The market for budget gaming laptops in the sub $1000 price range is heating up with a lot of competition among the PC makers bringing in above average models (sometimes models challenging the flagship variants). Acer barges in the market with a teaser 8th generation Intel processor Acer Nitro 5 AN515-53-55G9 gaming laptop with a mind-boggling price under $800.
Table of Contents
Major Highlights of the Product
- 8th Generation Intel Core i5 Processor
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti GPU
- 8GB RAM
- 15.6 Inches full HD IPS Display
- 256 GB Solid State Drive
- Windows 10
Form Factor and Design
Acer Nitro 5 AN515-53-55G9 has an impressive form factor, which has a premium feel to it as opposed to the average budget laptops in the gaming segments, doing away with the eclectic color accents. The laptop has a ribbed black form with an accent at the edges, which is more of a muted burgundy color rather than red. The logo is also a metallic black which accents nicely over the ribbed matt black lid.
The top has a metallic feel to it; however, the rest of the body of the laptop is built in premium plastic which has a sturdy build quality. The hinges are built strong enough to withstand normal pressure and don’t dent easily. The hinges are tight and remain in place on moderate jerking yet the lid is light enough to be opened with one hand.
All in all, a sturdy build quality. Below the hood, the laptop sports a backlit chiclet keyboard with red backlight to match the accent on the top of the laptop and W, S, A and D keys are in red, a signature mark up for most budget gaming laptops/ keyboards. However, the key travel distance is not optimum as to some; the keys may seem near to each other. Below the laptop, there are the specific access areas for the RAM slots and the Solid State Drive.
The base plate is completely removable. The design, however, fails to impress; and the user experience supports such impression. Acer boasts of dual cooling in the laptop by dual fans, however, both the fans are connected on one side of the base plate with a heat conductor tube going all over to the other end over the top of the GPU unit. The second heat conductor tube is connected to the GPU, which is parked right beside the APU.
This design effectively mismanaged the entire cooling capacity of the fans, and therefore with an hour’s gaming effort with the laptop in medium to high gameplay settings, leaves the laptop sufficiently heated up, to the extent of leaving the laptop to be set aside for cooling down or use an external cooling pad. Even though the fan speeds can be controlled by the inbuilt software, the fan becomes loud enough to the extent of being a disturbance. Further, the speakers are parked at the bottom of the laptop. The output of the speakers is not great, but parking it below the laptop muffles the sound quite a bit.
Performance of Acer Nitro 5 AN515-53-55G9
Processor
Acer Nitro 5 AN515-53-55G9 features an 8th Generation Intel Quad-Core i5-8300H processor, with enough firepower to take care of the regular day to day jobs, and the laptop can handle resource-hungry applications with ease.
RAM
The Laptop comes with factory fitted 8GB DDR4 RAM which can be upgradable to 32 GB.
GPU & Display
Acer Nitro 5 AN515-53-55G9 comes fitted with a top of the line NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti GPU with 4GB GDDR5 video memory, which is armed to handle most graphics resource hungry games with a charm. But the gameplay experience is cut short with the dim display of 280 nits and a color reproduction of only 65% on RGB and 49% on Adobe RGB.
Battery Life
The 3220 mAh 4-cell battery of the laptop is another disappointment with the laptop. The laptop, on a lower brightness settings and usage, limited to normal day-to-day usage with minimal graphics intervention can provide a good 5.5 hours of battery life, but with a minimal gameplay load the average battery life is reduced to around 4 hours and with a high setting, and high screen brightness gameplay situation, the battery life is hardly about an hour. Pertinent to note, this device does not support fast charge.
Other Peripherals
The device features a standard HDMI, 2 USB 2.0, USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 Type C Ports for physical connectivity and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for connecting over the air. The biggest miss here is a Thunderbolt port and to a great extent, an optical drive, which, though the makers claim has been omitted to save space, but the omission hardly serves any positive purpose.
Operating System
The laptop comes out of the box with Windows 10 factory installed.
Final Verdict
Accepted it does have some nifty features, that of a beautiful form factor, and the onboard presence of the top of the line Nvidia Chipset GPU for the budget section, yet the most limiting factor for the laptop remains in its poor design choice, heating up the laptop occasions where the user is playing game (Which is the laptop’s selling proposition) for a period of more than 40 minutes to an hour, or the poor battery backup that the laptop offers. All in all, not the best laptop to purchase for avid gamers, since there are quite a few better options than this at the same price ranges. The laptop is available soon on acer official website.
