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According to our colorimeter, the Nitro 5 covered only 45.4% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, which doesn’t even cover the budget gaming laptop average (52%). It was slightly more colorful than the Katana GF66 (43.9%), but the Inspiron 16 (67.9%) and HP Victus 16 (77.1%) were more lively. The Acer Nitro 5 lasted 5 hours and 9 minute battery life in our benchmark, which continually runs OpenGL tests, browses the web and streams video at 150 nits of brightness. That’s respectable for a gaming laptop. By comparison, the Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition had a 3:29 battery life on the same test. The ROG Zephyrus M16 was somewhat longer-lasting with a 6:22 life, and the ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition had an unusually massive battery life for a gaming laptop at 10:14. Heat on the Acer Nitro 5 It gets a little spicy under the hood of these two Acer Nitro 5 laptops, especially the stronger one. After 15 minutes of gaming, the RTX 3050 Ti model hit 94 degrees Fahrenheit on the underside, sitting comfortably below our 95-degree threshold. The center of the keyboard and touchpad reached 96 and 73 degrees, respectively. However, it got the hottest on the rear underside, beneath the fourth vent from the right, hitting 123 degrees.
The final test in this section is photo editing. We use an early 2018 release of Adobe Photoshop Creative Cloud to apply 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG image, timing each operation and adding up the total. This test is not as CPU-focused as Cinebench or Handbrake, bringing the performance of the storage subsystem, memory, and GPU into play. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider’s in-game benchmark running on its highest settings, the Nitro 5 hit 75 fps at 1080p and 51 fps at 2560 x 1440. That’s definitively better 1080p performance than the ROG Zephyrus M16’s 69 fps and slightly more frames at 1080p than the Alienware’s 73 fps. At 2560 x 1600, which is admittedly a slightly more taxing resolution than 1440p, the ROG Zephyrus M16 puts out 42 fps, which is plenty fewer frames than the Nitro 5 at 1440p. Meanwhile, the Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition was the only laptop to beat the Nito 5, hitting 88 fps on the benchmark at 1080p The Acer Nitro 5 is a solid performer (but not a looker), and it’s got a screen and audio that are accurate if not exemplary. Its keyboard is probably the ugliest part of the laptop, but I was able to hit my typical word count on it. We use two gaming simulations to measure the 3D performance potential of a PC. In UL's 3DMark, we run two tests: Sky Diver (lightweight, capable of running on integrated graphics) and Fire Strike (more demanding, for high-end gaming PCs), both of them DirectX 11-based. Unigine Corp.'s Superposition is the other; it uses a different rendering engine to produce a complex 3D scene. The Acer Nitro 5 we reviewed had a Ryzen 7 5800H processor, which means it benefits from AMD’s excellent productivity power. The Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5 config we reviewed had the same chip, while the ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition went a step higher with the Ryzen 9 5900HX. The ROG Zephyrus M16 was the one Intel rival we tested, with an also high-specced Core i9-11900H.
I’d rate the Nitro 5’s stereo speaker system as good rather than great. I’d like a little more bass, but definition and separation are both more than acceptable. There’s a decent amount of volume available, too, the system producing an average of 80dB at one metre from a pink noise source and peaks of 84dB from a music source.
The Acer Nitro 5 took the lead in Grand Theft Auto V’s very high benchmark, running at 93 fps at 1080p and 55 fps at 1440p. The Alienware only hit 82 fps at 1080p, while the Zephyrus ran at 86 fps at 1080p and 50 fps at 1600p. The ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition actually found itself bringing up the rear here, with an fps of 71.The Nitro 5’s potent combination of a 3.2GHz Ryzen 7 5800H octa-core CPU and an Nvidia RTX3060 GPU is frankly astounding for the price, and it came out rather well in our usual array of laptop benchmarking tools. The Nitro 5’s 15.6in matte finish IPS display isn’t the greatest. The maximum brightness of 257cd/m² and sRGB gamut volume of 61.4% are both quite poor, and the screen’s average Delta E (colour accuracy) was badly adrift too, at a depressingly high 6.97. The keyboard lighting is split into four-zones and you can configure the lighting within the NitroSense app. The RGB lighting mixed with the bold font creates a techy vibrancy. The battery life is a definite plus for this laptop, even if some of the alternatives lasted longer. Budget systems and larger laptops are often either short on runtime or power-hungry, but the Nitro 5 clears a long enough threshold to be a positive. Seven hours off the charger (though your runtime will vary, especially if you play games on battery power) is enough to keep you from worrying about the next time you'll be near a wall outlet. READ NEXT: Keep things running smoothly with the best laptop cooling pads Acer Nitro 5 review: Design and build quality
Excluding the Predator, this is a tight grouping, with the Nitro 5 appropriately within a few seconds of the lead. Graphics and Gaming Tests Despite its looks, the keyboard itself is perfectly usable. Keypresses weren’t hard nor were they cushiony, and the keycaps felt stable rather than slippery. I also regularly hit my 77 - 78 words per minute average on 10fastfingers.com. And for what it’s worth, 4-zone RGB might help you tune the aesthetics to your liking just a little bit.The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. Our configuration for the Acer Nitro 5 had mid-range current-gen specs across the board, including a Ryzen 7 5800H processor, an RTX 3070 laptop GPU, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. That’s a more consistently mid-range set of parts than the computers we tested it against, which include the Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5 (Ryzen 7 5800H/RTX 3060), Asus ROG Zephyrus M16 (i9-11900H/RTX 3060) and the Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition (Ryzen 9 5900HX/Radeon RX 6800M). In general, this gave the Nitro 5 strong, though not always leading, performance across our suite of test games.
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