Acer Nitro 5: This budget gaming laptop keeps getting better

With a revamped cooling system and a Ryzen 4000-series CPU on board, the affordable Nitro 5 should delight budget-minded gamers.

- BEN PATTERSON

We’ve long been fans of Acer’s line of affordable Nitro 5 gaming laptops. This new entry in the series, just $670 at Best Buy (go.pcworld. com/bb67), ups the ante with eye-popping CPU performance and great battery life.

Note that it keeps the same GTX 1650 graphics card that we saw in a similar model last year (go.pcworld.com/n519), so don’t expect ray tracing or frame rates much higher than 60 fps or so. But with its revamped cooling system and Ryzen 4000-series CPU, the updated Nitro 5 manages to squeeze every last ounce of performance from its limited GPU power, making it an enticing pick for gamers on a budget.

CONFIGURATION

Acer offers a wide variety of Nitro 5 configurations, with models powered by 9th- and 10th-gen Intel (Whiskey and Comet Lake) processors or AMD Ryzen 3000 and 4000 CPUs; and GTX 1650, GTX 1650 Ti, or RTX 2060 GPUs. The least expensive Nitro 5 variant packs in a quad-core Core i5-9300H processor, a GTX 1650 graphics card, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB solid-state drive, while the priciest system comes with a hexa-core Core i7-9750H CPU, an RTX 2060 GPU, 16GB of RAM, and a roomier 512GB SSD.

Our Nitro 5 review unit (AN515-44R99Q) features the following specs:

CPU: Hexa-core AMD Ryzen 5 4600H

Memory: 8GB DDR4 3200MHz (upgradeable to 32GB)

Graphics: Nvidia GTX 1650 with 4GB dedicated GDDR5 VRAM

Storage: 256GB PCIe NVMe (plus second PCIe slot and one 2.5-inch HDD bay)

Display: 15.6-inch full-HD (1920x1080) IPS display, 60Hz refresh rate

Webcam: 720p SHDR

Connectivity: 1 x USB SuperSpeed 10Gbps Type-C, 2 x USB SuperSpeed 10Gbps Type-A (one with power-off charging), 1 x USB SuperSpeed 5Gbps Type-A, HDMI 2.0, ethernet, combo audio jack