CES 2022: Acer Nitro 5 2022 gaming laptop hands-on preview
Acer Powers up the Nitro 5 for 2022
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Recently announced as a part of Acer’s brand new lineup for products coming in 2022, we got our hands on the all-new Acer Nitro gaming laptop’s 2022 refresh. The Acer Nitro gaming laptops have always offered an excellent price to performance ratio, and now Acer looks to bring this to further heights, with the system coming in both Intel and AMD Ryzen flavours, but will always be equipped with a brand-new RTX 30 series gaming GPU.
The Acer Nitro 5 is aimed at people looking for an entry into the PC gaming market, and that’s exactly what the Nitro 5 offers. With fast PCIe Gen 4 storage, cutting-edge DDR5 RAM, in addition to the latest CPUs from whatever team you choose, the laptop certainly has the theoretical horsepower to drive even the most demanding of gaming titles.
Chassis
The chassis itself is built from strong plastic, finished across the bottom of the chassis with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it addition of silver glitter. While this mainly matte black body is relatively stealthy, Acer has chosen to give the top of the system a slight makeover, with red and blue accents on the top of the body that doesn’t quite scream ‘hello look at me, I am a powerful gaming laptop’ more than it looks like a toddler’s gotten access to some gel pens and has decided the Acer Nitro 5 is their brand-new canvas.
Honestly, we would have preferred a simple matte black over the design chosen here. It doesn’t add anything to the system, and the colours used to stand out in a way that does not align with the rest of the Acer Nitro 5. Luckily, this is where our complaints come to an end.
The laptop is fairly hefty, owing to it the sheer amount of thermal cooling potential, battery, chips and density that this relatively small package will be able to kick out. It’s not the most stylish laptop we’ve ever seen, and a part of that is simply down to the bevelled edges of the back exhausts, which are fully plastic, too. You’re not going to see much metal in this design at all, which can come off as initially feeling cheap, but the Acer Nitro 2022 gaming laptop has it where it counts.
Keyboard
The keyboard design and build offer little to no flex with the preproduction unit we’ve got our hands-on and is finished with a keycap design that apes ‘pudding’ caps, with light shining through the keys. Key travel feels satisfying, though nothing can really replace a fully mechanical keyboard. However, the trackpad is also built out of plastic and is relatively small considering the 15.6-inch chassis. We would have liked to have seen something a bit larger, and with slightly more premium-feeling materials, which would make the Acer Nitro 2022 model a cut above the rest by comparison to its purported price category.
Display
Luckily, if you’re a serious PC gamer, you’ll probably have your own mouse to connect to the system itself. But, you might not need to lug around a monitor with you, because the fantastic display of the Acer Nitro 5 comes in at a strong 1440p resolution, and a refresh rate of up to 165Hz, which makes using this Windows 11-based system an absolute breeze. We decided to play a few visually challenging movies on the display and were pleasantly surprised at not only the Acer Nitro 5 2022’s colour reproduction but also its responsiveness in general usage, too.
While we can’t talk specifics about gaming performance due to this being a preproduction unit, it’s a pretty certain fact that you’ll have an excellent PC gaming experience out of this machine, considering the specs that Acer have doled out on CES. In addition to this is the significant thermal cooling solution provided by the dual fan intakes, and enough exhaust at the bottom and back of the chassis to get rid of all of the hot air.
Connectivity
For those looking to make a Nitro 5 2022 gaming laptop more of a permanent fixture in their setup, Acer has conveniently nestled the power, HDMI out and a Type-C connector at the back for easy cable management for your setup. With additional USB 3.0 ports on the sides in addition to an ethernet port on the system, this veritable desktop replacement comes out of the box with much more connectivity options than you’d see on even the Apple MacBook Pro, no dongles required.
The Acer Nitro 5 2022 has all of the makings of a great gaming laptop, with few compromises to speak of outside of build quality. The plastic design of the exhausts at the back look impressive and give the system more room to breathe when carrying out tasks with significant workloads. Since this system is aimed at being a good price to a performance gaming laptop, we’re not too disappointed that the whole thing isn’t made out of machined aluminium, as the saying goes, it’s what’s inside that counts.
Coming soon in both 15.6-inch and 17-inch flavors, will the Acer Nitro 5 (2022) gaming laptop be your go-to system for getting your PC gaming fix on the move? It’s a very strong contender, and one that most gamers shouldn’t sniff at, as ultimately what matters is not in its design or how well the keyboard lights up, but its performance and capacity to keep up with higher framerates, and with the sheer amount of configurations that will be available upon release, there’s sure to be a model of the Acer Nitro 5 gaming laptop that suits your exact needs.
We’ll be sure to take a look with a full review of the Acer Nitro 5 2022 gaming laptop when it fully releases in early 2022.
