The Acer Nitro 5 Review: Renoir And Turing On A Budget

Battery 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.