DECEMBER 2020 PCWorld 63DESIGN
Big, bulky and heavy: That’s pretty much the
name of the game when it comes to gaming
laptops, and the Nitro 5 is no exception.
Tipping the scale at 4.7 pounds (or 5.7
pounds if you include the 135-watt power
adapter), the inch-thick, 15.6-inch Nitro 5
feels as hefty as it sounds. That said, Acer (as
it has with previous models) has done its
best to give the Nitro 5’s shell a slim, tapered
appearance.
While this year’s Nitro 5 looks more or less
the same as earlier iterations, there are a
couple of key differences. For starters, the
Nitro 5’s hinge is now black rather than
maroon, which means that the shell is now
almost entirely black, aside from the bright-
red cooling vents in the rear.
Speaking of vents, the latest Nitro 5
models feature four
revamped cooling vents
(two in the rear and one
on each side) that are
designed to boost the
laptop’s thermal
performance by up to
25 percent compared to
last year’s
configurations.
The Nitro 5 also
comes with Acer’s
NitroSense app, which
lets you change the
laptop’s power plans as
well as tinker with the cooling fans. You can
manually customize the rotations of the fans
or engage CoolBoost, a setting that
intelligently boosts the maximum fan speed
and can help optimize CPU and GPU cooling
by up to 9 percent. We tried switching on
CoolBoost mode and switching the Nitro 5’s
power plan to High Performance mode
during our game testing, and we’ll let you
know the results later on in the review.D I S P L AY
The Nitro 5’s 15.6-inch, 1920x1080 display
is flanked by a pair of slim, 0.28-inch bezels,
while the bezels along the top and bottom
of the screen are somewhat chunkier.
Overall, Acer says that the new Nitro 5 has
an 80 percent screen-to-body ratio. During
my real-world testing, the display lookedThis year’s Acer Nitro 5 features four redesigned cooling vents to optimize
thermal performance by up to 25 percent.