The Acer Nitro 5 Review: Renoir And Turing On A Budget
by Brett Howse on October 9, 2020 8:00 AM ESTBattery Life
Although typical gaming systems are not generally known as road warriors, due to their high weight, and powerful internal components, on systems that include the ability to turn off the discrete GPU, such as the Acer Nitro 5, battery life can be fairly competitive.
Acer has only outfitted the Nitro 5 with a 51 Wh battery, which, considering the 15.6-inch chassis, is definitely on the small side, but battery size is only one half of the equation.
To see how the Acer Nitro 5 fares in runtime when not hooked to power, it was set to 200 nits brightness, and run down from 100% battery until it shut down on several different workloads.
Web Battery Life
Our web battery life test is very demanding on the CPU, and as such can really drain the battery down compared to tests that are mostly idle. The Acer Nitro 5 achieved 397 minutes here, which is just over 6.5 hours. That is a far cry from the 12-15 hours we see on Ultrabooks, but still a solid time for a 45-Watt class gaming laptop.
Looking at the normalized result, which removes the battery size from the equation, the Acer Nitro 5 gaming laptop does not manage to touch the smaller, lighter laptops in energy efficiency, but is not too far off either, despite the larger display and more powerful internals.
PCMark 10 Battery Modern Office
The PCMark 10 test leverages some of the sub-tests from their performance workloads and runs them in sequence. Each test is given ten minutes to complete, so if a system gets the work done quicker it earns extra idle time. This test is actually less demanding than our web workload, due to the idle time, and scores are generally a bit higher. The Acer Nitro 5 did very well on this test, achieving just a hair over nine hours.
Movie Playback
Generally, the least demanding task is video playback, since the video decode can be offloaded to efficient, fixed-function hardware in the CPU’s media blocks. This is one area where AMD struggled in previous generations of the Ryzen laptop platform, but is another area where they have become very competitive. The Acer Nitro 5 managed almost exactly ten hours of runtime.
If you are wondering how many movies that is, our Tesseract score divides the movie runtime by the length of a long movie- in this case The Avengers, and the Acer was able to playback the equivalent of The Avengers over four times.
Charge Time
Acer ships the Nitro 5 with a 135-Watt AC adapter, providing power to the system as well as charging. It connects via a barrel connector on the rear of the device, and the connector itself feels quite robust. If there was a knock against it, it is easy to put the plug in, but not actually connect it as it takes an extra push to click it in, but that does secure it nicely.
The system was able to go from 0% to 100% charge in about two hours, which is more or less average. Despite the high-power input, charging the battery at too high a rate would degrade the battery life.
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Operandi - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
Midrange AMD notebooks are something we've had forever this is boring. Where are the high-end Renoir based ultrabooks?vlayceh - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
All derivatives of GTX 1650 for laptops have 1024 cores while 1650 desktop has 896 cores. Your article mentions 896 cores which I suppose is an error.lightningz71 - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
Unfortunately, the GPU-Z screen capture that is shown on the GPU Performance page clearly indicates only 896 pipelines.An earlier article near the release of the 1650 mobile indicated that it could be configured with multiple pipeline enablement configurations and multiple power targets, and that few vendors were ever going to note how their particular implementation was done. The only way to absolutely insure that your 1650 was fully enabled, and also equipped with GDDR6, would be to get a 1650TI version.
treecats - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
lol, what a terrible idea. AMD Ryzen 4600H and 4800H already included Vega graphics. Why bother including a discrete graphic card. Get rid of the graphic card and use that money to improve the screen on the base model, and this will make the laptop thinner, lighter and probably cheaper. more attractive to potential buyers. People wants a gaming laptop wouldn't want to buy this, they rather spend more money.Otritus - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
This machine provides adequate 1080p gaming performance. As someone whos gamed on a 750 ti from 2015 to today, this would be an excellent step up in performance. And frankly this is not trying to be a cheap thin and light, but a machine that will give you solid performance at a cheap price. Not everyone can afford $800+ laptops, and the compromises to hit $670 seem fair.Bobby3244 - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
Any reason why we don't see the CPU clocks in the Far Cry thermals? I had a friend pick up a gaming laptop with ryzen 4800h and a 5600M (Dell something), and the CPU clocks when playing games was horrible (2500~ Mhz), which was promptly returned. As far as thermals go, this one looks better, but I would still like to see the clock speed of the CPU.Brett Howse - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
GPU-Z only grabs the CPU temperatures.nicolaim - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
The port selection is so 2017...Otritus - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
I've been noticing the value gaming settings is 13x7. While this seems fine on older integrated gfx solutions, the improved gaming performance of tiger like (and likely cezanne) seems like this resolution could be buffed to 1080p, especially because budget discrete gpus like the 1650 seem like an excellent 1080p medium to high card (and faster budget gpus are coming).And frankly for the games that I play at 1080p, I can either easily hit 60 fps on a 750 ti, or am fine with reducing the eye candy or sacrificing fps when compared to 720p. So a value 1080p might be better representative for entry-level gaming in 2020.