Acer Nitro 5 AN515-54 gaming laptop review: inexpensive and powerful

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The popular line of relatively affordable and massive gaming laptops Acer Nitro 5 received another planned

update. Previous models of the line have been in our reviews and impressed with very balanced gaming laptops. The updated version received a slightly updated design and construction, and the latest processors and video cards are installed inside.

What is it?
What makes him interesting?
What is included?
How does it look and qualitatively assembled?
How comfortable is the design?
How good is the display?
What about performance, autonomy and sound?
In the dry residue

What is it?

Acer Nitro 5 - gaming laptop with 15.A 6-inch IPS-display, a 9-generation mobile quad-core Intel Core processor based on Coffee Lake Refresh architecture, 16 GB of RAM and a discrete graphics card NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650.

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What makes him interesting?

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The updated Nitro 5 line is equipped with9th generation Intel Core processors or AMD Ryzen 5 and 7 and NVIDIA graphics cards up to GTX 1660Ti or AMD Radeon RX 560X, respectively. We got a configuration with a 15.6-inch FullHD IPS-screen with a refresh rate of 60 Hz (144 Hz in the top-end), a quad-core Intel Core i5-9300H processor, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card, 16 GB of RAM and two drives (SSD + HDD) . The configuration looks balanced. And we will see how it all works together, how stable and how efficiently the cooling system copes.

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What is included?

The laptop comes in a relatively smallcardboard box in black and red with the name of the line. Included is the laptop itself, a 135 W power supply, a power cable, documentation and a DVD with drivers. A similar drive was bundled with its predecessor. A strange old-school solution, given the lack of drive in a laptop.

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How does it look and qualitatively assembled?

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Visually, the new Nitro 5 recognizes familiar featuresfrom its predecessors, black and red colors and the use of plastic in the design. But if you look closely, then a decent amount of change. The first thing that catches your eye is the significantly reduced frame around the perimeter of the display. This allowed to reduce the overall size of the laptop. For comparison, the dimensions of the new are 363.4x255x25.9 mm, the old - 390x266x26.75 mm. The top cover is now mostly smooth, with embossed inserts on the sides:

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The location and set of ports have changed a bit. On the left side there is a Kensington Lock connector, a sliding RJ-45, HDMI 2.0, USB 3.1 Type-C (unfortunately, without the ability to connect a display) and two USB 3.0. In the previous version there was also a card reader on this side, but there was only one full-sized USB on this side:

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On the right is a combined audio jack, one USB 2.0, LED indicators, a socket for connecting a power supply and ventilation openings for air intake:

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Front face without functional elements. Only with embossed texture on the bottom:

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Behind - a decorative red insert with the namerulers and plenty of holes for blowing hot air. The “turbines” of the SB have slightly changed and are more reminiscent of the “honeycombs”, as in the more expensive Predators:

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At the bottom of the case there are 4 widerubberized legs and a large number of holes for intake of cold air, under which 2 fans of the cooling system are visible. Two triangles at the back of the laptop warn of potentially hot areas of the laptop. We have already seen this in other Acer gaming models. Unfortunately, they decided to abandon individual “hatches” for independent replacement of RAM and drives, so to access the insides, unscrew 11 screws and remove the entire bottom cover:

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Above the screen is a webcam with two microphones and an operation indicator. Along the perimeter of the top cover there are several rubberized inserts for screen security:

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Plastic and build quality in general turned out to be very sensible. There are no any backlashes, dangling elements or critical deflections of the case.

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How comfortable is the design?

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The hinge allows you to open the laptop about145 °, which is enough for a gaming laptop. The screen is well fixed in position. The working surface is made of plastic. The layout is full-sized, with an additional digital unit. But there is no gap between it and the main block, just as the block of arrows is not separated. As a result, the right Shift is slightly trimmed. Of the additional features - there is a separate button for launching the proprietary utility Acer NitroSense. Otherwise, there are no surprises: long Enter, Backspace and left Shift, row F slightly reduced in height. The power button is located in the upper right corner.

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The keyboard backlight is red, the WASD buttons are additionally highlighted. The button travel is 1.6 mm, they are “soft”, but quite informative:

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The touchpad is medium in size, the buttons are not separated from the main surface. Sensitivity is at a good level, coverage is good, fingers glide well. In everyday tasks, the touchpad is enough.

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Is the display good?

The laptop has 15.3-inch IPS-display with a resolution of 1920 × 1080 and anti-reflective coating. The refresh rate is 60 Hz. The viewing angles of the display are good, with the brightness also everything is visually in perfect order. Moreover, this is not an ultraportable and on the street it will obviously be used only very occasionally:

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Measurements showed that maximum brightnessmakes 261.083 cd / m², 0.249 cd / m², and static contrast - 1049: 1, quite good indicators. The picture “cools” a little: the color temperature in almost the entire range fluctuates between the reference value of 7000K and 7500K, the color error ΔE ranges from 0 to 8, which is very good. But the color gamut is significantly less than sRGB. For games it’s suitable, for working with photo and video content it’s worth looking at something with a more advanced matrix:

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What about performance, autonomy and sound?

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As we mentioned earlier, in the line canuse fresh 9th generation Intel processors with Coffee Lake Refresh architecture or fresh Ryzen. We came with a configuration with Intel Core i5-9300H, which is the youngest in the current H-series of mobile processors. In fact, this is an update from last year's Intel Core i5-8300H with a slight increase in frequency. Core i5-9300H is a quad-core processor with a clock frequency of 2.4 GHz and Turbo Boost up to 4.1 GHz. Hyper Threading 8 threads supported. The heat packet has not changed - 45 watts. As a graphics accelerator used NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 with 4 GB of video memory standard GDDR5. The 16th series refers to relatively affordable solutions and does not support ray tracing, and that’s all that is in the 20th series. The video adapter uses a 12-nm TU117 chip, the frequencies of the graphics core - 1395-1560 MHz. The configuration is not top-end, but for most modern games it’s enough to play comfortably in FullHD resolution. The amount of RAM is 16 GB DDR4 with a frequency of 2666 MHz. Wireless modules: WiFi 802.11 ac 2x2 MIMO and Bluetooth 5.0, there is a wired Gigabit Ethernet.

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The laptop demonstrates, albeit not top-end, butvery high performance, enough power for rendering video content, and for modern games. In graphic tests, it significantly outperforms the past Nitro 5 with the GTX 1050 Ti, in the “processor” ones it lags slightly behind. But this is to be expected as we had a configuration with a six-core Intel Core i7-8750H on our test:

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As drives SSD Kingston are used256 GB and 1 TB WD hard drive. At the same time, the manufacturer provided for the expansion and replacement of drives. Inside there is another slot for the second SSD format M.2. By the way, there is also Wi-Fi access and memory modules. If desired, it will be possible to upgrade to 32 GB:

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The SSD uses the PCI Express 3.0 x2 interface, respectively, the performance is not record high, but still the speed is significantly higher than that of models with SATAIII:

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The hard drive is quite much slower and demonstrates the expected read and write speed of about 115 MB / s:

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In AIDA64 stress test, CPU temperatureat the beginning it rose to approximately 90-95 ° and a minimum throttling of 5% was observed, after which the cooling system adapted to the load and then the temperature of the insides did not rise above 75 ° and the system worked stably. At the same time, there is noise, like all game models, but not above a reasonable level. He does not shout out the built-in speakers, and in an office setting he is not at all too noticeable. The test was carried out in the automatic mode of operation of CO. For the most extreme loads, there is a Coolboost mode in which the fan speed rises by another 10%. Although in real conditions there was no need for it.

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The games exhibited the maximum possiblegraphics settings that are supported by the video card. That is, without Ray Tracing and other delights of the 20th line of GeForce. In Control and Gears 5, the frame rate usually jumps between 40-50 FPS, Surge 2 produces 60+ FPS. Metro Exodus “sinks” to approximately 60 in open, wide locations and rises up to 90 FPS indoors. Destiny 2 - about 70 and above.

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A pair of built-in speakers is quite typical forthis class of laptops both in power and in quality. In general, they are enough for games or movies, but to listen to music, you should still connect headphones.

Acer Nitro 5 battery formally increased bycompared with the previous generation from 3220 mAh to 3580 mAh. In fact, there is no cardinal increase in autonomy. It lasts for about an hour of games and about 4 hours of work in office mode. Of the proprietary software, the most interesting is the Nitro Sense app. It allows you to monitor the status of the system (load and temperature), configure the operating modes of the cooling system, performance, power modes and so on:

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In the dry residue

Updated Acer Nitro 5 continues the main ideaof its predecessors: this is a balanced gaming laptop with a completely “lifting” cost, which is designed for a mass audience. It pleases with a successful, balanced configuration, which demonstrates very good gaming performance and a well-thought-out cooling system that effectively copes with its task. Of the nice bonuses it is worth noting the possibility of upgrading drives and RAM, as well as a nice full-size backlit keyboard. And all this is packed in a characteristic “gaming” case, which has become more compact and lighter. Of the claims, one can single out a display with a modest color gamut, a decision to remove the card reader and Type-C without support for video output. We visited the configuration review Acer Nitro 5 AN515-54-59TB (NH.Q59EU.039), which now costs about 30 000 UAH, which is very humane by the standards of gaming laptops.

5 reasons to buy Acer Nitro 5 AN515-54:

balanced configuration with decent performance;
efficient cooling system;
the ability to upgrade drives and RAM;
comfortable backlit keyboard;
aggressive gaming design and reduced dimensions (compared to the previous generation);

2 reasons not to buy the Acer Nitro 5 AN515-54:

you need a better screen with a larger color gamut;
there is no card reader and Type-C image output.

Acer Nitro 5 AN515-54-59TB (NH.Q59EU.039)

Gaming laptop with balancedconfiguration, the latest 9th generation Intel Core i5 processor, 16 GB of RAM, 4 GB nVidia GeForce GTX1650 Ti discrete graphics card, 256 GB solid state drive, 1 TB hard disk and 15.6-inch FullHD IPS screen.

MOYO

Comfy

Foxtrot

Hello