The Acer Nitro 5 Gaming Laptop Review: Absolutely AMD - Ryzen Plus Polaris
by Brett Howse on February 15, 2019 8:30 AM ESTBattery Life
Despite being a large laptop, weighing almost six pounds and being over 1-inch thick, the Acer Nitro 5 has just a 47 Wh battery inside, which is less than many Ultrabooks. As a gaming laptop though, its primary place of use is going to be on a desk, so this is likely a good place for Acer to save on the bill of materials. However, we’ve already seen a few times that AMD’s Ryzen mobile processor has some issues with high idle power consumption, so coupled with a small battery, expectations for great battery life are low.
2013 Light Battery
Our oldest test is also the lightest test, and it just consists of opening four web pages per minute. For most modern machines, this is a pretty simple task, and the device sits idle for most of the time. As expected, the Nitro 5 doesn’t fare well here.
2016 Web
Our newer battery life test is much more demanding, and generally knocks quite a bit of time off the light test. At 4.5 hours, the result isn’t great, but considering this is a gaming laptop, it’s actually pretty good.
Movie Playback
One other area AMD needs to work on is their power usage of their media block. This is generally a test that can offload the work to fixed function hardware, allowing the processor to sleep, but as we’ve seen on other Ryzen systems, the movie playback test somehow results in even worse battery life than the Web test.
Normalized Results
By removing the battery capacity from the equation, we can see how efficient each device is. It is more or less in-range with other Ryzen systems, which is where you’d expect.
Battery Conclusion
Ryzen needs work in this area more than any other, and hopefully the 2nd generation addresses these shortcomings. Luckily the battery life is probably not that big of a concern for most buyers of a gaming laptop, so despite being less than amazing, it is still acceptable for this type of system.
Charge Time
Acer ships the Nitro 5 with a 135-Watt AC adapter. However, they don’t dedicate much of the power to battery charging.
The laptop is fairly average in terms of charge time, even with the large power source, but since it’ll likely spend most of its life plugged into the wall, this isn’t a huge concern either.
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Oxford Guy - Saturday, February 16, 2019 - link
Unfortunately, it looks like the ColorMunki's price has gone way up and its software may not be reliable with Windows 10.GreenReaper - Monday, February 18, 2019 - link
It'll probably go on sale at some point and you can buy it then. I never even installed the software, just DisplayCal.Brett Howse - Saturday, February 16, 2019 - link
You can't calibrate when the backlight won't do sRGB. There's no way to get more blue out of the light than is available. All calibration would do is lead to some pretty extensive crushing.Oxford Guy - Sunday, February 17, 2019 - link
I read too quickly and thought you meant the panel had excessive coverage in the blue range. I see that it's the opposite. Usually with cheap laptop screens a very low contrast ratio accompanies strong sRGB undercoverage. A ratio of over 1000 is surprising for a screen with such poor gamut.Some undercoverage of sRGB can still really benefit from calibration, as seen here in the greens:
http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/viewsonic_vx24...
http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/asus_ms246h.ht...
http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/benq_ew2420.ht...
However, if it is severe as this laptop's is, then it's probably not worth the trouble.
GreenReaper - Monday, February 18, 2019 - link
Our eye responds more to green light, so I guess it's one way to easily boost perceived brightness and hence contrast ratios (as long as there isn't too much leakage as well).Calibration makes the crappy TN screen on my Lenovo X120e look a heck of a lot better, even if it's obviously not as good as my other displays - reasonably consistency within its coverage area is key.
Arbie - Friday, February 15, 2019 - link
Saying that one thing is "100% faster" than another means it is twice as fast. You do this repeatedly, where what you meant is "100% as fast". The two are wildly different.Brett Howse - Friday, February 15, 2019 - link
Appreciate the feedback and updating the wording.LMonty - Saturday, February 16, 2019 - link
I'm glad Brett is confident enough to appreciate valid corrections. :) Many tech writers ignore comments like this or even deny them.Brett Howse - Saturday, February 16, 2019 - link
I wrote one thing while meaning another - I always appreciate constructive feedback!nathanddrews - Friday, February 15, 2019 - link
At first glance - looks like decent budget gaming option. Looking closer:1. WTF is up with single-channel AMD notebooks? It literally HALVES APU performance in some games and significantly nerfs most other CPU operations. If you still have access to this laptop, please consider tossing in another stick of RAM.
2. That IPS display *shudder*. At what point does it even matter if it's going to be of such low quality? Also, why not FreeSync?
3. What's up with the 1060 and 1050 on the gaming charts dramatically switching positions? Are there some throttling issues at play?