Acer Nitro 5 AN515-44-R8QT – Hardware Review
Over the years, we have shown you many great items from Acer’s gaming lineup, and in a long-forgotten past, we’ve also shown you many of their smartphones. Nonetheless, Acer is a brand that keeps growing and is actually designing more and more devices that are perfectly suited for casual and competitive gamers alike. We have seen a few of the Predator laptops in the past, and these were already a great start for the company’s gaming lineup. These early heavy-duty laptops, were as the name stated, literally heavy pieces of hardware to drag around. For home usage, these were nice machines, very powerful and durable, but they were not really that comfortable as ‘mobile’ devices to actually take with you from location to location. When we rekindled the fires with Acer for a closer look at their expensive hardware, we were offered to try out one of the Nitro 5 models. When taking a look at the hardware inside, we were extremely surprised by its lighter weight, its power and its overall quality. For this review, we will be directing ourselves to casual gamers, as well as those looking for a powerhouse to play their games. We will dive less into the specs, as specs are standardized, and more on comfort, price and accessibility.
Design
The earlier Predator models often looked like very futuristic devices with a fair amount of bells and whistles. This was a great choice and felt very 90s, early 2000s, as this was also the period people started slowly modding their PC cases to look a bit more unique. Of course, all these extra pieces of design will eventually also translate into higher asking prices, purely for design, rather than actual specs.
When taking a look at the Nitro 5 (AN515-44-R8QT), we were surprised by its sleek and simple design. The back (or top) has a simple glossy ‘ACER’ inscribed on it, and that is basically all it needs to look very appealing. The sides have clear grids for proper airflow, as does the bottom of the device. The screen has a very tiny frame around it, making sure not that much space is wasted. While so far things look like a fairly standard device for everyone, the keyboard does spice things up a big. A bright red-backlit keyboard gets you in the mood to start playing some games. You’ll notice that the letter prints are donned in a red color, as well as the sides of the keys. The WASD, arrow and Nintrosense buttons have a thicker red outline to make them stand out more. The first two have to do with them being very important key-binds in games, the Nitrosense button is for the Acer-specific software for the device. We’ll dive into this later.
Comfort
Our office used to have a Predator G9-593-76G2, which was a whopping 4.8kg, making it nearly a workout to put this thing on your lap. This was mainly due to the impressive hardware in the device for the time it was released. We are happy to see that we have made some progress when it comes to making components smaller and lighter. The Nitro 5 is only half of its weight, weighing approximately 2.4kg. This makes the device a lot more pleasant to carry around, as well as using it as an actual laptop. Of course, smaller room increases the risk for overheating, but even so, when playing Cyberpunk 2077, a taxing game with little to no optimization, we never experienced any real discomfort in terms of overheating. The Nitrosense software also allows you to regulate the device’s fans’ intensity, allowing you to start cooling down the PC yourself.
One thing that does require some maintenance is keeping the device clean. Even if you don’t have greasy hands by nature, you’ll see fingerprints and smudges appear quite easily, even on the keyboard keys. It’s easy to get rid of these by using a proper microfiber cloth.
Specs
- 6″ FHD IPS 144Hz
- AMD RyzenTM 5 4600H
- 16GB DDR4
- 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD
- NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1650 4GB GDDR6
- Intel® Wi-Fi 6 AX 200 (2×2) + BT 5
- 57 Wh battery
- HD webcam with 2 Microphones
Overview
While we can dive into the specs and start dissecting every piece of the laptop, we feel it’s a bit pointless to do so. The device had decent stats but doesn’t top the charts in terms of the heaviest gaming devices available. Nonetheless, it will run every new game with ease on pretty much the highest settings without fail. The PC doesn’t heat up too much, and while on the max setting the fans do make some noise, it’s not more than what you’d get from a lot of desktop devices running a taxing game. We can only say that the limited disk space (512 GB) is not that ideal if you download many heavier games.
The visual output of this device is amazing. The Nitro 5 handles 4K with ease and doesn’t really heat up when doing so. Of course, running heavy games for longer periods of time will make your fans call to action, but we haven’t encountered any problems with overheating. The Nitrosense software on the device also allows you to properly keep tabs on the temperature of your device, and you can change certain settings as well to make certain fans work faster and harder. You can also change certain other settings here, such as the keyboard backlight timeouts, etc.
The battery life percentage seems to be a bit whimsical, but more than often we got between 6 and 10 hours out of the device, depending on what we were doing with it. During heavier games and some stress tests, we could see the battery life reduce a lot quicker than just doing our basic work, like typing reviews. We have to say that the timer for how long your battery has left with its current charge is somewhat unreliable. Sometimes we could work more than an hour more than the counter indicated, while we had the PC shut off twice when there were still around 40 minutes left.
Conclusion
The Nitro 5 (AN515-44-R8QT) might not be the most powerful device on the market, and while the standard SSD volume is a bit low, this is a very impressive fine-tuned piece of hardware that is actually not overpriced for what it’s giving you for your money. Laptops are often paired with high retail prices and don’t always deliver, especially for gaming purposes. This device is actually a very solid laptop, that provides user comfort, is not too heavy (weight) for a gaming laptop, and just runs smoothly. We weren’t able to try out adding more disk space, but this device offers that option, so you might be able to find an affordable upgrade if you’re running low on disk space to store your games library. We were quite impressed with the device and those with a reasonable budget should check this model out when browsing to purchase a new gaming laptop.
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