OCTOBER 2019 PCWorld 55Acer Nitro 5
PROS- Smoothly handles competitive shooters on
maximum graphics settings. - Not much bigger or heavier than some 15-inch
gaming laptops. - Supports RAM and storage upgrades.
CONS - Not great for CPU-intensive tasks.
- Keyboard has some minor annoyances.
- HDMI-only for display output.
BOTTOM LINE
For a certain kind of gaming, Acer’s latest laptop
gets the price right.
$879
the only gaming laptop we’ve tested in 2019
with an Intel Core i5 processor instead of a
Core i7. In Cinebench the Nitro 5 fell well
behind Core i7-equipped laptops. It even
turned in worse results than Dell’s G3, which
uses last year’s Core i5-8300H instead of the
newer Core i5-9300H.
What accounts for the discrepancy? The
most likely explanation is that the Nitro 5
runs hot and throttles aggressively. As we
also saw with the Nitro 7 (go.pcworld.
com/ntr7), the laptop’s CPU temperature
immediately jumps from an idle temper-
ature of around 32 degrees Celsius to
around 80 degrees Celsius under heavy
workloads, and it never let up. The Nitro 5’s
HandBrake encoding time—a stress test that
tends to reveal thermal throttling—was by
far the slowest of any laptop we tested with
current-gen Intel chips.
It’s worth noting that Acer offers a
“CoolBoost” feature that runs its fans faster
(and louder), but turning this on didn’t have
any major impact on CPU temperatures.
(We left the feature disabled, as is the
default, for benchmarks.) The only sure way
to bring temperatures down is to prop the
laptop up along its edges so the bottom-
facing air vents have more room to breathe.
One thing that did surprise us,
however, was battery life. Sure, 1080p
graphics and a 60Hz panel probably help
increase runtime over laptops with more
pixels and faster refresh rates, but the Nitro
5 even came out ahead of other laptops
with comparable panels, including the
Lenovo Legion Y7000P. At least for battery
life, the Core i5 CPU is likely advantageous
over the Core i7 chips that are more
common in gaming laptops.
The ultimate question is whether the
Nitro 5 needs a better-performing CPU,
even if it would push pricing closer to the
$1,000 mark. The answer, at least to me, is
no. Even without a Core i7 processor, the
Nitro 5 accomplishes its mission of running
games like Fortnite smoothly at maximum
graphics settings, and it does so on a big
screen with slim bezels. Every laptop has
compromises (go.pcworld.com/lpcm), and
the Nitro 5 makes the right ones in pursuit of
entry-level gaming.
Just make sure to plug in some
headphones while using it.