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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eva02langley - Monday, February 18, 2019 - link
It is not AMD fault if OEM are dumbs.I want a Macbook pro "kinda" laptop with a 3700u. I am not buying one until one is available.
akvadrako - Monday, February 18, 2019 - link
I'm also waiting for one of those, but it's not going to be MBP level. Those are more like portable workstations, while the 3700U is made for ultra-thin laptops according to AMD. So it will be in the class of Dell XPS 13 - between MacBook Air and MBP.yeeeeman - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link
What about Huawei's Matebook D? Isn't that good enough? Maybe AT could try reviewing that also.zodiacfml - Sunday, February 17, 2019 - link
At least they're dropping the price of entry for gaming laptops.However, I'm done with laptops with discrete GPUs. They're a lot more expensive, hot, and with small performance increase. Still can't forget those dead laptops due to GPU chip solder issues.
I'd rather have this without the discrete GPU as the integrated Vega is decent for low res gaming and emulation gaming.
Annnonymmous - Sunday, February 17, 2019 - link
Modern laptop GPUs are nearly equivalent to their desktop parts. If you go high-end they are still hot/loud, but at the entry/mid level you can find quiet and cool solutions. The laptop in question runs dead silent most of the time, with a mild hum in gaming. It's also very cool almost never breaking 70c on CPU/GPU.bananaforscale - Sunday, February 17, 2019 - link
How the heck did you get 636 in Cinebench multicore? I have never seen more than 604. The CPU boosts to 3.2 GHz for a few seconds but the drops to ~2.9 GHz and it's not even temp throttling. Does the review unit have a BIOS newer than 1.08?bananaforscale - Sunday, February 17, 2019 - link
(NVM about the BIOS, it seems to be the same. There's *something* going on tho.)Annnonymmous - Sunday, February 17, 2019 - link
The latest bios is 1.12 i believe. So that's possible. Also, if you turn on the power saving features (like I have) it lowers scores a bit.bananaforscale - Sunday, February 17, 2019 - link
Fascinating, Acer Care Center can't find it but there it is on the support site. I'll do an update then. :)ads295 - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link
Acer Care Center is absolutely useless for updates...