It’s complicated, but honestly the version Acer sent us is probably the most balanced kit—though as I said, that 500GB SSD is tempting. It peters out at a mere 250 nits’ brightness though, which is usually our baseline for testing.
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It’s modern but very entry-level gaming hardware, exactly what you’d expect for the price.
That said, this is unmistakably a gaming laptop—same as the Nitro 7 we reviewed a few months back.
Sure, that won’t translate directly into two more hours of peak-performance gaming—we do our rundown test with looped video, which is considerably less intensive.
For that we really need to turn to gaming performance, and that GTX 1650.
Acer Nitro XV272U Pbmiiprzx 27" WQHD (2560 x 1440) IPS G-SYNC Compatible Monitor, 144Hz, 1ms VRB, VESA Certified DisplayHDR400, DCI-P3, Delta E<2 4.2 out of 5 stars 214 20 offers from $369.99 Benchmarks prove that out, as the Nitro 5 slips a few notches below the Nitro 7 we looked at—especially in the CPU category, where the Nitro 7’s Core i7-9750H handily outpaced the Nitro 5’s Core i5 in Cinebench, most notably in multi-threading.
Well, except the display. The Acer Nitro VG271U is a good monitor for media creation.
PCWorld |. The 1440p, 27 inch screen is great for multitasking and makes it easier to see more of your work at once.
The build quality far surpasses what I’d expect from a laptop this cheap, and the internals are “good enough,” for what that’s worth. We took a look at the $830 Nitro 5, which features an Intel Core i5-9300H clocked at 2.4GHz, an Nvidia GTX 1650, 8GB of DDR4 RAM, a 1TB hard drive, and a 128GB SSD boot drive. In most regards the Nitro 5 holds its own, with a fairly standard 15.6-inch, 1920x1080 IPS screen. That said, the 2019 Nitro 5 did manage to improve upon its predecessor’s time (52 minutes) by almost ten minutes, so it’s not all bad news. We knocked 2018’s Nitro 5 for its 291-minute runtime, and Acer apparently took the criticism to heart.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Like the Nitro 7, I’ve found myself using the Nitro 5 to write articles more often than I expected.
So let’s get into the under-the-hood hardware, shall we? There’s been one last major improvement: battery life.
It doesn’t really do much to slim the Nitro 5’s profile, nor is it especially interesting.
The Nitro 7 wasn’t exactly speedy, but still managed to finish the job almost ten minutes faster than the Nitro 5’s poor Core i5 and its 44-minute encode.
That means slightly more than usual though, as we’ve had both CPU and GPU generation changes this year.
Still, for a gaming laptop?