The Acer Nitro 5 Gaming Laptop Review: Absolutely AMD - Ryzen Plus Polaris
by Brett Howse on February 15, 2019 8:30 AM ESTWireless
As we’ve seen in several laptops over the last year, the Acer Nitro 5 features a Qualcomm Atheros QCA61x4a wireless card, which offers 2x2:2 and 802.11ac. It also offers a Realtek Gigabit Ethernet connection if you’ve got access to wired networking.
The performance of the Qualcomm adapter is decent. It doesn’t offer the much faster connections that are typical of the latest Intel wireless adapters, but it gets the job done. Reliability also seemed to be quite good, and there were no disconnects or other abnormal behaviour detected.
Audio
With just two stereo speakers and no subwoofer that you sometimes see on this size of system, expectations weren’t high, but despite only hitting about 75 dB(A) on our test track, the Acer delivered solid, crisp sound, with more dynamic range than expected. For software, Acer offers their Dolby Audio Premium software which works when using the headset jack.
Thermals
Acer outfits the Nitro 5 with Acer’s CoolBoost, which features two fans which draw air from the bottom and expel it out the back of the system. There’s also a software toggle to kick up the speed for maximum cooling if necessary, although in our testing it certainly was not necessary.
To test the thermals we ran Shadow of the Tomb Raider for just over an hour, measuring the GPU and CPU temperatures for the duration. The thermal performance of the Acer Nitro 5 was excellent, with no degradation in performance found, and quite low temperatures on the components. The GPU only went up to 71°C, with the CPU just under that at 68.9°C peak. Power draw on the GPU peaked at 72.5 Watts, and the GPU frequency was locked in at 1275 MHz with no deviation detected at all. Fan speeds were only at 35% as well, which kept the noise down to just about 46 dB(A) measured one inch over the trackpad.
Neither the AMD Ryzen 5 processor, nor the RX 560X, are too power hungry in a system of this size, but even so, the Nitro 5 does a great job of keeping everything cool without getting loud.
Software
As a value product, Acer has turned to offering some pre-installed software to help with margins, which is a practice we’ve seen less and less of by OEMs, which is ironic since Microsoft is now tapping that same well for Windows itself. The Acer Nitro 5 ships with Norton Antivirus, as well as an “Acer Collection” which opens to several Store apps. There’s nothing here too exciting.
The Acer Care software is something most manufactures offer now, with a single pane of glass to manage support, updates, and more, and unlike the other software that’s installed, is probably useful for almost anyone.
The laptop also comes with Acer NitroSense, which allows you to customize the fan profiles, set the power plan, and monitor the CPU, GPU, and fan speeds.
The software is simple to use, and works well. There's no macro support or anything that you might see on a higher priced gaming laptop, but for monitoring, it does the job well.
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GreenReaper - Monday, February 18, 2019 - link
People who are just coming here to find a review of a particular laptop may not know that.I agree that it would be nice to know for sure if it was stuck in single channel, as I seem to recall that being a criticism of its other AMD model. At the same time it's possible that the impact is less given the separate graphics hardware with 4GB dedicated GDDR5.
jgraham11 - Thursday, February 21, 2019 - link
Brett, thank you for commenting back. Bottom line is that when people are choosing a laptop to purchase, most people that don't have an unlimited amount of money or a specific design requirement want to know what they can get with the money they have. By comparing notebooks that are double, triple or more the price and not indicating price so distorts the perception of this product in a negative way. To solve this, label the price of each notebook (you would get crucified for making such outlandish comparisons) or only compare to other notebooks that have a similar price tag.If you don't do that, you are supporting an Intel monopoly, please say that isn't the case.
Annnonymmous - Sunday, February 17, 2019 - link
It actually shows how much of a bargain this laptop is. Why spend all that money when a bargain bin laptop gets you within a similar level of performance. I own this laptop. It won't disappoint you.Vitor - Friday, February 15, 2019 - link
Wow, what a dismal ips display. That's depressing actually.niva - Friday, February 15, 2019 - link
I said to myself:. Wow, finally, an AMD laptop with a good ips display!Then I saw the results. It's clear that unless AMD makes their own machines directly, no manufacturer will get it right.
mr_tawan - Friday, February 15, 2019 - link
Based on my own experience with Acer's machines. ... This is about just right :P.Well I've never come across Acer's machine with good stuffs in it before, they are pretty much all budget-oriented. That said things, might have changed.
TheinsanegamerN - Sunday, February 17, 2019 - link
I've been saying this same thing for years. AMD has had great notebook chips for awhile, but no OEM takes them seriously. They should partner with sapphire or clevo and build a range of proper Radeon-books or such.michaelflat1 - Thursday, February 21, 2019 - link
Clevo and MSI are not going to use AMD's 7nm mobile chips on their release.. so we are out of luck on that front.. some budget laptop chinese companies are locked into a contract with intel, they get cheaper chips but not allowed to sell any amd laptops.. only one amd ryzen embedded laptop to come out of china :( (not regarding matebook D)If AMD's 7nm goes right hopefully we can get a big OEM onboard, microsoft? Dell? Apple!?! that would probably be dreaming..
I think the high idle consumption is keeping them out of high end laptops, and stuff like video playback/streaming on youtube has too much of a hit on battery life.. maybe 7nm will fix this (we hope)
tipoo - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link
Yep, manufacturers seem to fall into the trap of them being slightly cheaper than Intel/Nvidia parts meaning they have to penny punch every other component. Would be a pretty great system with a decent display, and preferably dual channel memory, though as noted that doesn't choke a CPU much since this has dedicated VRAM.Oxford Guy - Saturday, February 16, 2019 - link
It would be useful to see calibrated results. Products like the ColorMunki are not expensive.Since the black depth wasn't as bad as some of the other screens here it may be the case where this panel isn't quite so bad with calibration.