PC World - USA (2020-12)

68 PCWorld DECEMBER 2020

REVIEWS ACER NITRO 5

The Nitro 5’s FireStrike Extreme score lands third

to last in our chart, but that’s not a surprise given

its GTX 1650 graphics card.

Unlike the much lengthier HandBrake test,

Cinebench is usually done in mere minutes,

and thus shows us how a laptop CPU

handles crushing but short-term processor

bursts. Here, we’d expect to see chips with

the fastest boost clocks get the upper hand.

Longer bars are better this time.

Once again, we see the Nitro 5’s multi-

threaded score land in second place, behind

(again) the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 but

ahead of all other comers, and achieving

double the results of 2019’s Nitro 5. The

single-threaded score for this year’s Nitro 5

is a bit lackluster, although I didn’t notice any

slowdowns in the Nitro’s single-core

performance. In any event, the Nitro 5 turns

in an impressively strong Cinebench

performance considering its price tag.

3DMARK FIRESTRIKE

EXTREME

At last, let’s turn our attention to the Nitro 5’s

GPU. Here we’ll see its performance come

back down to earth. While the Nitro 5 has

been whipping its competitors when it

comes to CPU power, the laptop’s GTX 1650

is a decidedly mid-range graphics card. Even

when paired with a hot-rod CPU like the

Ryzen 5 4600H, it’s going to struggle to

compete with some of the more powerful

GPUs in our roundup.

As expected, the Nitro 5 slides down

near the bottom of our chart, below gaming

laptops with GTX 1660 Ti, RTX 2060, and

(especially) RTX 2080 Super graphics cards.

Still, our Nitro 5 review unit did manage to

notch a better score than last year’s Nitro 5,

which comes equipped with the same GTX

1650 GPU, as well as the Lenovo Yoga C940

and its Max-Q-optimized GTX 1650.

RISE OF THE TOMB RAIDER

Now for some real-world tests, with the

Nitro 5 running the benchmark in Rise of the

Tomb Raider at maxed-out graphical settings

and in DirectX 11 mode. With its GTX 1650

graphics card, we’d expect the Nitro 5 to

land somewhere in the 60-fps range, and it

did just that.

While its recorded score is slightly below

that of last year’s Nitro 5, we regard that as

3DMark FireStrike

Extreme 1.1 Overall

Graphics performance

Acer Predator Triton 500Core i7-10750H

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 Ryzen 9 4900HS

Acer Predator Triton 500Core i7-8750H

HP Pavilion Gaming LaptopCore i7-9750H

Microsoft Surface Book 3Core i7-1065G7

Acer Nitro 5 AN515-44-R99q Ryzen 5 4600H

Acer Nitro 5 AN515-54-51M5Core i5-9300H

Lenovo Yoga C940 15Core i7-9750H

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

9, 512

5,434

6,7 12

4,055

7, 2 4 8

4,277

5,878

3,651