The Acer Nitro 5 Review: Renoir And Turing On A Budget
by Brett Howse on October 9, 2020 8:00 AM ESTBattery Life
Although typical gaming systems are not generally known as road warriors, due to their high weight, and powerful internal components, on systems that include the ability to turn off the discrete GPU, such as the Acer Nitro 5, battery life can be fairly competitive.
Acer has only outfitted the Nitro 5 with a 51 Wh battery, which, considering the 15.6-inch chassis, is definitely on the small side, but battery size is only one half of the equation.
To see how the Acer Nitro 5 fares in runtime when not hooked to power, it was set to 200 nits brightness, and run down from 100% battery until it shut down on several different workloads.
Web Battery Life
Our web battery life test is very demanding on the CPU, and as such can really drain the battery down compared to tests that are mostly idle. The Acer Nitro 5 achieved 397 minutes here, which is just over 6.5 hours. That is a far cry from the 12-15 hours we see on Ultrabooks, but still a solid time for a 45-Watt class gaming laptop.
Looking at the normalized result, which removes the battery size from the equation, the Acer Nitro 5 gaming laptop does not manage to touch the smaller, lighter laptops in energy efficiency, but is not too far off either, despite the larger display and more powerful internals.
PCMark 10 Battery Modern Office
The PCMark 10 test leverages some of the sub-tests from their performance workloads and runs them in sequence. Each test is given ten minutes to complete, so if a system gets the work done quicker it earns extra idle time. This test is actually less demanding than our web workload, due to the idle time, and scores are generally a bit higher. The Acer Nitro 5 did very well on this test, achieving just a hair over nine hours.
Movie Playback
Generally, the least demanding task is video playback, since the video decode can be offloaded to efficient, fixed-function hardware in the CPU’s media blocks. This is one area where AMD struggled in previous generations of the Ryzen laptop platform, but is another area where they have become very competitive. The Acer Nitro 5 managed almost exactly ten hours of runtime.
If you are wondering how many movies that is, our Tesseract score divides the movie runtime by the length of a long movie- in this case The Avengers, and the Acer was able to playback the equivalent of The Avengers over four times.
Charge Time
Acer ships the Nitro 5 with a 135-Watt AC adapter, providing power to the system as well as charging. It connects via a barrel connector on the rear of the device, and the connector itself feels quite robust. If there was a knock against it, it is easy to put the plug in, but not actually connect it as it takes an extra push to click it in, but that does secure it nicely.
The system was able to go from 0% to 100% charge in about two hours, which is more or less average. Despite the high-power input, charging the battery at too high a rate would degrade the battery life.
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cfenton - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
The screen is such a big compromise on a laptop. I wish there was an option to pay a bit more and get something decent.I know it's kind of weird, but this looks like it would make a decent HTPC. It has lots of power and a new GPU for media playback.
ingwe - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
Yeah this screen makes it DOA to me. Such a shame they cut that corner as it really separates a decent laptop from a great laptop.edzieba - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
Seriously, 61% sRGB? How on earth do you even FIND an IPS display with primaries that far off?!Otritus - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
I recall an entry level laptop with amd having a 38% sRGB 60hz 1080p 15.6 in screen. That's more inaccurate than not!meacupla - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
Consumers need to realize that panel type ≠ inferred qualityVery high quality TN panels have good enough color reproduction, but still not great viewing angles.
Very poor quality IPS panels look like garbage, and look like garbage at any angle.
meacupla - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
Just to be clear I don't mean to let Very poor quality TN panels off the hook either.Very poor TN panels have extremely awful color reproduction, but are also combined with atrocious viewing angles that invert colors inside of 50cm viewing distances.
So, as awful as this IPS panel is, it's still infinitely better than an equally very low cost/quality TN panel.
sonny73n - Saturday, October 10, 2020 - link
I just got an laptop for less than $780. To my surprise, its IPS display has no backlight leaks even in the dark. I won't mention the brand because some of you may start the politic bullshit but here's the specs:Ryzen 4700U, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 512GB PCIE SSD, 14" 1080p 100% sRGB display, fingerprint sensor on the power button and backlit keyboard.
The companies behind those brands that allowed to sell in the US must've thought that most consumers are pretty stupid - all their midrange and budget devices are garbage.
DiHydro - Sunday, October 11, 2020 - link
Toshibakmmatney - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
I bought an Intel version of this laptop last year - paid $550, so it was the lowest end model and I'm certain had this same display. The screen isn't that bad - much better than other laptops I had looked at. In fact, I had originally purchased an HP budget gaming laptop on black Friday, but the TN screen was so horrible I had to return it. By comparison this screen was awesome. I'm real picky about screens - my normal driver is a Dell Mobile Precision with an expensive color calibrated display. This screen was not as good, but I have no problems with it.lightningz71 - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
I wish that the 1650ti version was available for testing as well. I've seen a few comparison benchmarks online, but not as rigorously done as these.Also, it looks like the 4800h version with the 1650ti and improved screen might be a decent foundation for a long term machine. Being able to add a 2.5 inch ssd as a boot drive, and then get two fast NVME drives to raid together to hold the game files, you could have a convincing mobile machine for the new titles coming out for the next console generation. It would be able to keep up with the higher data throughput demands, have 8 real cores, and a similar amount of memory, just no ray tracing.