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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Crazyeyeskillah - Sunday, October 11, 2020 - link
The keys themselves are reasonably, with good resistance and travel.Editors: We can do better than this anandtech, really been trying to be loyal despite the drop in quality.
Calista - Monday, October 12, 2020 - link
Obviously built to a budget, but for the money few complains can be raised. $700 give us a decent gaming laptop with no fatal flaws. Sure, the screen could have been better. But a lot of people just don't care all that much when it comes to PQ, and even a bad IPS screen tend to be a good enough.AMDSuperFan - Monday, October 12, 2020 - link
I am not sure if I am still banned.AMDSuperFan - Monday, October 12, 2020 - link
I was banned for the big AMD announcements. But since I am back for now, I ask that people do not ask that I be banned for opinions and dialogue. You will note that I never curse or harass others. I simply provide noteworthy opinions on the articles, from my personal perspective of a Super Fan of the AMD company. Why would my personal opinions generate such angst from the community while others say curse words upon one another and engage in angry discourse?I am not angry. I am happy and go lucky. Allow me to be!
All that said, I am super excited about this new budget offering from AMD. AMD may not be the fastest but it is good for those of us on a tight budget. Let the rich fat cats buy the Intel products that are faster with better features. AMD fans like me enjoy a bargain and will give up quality in every aspect of a product for a good deal that is almost as good at some things!
lefty2 - Tuesday, October 13, 2020 - link
mentions no noise at idle, but says nothing about noise at low load. nor does he mention noise levels when coolboost is turned offJohnstron1980 - Friday, December 4, 2020 - link
I agree with the other commenters! I was SOO close to buying the Nitro 5 2020 with a Ryzen 4800H but then... the screen is so poor. WHYYY?? It seems like a trend to put crappy panels on great Ryzen machines to save the manufacturer a buck. But it does not make sense. I would gladly pay a bit more for a better screen, but the next step up in screen quality on the market is MUCH more expensive. Surely it does not cost the manufacturer that much more to go to the next step up in screen quality?Rec2020 - Monday, July 19, 2021 - link
I got into photography a few months after getting this laptop. I edit photos on it, but something made it feel flat, and other devices always made my photos look more saturated. Despite calibrating the screen with the built in utility + using a few other on-screen gradient charts etc and having fairly accurate looking hues the saturation has always been an issue. Did some digging just to find this thing only has a 61% of sRGB gamut? Jesus! sRGB is the smallest gamut even used for ANYTHING. It's THOROUGHLY outdated, even the old analog NTSC color space from 1953 is larger than sRGB (which came out in 1993 I think). How do you manage to manufacture something in the 2020s that could be outdone by a 1950s high end CRT TV? Absolutely pathetic.Rec2020 - Monday, July 19, 2021 - link
Oh, and by the way this laptop's screen also has uneven lighting at the top from the backlights. They point outwards in a ^ shape from the top center. Not sure if it's a widespread issue, but I've seen an in store display for a slightly more recent version of this with that too. Not an issue unless darker content is displayed on screen but worth mentioning.Altuzza - Monday, August 23, 2021 - link
Even those with a stable income source and are regularly paid salaries can face an emergency when they need cash quickly. I recently used https://oncredit.vn . It literally saved me. There was no money at all. The popularity of payday loans is at its peak today. I don't see anything wrong with that.Maurice Hawkins - Wednesday, February 16, 2022 - link
It's awesome, I'm looking forward to it. I will go to https://apkcima.com/ to download the game and test it on this laptop