DECEMBER 2020 PCWorld 71Acer Nitro 5 AN515-44-R99QPROS- Speedy CPU performance.
- Solid 60-fps visuals.
- Excellent battery life.
- Comfortable keyboard.
CONS - Evidence of screen bleed in the full-HD display.
- Heavy and bulky design.
BOTTOM LINE
WIth a revamped cooling system and a Ryzen
4000-series CPU on board, the affordable Nitro 5
should delight budget-minded gamers.
$669
Surface Book 3 and its mobile-optimized
GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q CPU and well ahead of
the rest of its competitors, including some
with much larger battery capacities. The
third-place Lenovo Yoga C950, for
example, has a 69 watt-hour battery,
while the Acer Predator Triton 500 has an
82Whr battery capacity.
The Nitro 5’s battery won’t last 10.5
hours if you’re playing a GPU-
intensive game or encoding
video files. Still, it exhibits
some of the best
battery efficiency
we’ve seen
from a gaming
laptop.
BOTTOM LINE
You’re not going to find a $670 gaming
laptop that’s perfect. In the Nitro 5’s case,
you’ll have to settle for a mid-range GPU, a
60Hz display that (in our review model, at
least) shows signs of screen bleed, and a
fairly bulky and hefty design. That said, we
still believe that Acer has managed to
squeeze plenty of value out of this particular
Nitro 5 configuration, which boasts
excellent CPU performance, impressive
battery life, and—if you don’t mind
sacrificing such high-end niceties as ray
tracing—solid 60fps-range visuals from
popular AAA games.