Acer Nitro 5 (AN515-56) Gaming Laptop Review

Acer introduced another mid-range gaming beast equipped with the latest 11th Gen Intel Core processor. The all-new Acer Nitro 5 (AN515-56) follows its design legacy with some tweaks. It got thinner bezels and aesthetics get sleeker. Let’s find out more about it –

The gaudy design

Though Acer hasn’t gotten many makeovers yet the overall design looks gaudy. The major impact in the design comes with its thin aesthetics and thin bezels on the screen, it looks sleek and small. It got multiple chamfered that sometimes prick while working on it. The laptop has got plastic shell that has an Acer logo plus generic sci-fi theming on the lid.

Display

The 15.6-inch IPS display offers a native resolution of FHD (1920x1080p). The Acer ComfyView LED-backlit TFT LCD delivers vivid colours and clear imagery without any distortion at any angle. Working on the screen is a pleasure, with its superb colour reproduction. Text appears sharp and viewing any video or image remain steady even from any angle.

The blocky keyboard

The gaming laptop comes with a large blocky letters keyboard. The arrow and WASD keys have white borders and their own separate font. The RGB keyboard lets you customise your colour combination using the NitroSense.

Speakers and multiple connectivity options

The Nitro 5 comes with stereo speakers which are loud enough to watch movies and play games. The HD webcam is adequate for video calls and virtual meetings.

The laptop comes with plenty of ports that are distributed well on both sides. It has one HDMI, three USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, audio jack, one RJ-45 port, and a Kensington lock slot. The gaming machine comes with the latest Killer Wi-Fi 6 AX 1650i wireless connectivity for superfast wireless connection.

Performance

The Nitro 5 comes with the latest 11th Gen Intel Core i5 CPU with dedicated NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 with 4 GB GDDR6 graphics, 16 GB RAM, and 512 GB SSD. The combination gives you enough juice to handle most of the day-to-tasks and games.

While browsing the internet and working on daily productivity apps, I didn’t notice any performance lag. It was super smooth to switch between the apps and work on the PC even for longer hours while using the PC for more than a month.

I loaded it with various high graphics-intensive apps, including Adobe Suite and games such as Shadow of Mordor, Thief, NFS, etc. but first let's see how it performed with daily productivity apps.

We opened two chrome browsers with 10 tabs in each, along with applications like MS Word, Excel and Adobe Photoshop and Premiere. While operating the machine with all these applications running in the background, we didn’t notice any performance lag. We were able to switch between applications.

We played games like Thief, Shadow of Mordor, NFS and some other titles on it. The Nitro handled all the games quite easily. While playing these games we didn’t notice any visible performance lag. With about 100 fps it was able to render the graphics beautifully. To go beyond, we ran all four games at the same time and played one while running rest in the background. Still, there was no issue with the performance.

Benchmarks

Battery life

While using the laptop, we got about more than 5 hours of battery backup with moderate usage. But when we played some intensive games, it lasted for about 2 hours. In our video loop test, the battery was able to play video for about 2 hours and 43 minutes over Wi-Fi with full brightness and volume. While using the BatteryMark, it lasted for 1 hour and 40 minutes.