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The Acer Nitro 5 took the lead in Grand Theft Auto V’s very high benchmark, running at 93 fps at 1080p and 55 fps at 1440p. The Alienware only hit 82 fps at 1080p, while the Zephyrus ran at 86 fps at 1080p and 50 fps at 1600p. The ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition actually found itself bringing up the rear here, with an fps of 71.
It gets a little spicy under the hood of these two Acer Nitro 5 laptops, especially the stronger one. After 15 minutes of gaming, the RTX 3050 Ti model hit 94 degrees Fahrenheit on the underside, sitting comfortably below our 95-degree threshold. The center of the keyboard and touchpad reached 96 and 73 degrees, respectively. However, it got the hottest on the rear underside, beneath the fourth vent from the right, hitting 123 degrees. I’d rate the Nitro 5’s stereo speaker system as good rather than great. I’d like a little more bass, but definition and separation are both more than acceptable. There’s a decent amount of volume available, too, the system producing an average of 80dB at one metre from a pink noise source and peaks of 84dB from a music source. One thing to note is that there are a lot more configurations with the AMD model compared to the Intel one, which makes us feel like the AMD one is Acer’s preferred version. On the Geekbench 5.4 overall performance test, the Nitro 5 scored 9,148), nearly doubling the 5,480 budget gaming laptop average. Each with an Intel Core i7-11800H CPU, the Katana GF66 (8,897) and Inspiron 16 (8,031) couldn’t keep up, but somehow the Victus 16 (9,426) excelled. Just over seven hours is a good number for a powerful 15.6-inch gaming laptop these days, providing enough freedom for a day trip sans power adapter. (That said, take the adapter if you plan on actually gaming; like nearly all its competitors, the Nitro 5 can't deliver peak performance on battery.)
A Dazzling Display
The battery life is a definite plus for this laptop, even if some of the alternatives lasted longer. Budget systems and larger laptops are often either short on runtime or power-hungry, but the Nitro 5 clears a long enough threshold to be a positive. Seven hours off the charger (though your runtime will vary, especially if you play games on battery power) is enough to keep you from worrying about the next time you'll be near a wall outlet. Oddly, our review unit was equipped with a 1TB Samsung PCI-E NVMe SSD, although the retail model only comes with 512GB of space. Regardless, the SSD I tested performed well in our sequential read and write test, with speeds of 2,127MB/s and 1,615MB/s respectively. I listened to Ross Lynch’s cover of “Teenage Dirtbag,” and the entire sound was low. Even the chorus couldn’t fully encompass my small office space. Despite that, the guitar, vocals, and drums were distinguishable from one another. However, there was little to no bass to be found. The bass guitar felt like a regular guitar.
There’s no point beating about the bush, since this thing goes like the clappers. Our standard 4K media-processing test returned the second-highest score we’ve ever seen from a laptop, with a total of 323 points.Finally, the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 will show you what paying up for a smaller, more powerful system will do, and whether the performance gap is worth hundreds of dollars more. Expect it to lead most if not all of these tests, as it's the most expensive contestant. Productivity Tests Excluding the Predator, this is a tight grouping, with the Nitro 5 appropriately within a few seconds of the lead. Graphics and Gaming Tests Turning our attention to the Nitro 5’s gaming benchmarks, it became clear that the GTX 3060 is an ample performer, but it’s a long way from the output offered by its bigger brothers, the RTX 3070 and 3080. The final test in this section is photo editing. We use an early 2018 release of Adobe Photoshop Creative Cloud to apply 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG image, timing each operation and adding up the total. This test is not as CPU-focused as Cinebench or Handbrake, bringing the performance of the storage subsystem, memory, and GPU into play.
The Nitro 5 transcoded a 4K video to 1080p in just 5 minutes and 58 seconds on our HandBrake benchmark, which flew over the category average (7:06), the Katana GF66 (6:37), the Inspiron 16 (7:13), and the Victus 16 (7:12). The Acer Nitro 5 has a 15.6-inch IPS screen, and the model we reviewed has a 2560 x 1440 resolution that runs at a 165Hz refresh rate. It’s a bit disappointing that this laptop still uses a 16:9 aspect ratio as 16:10 becomes more common in the laptop world, but the picture itself was great across a variety of conditions. The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. The Acer Nitro 5 was reasonably cool during our non-gaming heat test, where we play 15 minutes of streaming video before taking temperatures, but could get warm during our gaming heat test, where we take temperatures during the sixth consecutive run of the Metro: Exodus Ultra benchmark.The Nitro 5 achieved 79 fps (85 fps with RTX 3060) on the Far Cry New Dawn benchmark (Ultra, 1080p), which sped past the category average (72 fps). However, neither model could outpace the Katana GF66 (94 fps) or HP Victus 16 (93 fps). Acer Nitro 5 (2022) performance In the trailer for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, I could make out some detail in the hundreds of faces staring at the lich-like being during the craned camera shot. But in the wide angle shots of the chaotic cities, lush forests, and volcanic caverns, it looked lifeless. Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
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