Acer Nitro 5: A Coffee Lake–flavored gaming laptop that won’t empty your wallet
Acer’s Nitro 5 gaming laptop says you can have a modest budget of $800 or less and get a decent amount of horsepower for playing AAA games. While most of the Nitro 5’s parts are midrange at best, it takes things up a notch with its new Coffee Lake CPU, offering solid mobile gaming performance in an affordable, if somewhat hefty package. Gamers who insist on maxing out their graphics will have to settle for middling frame rates on the Acer Nitro 5, and battery life is on the short side. But even with those caveats, the Nitro 5 is a good value.
SPECIFICATIONS AND PRICE
We tested the $750 version of the Acer Nitro 5 (Model AN515-53-52FA), which comes with an Intel Core i5-8300H processor and 8GB of RAM, a 15.6-inch FHD display, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 graphics with 4GB of dedicated GDDR5 VRAM, and a 1TB 7,200rpm SATA hard drive.
The Coffee Lake CPU that powers the Nitro 5 marks the first Core i5 chip to boast Hyper-Threading, a feature that serves up two threads per processor core. This allows the quad-core i5-8300H to deliver eight threads of processing power. While few current games take advantage of Hyper-Threading (a feature that was formerly found only in Core i7 CPUs), it’ll still come.)
