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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PeachNCream - Friday, February 15, 2019 - link
The 1060's showing inside the Surface Book makes it painfully obvious that Microsoft's cooling solution suffers from some pretty severe limitations. Granted, MS wasn't trying to make a gaming system, but something thin and light to compete in more or less the same category where Apple's laptops live so cooling is going to end up taking a backseat.Brett Howse - Friday, February 15, 2019 - link
The Surface Book 2 is a 15W CPU and the XPS 15 is a 45W CPU, so in games that are CPU limited, the 1050 can outperform. Dota is a great example of this.29a - Friday, February 15, 2019 - link
I would like to see benchmarks with a second piece of RAM also.Quad_Tube - Friday, February 15, 2019 - link
I was also scratching my head when I saw it only had one-stick, albeit 8 GB capacity. Looking forward to seeing how it runs with two sticks (I think the difference would be huge).kpb321 - Friday, February 15, 2019 - link
If they were actually using the integrated GPU it would be a huge issue as the integrated GPU is often very memory bandwidth starved but as the article mentions the single stick isn't really a big problem when you are running with a discrete gpu.GreenReaper - Monday, February 18, 2019 - link
It might potentially use more power and so run slower or louder, and for less time. Laptops are a trade-off. As others have mentioned the bandwidth isn't *as* much of an issue with a discrete GPU.Alexvrb - Friday, February 15, 2019 - link
That doesn't apply to APUs when you're not even using the integrated graphics. Further, since it's a single CCX, RAM clocks don't even matter. Performance would barely budge if they were running 4 x 2. Margin of error difference.Rookierookie - Friday, February 15, 2019 - link
The screen hinge design for these laptops from Acer has not changed in a while, and anecdotally it's pretty shoddy, prone to splitting open after a couple of years.Annnonymmous - Friday, February 15, 2019 - link
I own this laptop. The screen hinge is just fine.TheinsanegamerN - Sunday, February 17, 2019 - link
Are you from the future? Otherwise, how would you know if your hings will be fine after several years of operation.