Acer Nitro 5 (2021) - Nuclear Review

Originally published in 2021. Text review adapted from YouTube video script. Original video currently only available at patreon.com/NuclearNotebook.

The Acer Nitro 5 is the entry level gaming laptop, generally undercutting competitor’s prices by a few hundred dollars.

Specifications & Features

The unit I have here, or rather the two units I have here, are equipped with an Intel Core i5, in this case 10th and 11th generation, and GeForce RTX 3060. I was quite surprised to discover that while these two are pretty much identical inside and out, Acer did bother to alter the rear display housing, delete the red ring around the trackpad, and rather bafflingly, update the red trim on the back to a different shade and slightly shinier finish on the newer model.

Without seeing them next to each other you’d really struggle to notice any of these changes.

The 10th gen model is stuck with a quad-core processor while the 11th Gen’s Core i5-11400H is a 6-core 12-thread chip on intel’s newer 10nm architecture, featuring PCIE 4.0 and Thunderbolt 4, both of which are absent on the older model.

Other noteworthy features are as follows:

  • Resizable BAR: Yes

  • Nvidia Dynamic Boost 2.0: Yes

  • Nvidia Whisper Mode 2.0: No

  • MUX switch: No

  • Adaptive Sync/G-Sync: No

  • HDMI 2.1: Yes on 11th Gen (HDMI 2.0 on 10th Gen)

  • Intel AX201 WiFi

  • Realtek Gigabit Ethernet

  • 512GB NVMe SSD

  • 4-zone RGB keyboard

  • GPU power is max. 95W (VBIOS update v101a)

In the Box

In the box, you’ll find the Nitro 5, a reasonably sized 180W power adapter, endless warranty information, a basic setup guide and a bunch of stickers I don’t understand. Oh, and a piece of brown cardboard.

External Interface Extravaganza

Having a look around the machine, you’ll find nothing of interest on the front aside from some obvious screw holes.

On the right hand side is a USB-C port which supports Thunderbolt on the 11th gen model only, a full-sized USB Type-A, an HDMI port, and the first of four air vents.

Around the back, there’s a pair of wide-open air vents, the DC-in jack, and a piece of red trim which seems to have leaked out of a fever dream.

I need to quickly address that DC-in jack. Acer have designed the socket in such a way that no power is delivered to the machine unless the plug is pushed in hard enough to loudly click into place. There’s no documentation on this so you need to know to push it all the way in, and then push it harder. When it clicks, it’s connected.

On the left is a Kensington lock, an air vent, RJ-45 Ethernet, two USB 3 Type-A ports, and a combined microphone & headphone jack.

Underneath the Nitro 5 you’ll find the air intake vents, two speakers, and three completely unnecessary warning labels.

Input Devices

Inside you’ll find a nicely sized trackpad, full keyboard with the usual slightly squished number pad, battery & sleep status LEDs, and not really a whole lot else.

Display bezels are reasonably narrow on the sides but a little chunky at the top and bottom, and above the screen is the usual low quality webcam and a pair of stereo microphones.

The Windows Precision trackpad works reasonably well with only mild input lag. I had no real complaints about this one but do note that on plastic trackpads the slightly roughened texture will rub off over time which can cause the surface to feel very sticky.

The four-zone RGB-backlit keyboard is, for the most part, quite decent. Opinions on all keyboards will vary but I found the key spacing to be spot-on, other than the infuriatingly narrow number pad, and the switches have a reasonably satisfying action although they do sound a bit cheap and plasticky.

Display

Moving onto the display.Fitted to both the Nitro 5 is an Innolux IPS panel with 144Hz refresh rate.

As measured with an X-Rite i1DisplayPro, peak brightness is higher than the rated spec, coming in at 287 nits, as is the contrast ratio which is an excellent 1467:1.

Unfortunately the colour gamut coverage this panel turned in was even lower than expected, at only 61%.

Subjectively the high contrast ratio and reasonable brightness do make this a usable panel for gaming but it’s not going to be much good for any photo or video editing work.

Speakers

As you’d expect for the price, the speakers on the Nitro can best be described as borderline usable. They’re ear-piercingly tinny with the laptop sitting on a desk, and very muffled and quiet when it’s on your lap. I won’t be including an audio test clip here because I’m not satisfied that they can demonstrate the sound performance in a meaningful way through a YouTube video.

Battery

Battery life is fairly similar with both the 10th and 11th gen Core i5s.

You’re looking at between 5 and 6 hours with the machine at idle, and a staggeringly short two and a half hours with the brightness at maximum while browsing the internet while watching YouTube.

Fan noise

Now, before we talk about fan noise and thermals, I need to bring up a quality control issue. My 11th gen Nitro arrived with the right-hand-side fan not plugged into the motherboard properly, so it wasn’t working at all. It didn’t take me long to notice since the thermals were horrendous with only one fan running, but neither the BIOS nor the NitroSense software showed a notification about a fan failure. Shown here is the fan cable as it was delivered…

…and here’s how it should look when plugged in properly. Something to watch out for.

Now here’s a side-by side demonstration of the difference a laptop stand makes, using the 11th gen Nitro in a 21-degree room. On the left, the machine is sitting directly on the desk, and on the right it’s elevated a few inches on a fanless stand.

On average, there’s around a four degree difference on CPU and GPU temperatures. In a hot environment you’ll almost certainly see the GPU running up into the 80s so you’ll definitely want to look into a stand or cooling pad.

Benchmarks - Synthetic

Now, there’s no way to discuss the performance of a Nitro 5 in this sort of specification without focusing on the elephant in the room: that 8GB of RAM in single-channel mode.

You’re working with half of the memory bandwidth of a dual-channel setup, and only 8GB on top of that.

Interestingly, in some of these synthetic benchmark results, the 11th gen Core i5 demonstrates an even greater performance hit from a single-channel configuration than the older 10th gen i5, to the point of actually posting lower scores in some tests.

When equipped with dual-channel memory, there’s a massive performance advantage for the 6-core Tiger Lake chip over the Jurassic-era 10th gen quad-core.

During my 30-minute stress test which loads up the CPU and GPU to 100% usage, the older Nitro allocates a full 25-watts more power to the CPU, and 15-watts less to the GPU than the 11th gen unit.

Clearly Dynamic Boost is far more aggressively allocating power to the graphics in the newer system. The result of this is the Tiger Lake Core i5 is running a staggering 15 degrees cooler than the chip in the older machine, and it also manages to keep the RTX 3060 3 degrees cooler.

The Western Digital SSD fitted to the Nitro is fast enough, but noticeably slower than the best PCIE 3 SSDs. Not bad at all, but nothing outstanding.

Game Benchmarks

Performance in games is, again, heavily dependent on the RAM configuration.

In some situations, as clearly demonstrated in Watch Dogs legion, the RAM can be the difference between a near-60 frame per second experience and a pretty much unplayable 28.

I won’t dwell on the actual numbers here too much, because the graphs speak for themselves.

Relative Gaming Performance

Moving onto the final chart, where I’ve averaged all game performance results for each tested laptop and then set the highest overall result to represent 100%, it’s really clear what’s happening here.

With the factory RAM configuration, these Nitro 5s are the slowest RTX 3060 laptops I’ve tested, by far, barely even outgunning the RTX 3050 Ti in the Legion 5 Pro.

Chucking in another 8GB stick brings them right up to parity with similarly-configured competitors.

I find it unbelievable that Acer actually ship these machines in such a crippled state.

If you only saw the performance results for single-channel RAM, you’d think these were absolute garbage.

The reality is that they’re actually capable of some very good gaming performance.

It would be far better for Acer to chuck in the second stick of RAM and just tack on the minor increase to the price.

Especially in the Australian market, this would still leave the Nitro far ahead of its competitors from a performance-per-dollar perspective.

If you do decide to pick one of these up, I really can’t stress this enough – you need to budget for another 8GB stick of RAM.

It’s very easy to remove the bottom cover to perform the upgrade.

And on that note, let’s rip a Nitro apart & check out the build quality from the inside.

Teardown

Initial disassembly of the Nitro is nice and easy.

Remove 12 screws from the bottom cover.

From there, you don’t even need to use a pry tool to release the clips – just carefully & gently pull up on the plastic around the rear air vents. Watch out for any screws trying to make their escape when the latches release.

Once inside, you’re greeted by an exceptional amount of expandability for an entry-level laptop.

Moving from left to right, there’s a socketed WiFi card, the first M.2 NVME slot, and an empty 2.5” drive bay; two RAM slots in the center; and a second M.2 NVME slot on the right.

Towards the front of the machine are the two tiny stereo speakers and 57 watt-hour battery

For your own safety, always make sure to visually inspect your battery whenever you open up your laptop to make sure it’s not showing any signs of bulging or deformation. Batteries are easily removed & replaced and you should immediately stop using one if it begins to change shape.

At the rear, we’ve got the usual Angry Owl cooling system, equipped with two fans and three heat pipes, one of which is shared, moving heat to four individual heat exchangers.

Moving further inside the Nitro 5, I’ll quickly remove the battery & RAM, NVME storage, and WiFi card.

Removal of the fans is made slightly tedious by the need to move the display cable & WiFi antenna cables out of the way, and peel off the black tape covering the gap between the fans and heat exchangers.

From there, just take out the two screws holding each fan in place, and pull them up and out.

Up close, the copper heat exchangers look good. They’re a nice large size and should be pretty easy to clean out.

We’re now most of the way through getting the heatsink out – repasting this machine is super easy.

Just a few more screws need to be removed and then the heat spreader assembly lifts straight out.

Unusually, Acer are using a viscous pink thermal paste on the VRAM & some VRM components in place of the usual thermal pads. This is generally reusable but after two or three repastes you’re going to need to track down a suitable replacement.

Thermal paste application on the GPU & CPU chips is decent with good coverage of the entire die.

Cold plates on the cooler, however, show evidence of cost cutting during production. Both copper plates have deep scoring clearly visible.

This is unlikely to cause any real problems since thermal paste is designed to fill these gaps, but regardless, this is the poorest finish I’ve seen on these to date.

Now in normal use, you’ll never need to dismantle a laptop any more than this, but we’re going to go further for a clearer picture of the quality of design & construction in this machine.

After removing all remaining screws & undoing the last of the cables, the motherboard lifts easily up and out.

Underneath, just over half of the top case is reinforced by a metal plate.

“Reinforced” is a fairly strong word though, because looking closely, you can see how wafer-thin this metal really is. You’re talking far less than a millimeter.

Hinge assemblies, on the other hand, are made of fairly thick steel, but they’re still bolting straight into the plastic upper shell.

Giving the hinge a little wiggle from this angle shows where the flex I mentioned earlier is coming from. The hinge itself holds its shape well, but the laptop’s chassis has very little structural rigidity. Obviously it’s a little worse than it should be because the laptop’s in pieces, but believe me, you can absolutely see and feel that flex when it’s fully assembled.

I haven’t seen any reports of the case failing in this area yet, but it’s definitely the weakest point in this machine’s design.

Removing the display assembly from here is simple. Remove the two remaining screws, then bend the hinges up away from the top case, and lift it out.

The display bezel is only held on by plastic clips around the perimeter.

They’re not the easiest to separate, but once you’ve got at least a corner free, you can just pull straight up on the remaining clips to pop them out. They’re quite sturdy so you shouldn’t have to worry about breaking any.

Inside, we’re now in the area that’s most likely to cause you grief on any given laptop. Nitro 5s in particular used to have a well-known issue with the hinges snapping off where they screw in below the LCD panel due to a lack of any structural support above this small area.

Now, while you’ve still got the three screws on each side mounted to soft, thin plastic, this turns out to be an area where Acer have massively improved the design of the Nitro in newer generations.

After removing the two screws at the top & pulling the LCD out, you can see how this works: the hinges are firmly bonded to a large metal bracket which spans the entire height of the display & is also adhered to the rear of the LCD panel.

This spreads the load of supporting the display out over the largest area possible and should help the hinges to last the life of the machine without a structural failure.

The only noteworthy downside here is that if you do need to replace the LCD panel itself, you’re going to need to very carefully separate these support brackets from the original LCD without bending or otherwise damaging them in the process.

And it goes without saying that if you need to replace one or both hinges, you’ll need to be extremely careful not to break your screen.

Conclusion

So there you go. I suppose it should come as no great surprise that the cheapest gaming laptops have the cheapest design & construction.

However I will at least give Acer some credit for delivering a totally usable product here with no major red flags.

Provided you budget for a RAM upgrade & don’t need a colour-accurate screen, for the right price I’d struggle to find a reason not to recommend the Nitro 5 as a bargain-basement RTX gaming machine.

Price, though, really makes or breaks this product. I would strongly suggest avoiding any configuration above these RTX 3060-equipped models as the price rapidly skyrockets, and quite frankly high-end components have absolutely no place in such a cheaply built laptop.

To sum this one up, if, wherever you live, you’re able to pick up a Nitro 5 with either an Intel Core i5 or AMD Ryzen 5 and an RTX 3060 for the same price you’d pay for an RTX 3050 from another brand, and you’re most interested in getting the best gaming performance possible for your money, my advice is go for it.

But if you’re looking for a more well-rounded system with a good quality screen, small size and great battery life, then you need to look elsewhere.