OCTOBER 2019 PCWorld 51keyboard—and never felt uncomfortable
banging away on the springy keys.
On the downside, the laptop’s narrower
frame and inclusion of a number pad makes
the keyboard a bit more cramped than even
some tenkeyless 15-inch laptops. The keys
don’t always register if you strike them on
the corners with a light touch. The
placement of Acer’s NitroSense key, which
lets users switch power profiles and tweak
fan speed, is also a nuisance, as you’re
liable to hit it by accident instead of the
adjacent backspace key.
The trackpad, meanwhile, has a smooth
surface that’s fine for work. As with many
other laptops, however, its clicking
mechanism starts feeling pretty stiff once
you’ve crossed above its halfway point. This
is about the amount of attention you’d
expect Acer to put into the trackpad on a
gaming laptop.thicker, yet its display is 1.7 inches longer on
the diagonal.
The display itself isn’t as cutting-edge,
but its resolution of 1080p and refresh rate of
60Hz are a good match for the GTX 1650
graphics card inside. Anything better would
likely require a more powerful GPU to keep
up. Besides, it’s still an IPS panel with great
viewing angles, and the peak brightness of
280 nits is decent. (Other gaming laptops
we’ve tested lately hover around the 300-nit
mark, which is what Acer actually advertises
for the Nitro 5.)
KEYBOARD, TRACKPAD,
AND AUDIO
If you need to get work done on the Acer
Nitro 5, you may appreciate the keyboard’s
snappiness, travel, and number pad. In a
typing test, I averaged 105 words per
minute—on a par with my mechanical
Yep, it’s a gaming laptop.