2022) performance The Acer Nitro 5 has a 15.6-inch IPS screen, and the model we reviewed has a 2560 x 1440 resolution that runs at a 165Hz refresh rate. It’s a bit disappointing that this laptop still uses a 16:9 aspect ratio as 16:10 becomes more common in the laptop world, but the picture itself was great across a variety of conditions.
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