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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Brett Howse - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
Let me re-evaluate when I get something Tiger Lake. Right now I'm still finding that the iGPU solutions are struggling at 1366x768 / 1280x720 in most titles.lakedude - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
Laptops in this class are right up my alley. You can easily spend $800 on a laptop with zero graphic performance. I've got a Nitro and would buy another, depending on specs/price of course.My taste may not be typical but the monitor does not bother me for 2 reasons.
1) Color gamut is not that noticable to me. Sure I've got OLED screens that look amazing and side by side the Nitro looks washed out by comparison but there are many other worse problems to my eye (like slow switching, limited view angle, low res, etc.).
2) All but a couple times a year I used my laptop "docked" to a keyboard/mouse and monitor so the monitor isn't even in use most of the time. I realize this is a special use case so YMMV.
Other than the screen this thing has specs that would have needed a huge heavy chassis just a few years ago.
Cheap, good specs (cept screen), and fairly light for a 1080p "gaming" system. What is not to like?
lmcd - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
~4 lb laptops with equal dGPUs are absolutely possible. For example, an upgraded Inspiron 15 would match this in performance in a smaller profile.Linustechtips12#6900xt - Thursday, May 13, 2021 - link
exactly correct if I didn't have to go to college and have something that didn't scream "I'm a fuc*ing gamer B*tch" then I would totally buy thisValantar - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
It's a shame the Zephyrus M15 is missing from the normalized battery life chart, as that is the most relevant comparison of those in the other charts. For reference if anyone else wonders, with its 76Wh battery it ends up at a normalized battery score of 6.74, noticeably below the Nitro.coolrock2008 - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
AM i reading this correctly? The difference between the entry level SKU and the the $999 SKU AN515-44-R078 is just the GPU upgrade? $330 to move from 1650 to 1650Ti? Ouch.DanNeely - Friday, October 9, 2020 - link
Also the 144hz display. But since the GPU isn't fast enough to play current games that fast' I'd much rather have seen the 16gb/512gb upgrade instead. Assuming the 144hz panel isn't better quality in ways other than the refresh rate anyway.Brett Howse - Saturday, October 10, 2020 - link
Mid-tier is still the 60 Hz panel so yes only the GPU is different.Galcobar - Sunday, October 11, 2020 - link
Either this (Brett's) comment or the chart on the first page has an error then; the chart shows the middle tier to share the upgraded GPU and screen refresh of the upper tier.Brett Howse - Sunday, October 11, 2020 - link
There was some confusion from Acer on this I think someone edited my chart, but I switched it back now. Only the top-tier model has the 144 Hz display. Acer's marketing materials for the mid-tier said it did, but the spec sheet did not show it, and I clarified with them that the mid tier does in fact not have the 144 Hz.