The Acer Nitro 5 gaming laptop line, is a long-running series that regularly makes it into best budget gaming laptop lists year-on-year. Although Acer has recently introduced the new Acer Nitro 16 and Acer Nitro 17 laptops both of which offer more mid-range performance, it still retained the Acer Nitro 5 as that entry-level option.

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Pros

High FPS performance
MUX Switch
Dependable keyboard and trackpad
Solid webcam
Decent build quality for a budget machine
Quiet on Default and Quiet profiles
Upgradable DDR5 RAM and M.2 storage

Cons

Loud fans when in Performance profile
Poor battery life
Poor color replication

This 2023 variant comes with the same laptop chassis and many of the same features as the 2022 model, but now comes with Nvidia 40-series graphics card options and DDR5 RAM as standard. So how does it measure up?

Pricing

The Acer Nitro 5 AN515-58-55MF 15.6″ gaming laptop is equipped with an Intel Core i5-12500H CPU and Nvidia RTX 4050 and retails at around the $1,000 mark, though a variant equipped with the i7-12650H and RTX 4060 is also available. Memory can be upgraded to 32GB, and the 512GB SSD can also be expanded with a 1TB HDD as well. There’s also a 17-inch version with similar specs. All models come with Killer Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.1, plus Gigabit ethernet support.

Overall Design

Acer’s Nitro 5 comes complete with an off-black finish as standard. That’s pretty basic but by no means does it look bad. The lid has an elegant navy and crimson pattern of thinly veiled cyberpunk-esque streaks, with red lettering spelling ‘Nitro’ just about visible when it’s closed – it’s subtle but incredibly stylish. The keys of the keyboard are surrounded by a svelte white edging which does look a bit shoddy, but admittedly helps you find the keys better in a pinch The keyboard features RGB backlighting perhaps unsurprisingly, however, it is pretty dim, particularly on the bottom row.

Acer Nitro 5 2023 review design 4 — Acer Nitro 5: left side

Acer Nitro 5 2023 review design 6 — Acer Nitro 5: left side

The 2023 Acer Nitro 5 has essentially an identical chassis to the previous 2022 model. It’s all plastic as you’d expect from a budget machine, but there’s a solid build quality to it. The chassis does bend slightly when depressed and screen wobble is noticeable, but it’s not an overall major distraction. Crucially the monitor hinge feels sturdy. All-in-all, it’s pretty standard for a 15.6” gaming laptop: it’s not the lightest out there either, but still pretty portable.

Tech Specs

CPU

Core i5-12500H

GPU

RTX 4050

Refresh Rate

144Hz

Laptop weight

2.5kg/5.51lbs

Dimensions

26.9mm x 360.4mm x 271.1 mm (H x W x D)

The Nitro 5 also features a full-size membrane keyboard. It’s pretty decent for typing with sturdy-feeling keys, although the Shift keys were a bit on the small side. The trackpad isn’t a precision glass one, but it still feels solid and responsive to use. The Nitro 5 has an inbuilt webcam that runs at a max 720p resolution at 60 FPS. It doesn’t have InfraRed unfortunately, so no Windows Hello support, however, the quality of the image and the recorded sound were not great but not terrible either – better than you’d expect at this price point.

Audio for the Nitro 5 was a bit better than we’d expect given the price. There’s surprisingly no fuzziness or quality loss at max volume. That being said, it was impressively quiet at max, and you’ll probably want to set it to at least 70/100 to actually hear whatever you’re watching or playing when using those external units. Bass production is generally on par with other budget gaming laptops as well, i.e. middling at best. if you’re playing music on this machine don’t expect to hear many of those low notes.

Acer Nitro 5 2023 review keyboard & trackpad 1 — Acer Nitro 5 laptop keyboard close-up.

Screen

The 16:9 1080p 144Hz display is the same found in last year’s Nitro 5, coming with a less-than-ideal 17ms g2g response time, but that’s not unsurprising given the price. The 144Hz maximum refresh rate is ideal for gaming though. As you can see from our results, the color gamut coverage was unimpressive and less than ideal for color-accurate work, but beyond that, it’s noticeably poor even when gaming.

The results we recorded were: 6665K (White point), 0.0668 cd/m² (Black point), 1298.3:1 (Contrast ratio), 6.69 (average deltaE*00), 2.16 (gamma). This means the white point and contrast ratio are both respectable in line with more mid-range gaming laptops, and the black point and gamma are both surprisingly good. The average deltaE*00 however, was pretty poor, and combined with the narrow color gamut as discussed above you certainly wouldn’t want to do any color-accurate work on this machine.

Acer Nitro 5 RTX 4050 color gamut 2023 08 29 131923 — A window showing the settings for color on the Acer Nitro 5.

Acer Nitro 5 RTX 4050 sRGB Gamut Coverage B156HAN08.4 1 2023 08 29 13 00 120cdm² D6500 2.2 F S XYZLUTMTX — A window showing the settings for color on the Acer Nitro 5.

We did a quick calibration to see if this would improve any of the above results, but as expected the display is pre-calibrated, and there was negligible difference, with some results actually getting slightly worse as some got slightly better – not worth it overall.

We did a quick calibration to see if it would improve color performance, but as the display is likely pre-calibrated anyway, there was negligible difference, with some results actually getting slightly worse as some got slightly better.

Looking purely at panel uniformity, the results we got on the Acer Nitro 5 were pretty respectable for a gaming laptop, although those looking for a uniform machine for creative work would probably want to look elsewhere. The larger variation (in orange/yellow) occurred on the left and right sides of the screen, ranging between a 1.31 – 2.06 average delta variance.

Acer also claims the Nitro 5 can hit a peak brightness of 300 nits, however, we only recorded 254 cd/m² in our test, with a minimum of 22 cd/m². This isn’t great, though pretty standard at this price point. You’ll definitely be restricted to indoor use with this machine, and even then particularly bright lighting could be an issue.

The 120 cd/m² mark (the standard brightness for calibration) was achieved at 48% in the brightness settings.

Battery Life

We managed 2 and a half hours in our general use battery test, which is pretty poor, but this doesn’t match up to what we’ve seen other reviewers get on their tests, which is closer to around 4 hours, so it’s possible that there was an issue with the battery of our particular unit or some background function sapping the battery.

Software

The onboard software, NitroSense, has a shortcut button on the keyboard next to the NumLock key. NitroSense has few customization options compared to what you’ll find in more premium laptops, but it does have the things that matter: namely a MUX Switch, plus three different power/performance modes (Quiet, Default, Performance), and three fan control presets (Auto, Max, Custom).

The minimalist design of NitroSense does make it cleaner and easier to navigate than some of the bloated offerings you can find elsewhere. There’s also some rudimentary RGB control for the keyboard backlighting as well here.

Performance

With the power mode set to Performance and the fan control either set to Max or Auto when conducting our gaming benchmarks, the fan volume was unbearably noisy – some of the loudest we’ve heard to date. You’ll certainly need to wear headphones when gaming in those settings as it will be incredibly distracting for most people in the vicinity.

In Default performance mode, however, with the fans set to Auto, the noise was audible but a lot more tolerable. Although we didn’t conduct our FPS benchmarking on these settings, running Doom Eternal on High ran fairly well. You can also manually set the fan speed of both the CPU and GPU independently with the Custom preset, so it would be well worth experimenting with this to find a fan curve that suits you.

On Quiet mode during general usage, and even in Default mode outside of gaming, the laptop was virtually silent – ideal for the office or anywhere public.

As for temperatures, although some warmth was noticeable on the Nitro 5’s chassis when gaming, it never proved uncomfortable. The fans overall did a good job of keeping temps sufficiently low, at least low enough for your hands to rest on it when gaming without getting sweaty. Internal temperature results were mixed – maximum and average GPU temps were pleasingly low, as was the CPU average temp. The CPU max scores however were very high.

When gaming max temps around the mid to low 90°C range is where thermal throttling starts to take place for laptop CPUs, and the high 90°Cs is where degradation can occur to the CPU over time, reducing its performance. The CPU in the Nitro 5 capped out at 100°C in all titles other than CS:GO, which still reached a very high 97°C – this points to potential issues for the CPU over time. We’d consider picking up a laptop stand or a laptop cooling pad to help take this down a notch.

Gaming Performance

Acer Nitro 5 RTX 4050 Assassins Creed Valhalla FSR Balanced 1080p — Assassin’s Creed Valhalla benchmark Acer Nitro 5

Acer Nitro 5 RTX 4050 CS GO 1080p — Assassin’s Creed Valhalla benchmark Acer Nitro 5

We tested the Acer Nitro 5 with the power profile set to Performance mode and the fans set to Max/Auto. Given the very loud fan noise as discussed, you’re unlikely to want to do this most of the time when gaming, so bear in mind performance may drop if you use it in its default configuration.

This is the first RTX 4050 we’ve tested and the FPS results were actually fairly impressive. Although admittedly we had frame generation (DLSS and FSR) enabled for three of the games, to generate an average of 138FPS in Assasin’s Creed Valhalla on the highest settings is still a major win for such an affordable laptop, particularly given the CPU is a previous-gen i5. In fact, it performed about as well as one of our favorite high-powered RTX 3070 laptops that we tested a couple of years back without frame-generation enabled (this was before DLSS 3.0 and FSR had been released).

The one downside is that we were unable to play Doom Eternal on maximum settings (Ultra Nightmare), with or without Ray-Tracing enabled, as the settings exceeded the maximum 6GB VRAM of the RTX 4050 M GPU. You can tweak the settings higher than the ‘High’ preset we use for our middle test – switching things up to ‘Ultra’ for most settings, but we didn’t benchmark this to keep our test settings standardized for consistency of comparisons between laptops. Ultimately lower VRAM is one of the prices you must pay when buying a budget GPU, and right here, is where it hurts.

A Budget King?

Although not without its flaws, the Acer Nitro 5 2023 variant is a great gaming laptop for those on a budget, offering terrific FPS performance per dollar spent, particularly in those games that support frame-generation tech. This is in no small part thanks to the inclusion of a MUX Switch, which is still a fairly rare sight for budget gaming laptops.

You get reasonable quality for the price point in terms of the overall build quality, plus the standard of the keyboard, trackpad, webcam, and microphone. Upgradable DDR5 RAM and the two upgradable M.2 storage slots are welcome. The two biggest downsides are the poor battery life and ridiculously loud fans on the highest performance preset, although the latter is counteracted somewhat by the impressively quiet performance on Default and Quiet modes, you can tweak the fan speeds yourself in the software to get the balance to your liking with a Custom preset. Although the 1080p screen’s color replication and peak brightness are unimpressive, the latter isn’t any worse than the majority of other gaming laptops at this price point.

All told this is one of the best affordable gaming laptops currently available if you’re looking to play demanding titles on medium settings.

One of the best budget gaming laptops money can buy. The Nvidia RTX 4050 GPU plus Intel Core i5-12500H CPU punches well above their weight, mainly when DLSS or FSR is enabled in those games that support it, and you ensure the MUX Switch is turned on. The battery duration is regrettably short and it pumps out substantial decibels on the highest performance mode, but tweaking the settings down a bit reduces this substantially, and the Nitro 5 runs pretty quietly under these conditions. The screen isn’t bright and the colors aren’t great either, but that’s to be expected for this price, and the overall build quality is surprisingly good for the money. Both the RAM and SSD storage are also upgradable, which is a bonus.

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