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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evolucion8 - Sunday, February 17, 2019 - link
Compared as against Vega 10? Typo on the article lol. And there had been many other laptops with RX GPUs, like the Asus GL702ZC with an RX 580, the Acer Predator 500 with Vega 56, the HP Omen with an Intel CPU but an RX 580, not as widely adopted as the Intel/Nvidia combo but going onto the right direction. Hope you guys can review the AMD powered Predator 500 which is impressive!Brett Howse - Sunday, February 17, 2019 - link
Vega 10 is the iGPU on the Ryzen 7 2700U in the Acer Swift 3.eva02langley - Monday, February 18, 2019 - link
Big, bulky, unattractive...Thanks Acer... when will you understand that we want THIN FORMAT laptops with APU for production and office work ABLE to game at 720p?
Man, my only hope is the 3700u is actually part of the upcoming MS surface.
GreenReaper - Monday, February 18, 2019 - link
If you want that, you might not want Acer. Try a more upmarket brand. Of course they might go with Intel because it still has the edge on single-threaded performance at a particular power level. A chunky laptop with good cooling is one of the cases where Ryzen makes the most sense.But there are now things like the Lenovo IdeaPad 720S: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/ideapad/ideap...
and the Huawei Matebook D: https://hothardware.com/reviews/huawei-matebook-d-...
Notebookcheck found some good things about the IdeaPad w/2500U: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-Ideapad-720S-...
The 2700U, slightly more: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-IdeaPad-720s-...
But not as much as the Intel alternative: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-Ideapad-720S-...
Basically poor thermals and single-channel DIMM killed it. The Matebook allegedly has dual-channel.
I would suggest waiting until the 3xxx and maybe even until 7nm comes out for it (yes, I know that's probably another year, but you might get Navi and AV1 decode as well, arguably worth the wait).
Ford_Prefect - Monday, February 18, 2019 - link
Kinda of regret buying this now, as ASUS is gearing up to release TUF FX705 and FX505 models with Ryzen 5 3550H processors. The latter of which has a 120 mhz display option.Ford_Prefect - Monday, February 18, 2019 - link
*120Hz0ldman79 - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link
When you factor in that random bug on Skylakes (could be on later models as well, just can't confirm) where the uncore draws 6W at idle for no reason at all the low usage power consumption difference effectively disappears.Reboot the Skylake machine and the issue goes away, but you have to actually notice it in order to do that. Your average user probably isn't watching Core Temp and the power draw while using the laptop.
Gasaraki88 - Wednesday, February 20, 2019 - link
For some reason this review is very confusing and pointless? The charts just have random laptops on them, not all the laptops appear in all charts, the laptops tested are all random, some are cheap, some are very expensive, so what's the point? You have to have a standard to compare, you can't just throw random laptops together. Are you comparing similar priced laptops? Are you comparing 'gaming' laptops? Are you comparing laptops that weight similar? Are you comparing laptops with similar wattage cpus?We know that a $2000 laptop is going to be faster than a $1000 one.
ballsystemlord - Wednesday, February 20, 2019 - link
Spelling and grammar corrections:So what do you if you need more performance, particularly GPU performance?
Missing do.
So what do you do if you need more performance, particularly GPU performance?
We've reached out to Acer and AMD to confirm the TDP settings, but as you'll see below this Ryzen 5 2500U performs well ahead of other we have tested.
Other whats?
Luckily the battery life is probably not that big...
Missing comma
Luckily, the battery life is probably not that big...
JamesALang - Monday, March 4, 2019 - link
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