Category
🤖
TechTranscript
00:00Hey, how's it going? Dave 2D here, and this is the Acer Nitro 5. Now this is a laptop
00:08that's geared towards that whole inexpensive gaming market. It's 900 bucks, it's got a
00:13GTX 1050 Ti, 256 gigs of SSD, and a Kaby Lake chip in here. I mean, there's a lot of stuff
00:20that I like about this thing, but if you'll notice the title of this video, I don't openly
00:24recommend this thing to everybody. And the reason why is because I feel like there's
00:27a better option than this for people who are actually interested in this. And it's
00:31not because this is a bad laptop. This is actually a very good laptop, but as you'll
00:35see, there's something a little bit better than this. So the things that I do like about
00:39it. First, I really like the build quality. This thing looks less gamer, I should say,
00:44than the average cheap gaming laptop. So it has a red strip down here, but it's not that
00:48bright cherry red, it's more like a muted metallic burgundy color. It's still red, it's
00:53not my favorite thing, but I think it's a lot better than a lot of gaming laptops. And
00:56everything else on the top, at least, is black. Even that logo, the Acer logo, is just
01:00simple black. And the components they've chosen in here are good. The 1050 Ti is that sweet
01:05spot for inexpensive 1080p gaming. The port selection is pretty standard for this price.
01:09You're getting three USB-As and one USB-C, not Thunderbolt 3 though. I like the screen,
01:14it's not amazing. It's an IPS screen, and it looks not bad. I mean, it's a $900 gaming
01:19laptop, you're not going to get 4K color accurate screens at this price. So yeah, I'm happy
01:24with the screen. The keyboard and the trackpad are also both good. The keyboard is comfortable
01:28to use, nice layout. The one thing that's a little bit weird on the layout is that the
01:31shift and the up arrow are really close together. Now, I personally didn't have any issues using
01:35it, but I think it'll depend on how your keyboard habits are. If you, I don't know, if you hit
01:40your shift in a particular way, you might hit the up arrow at the same time, but I didn't
01:44have any issues. Trackpad is also really good. Windows Precision Drivers. Acer has totally
01:48gone into the whole Windows Precision Driver thing. They don't use any more Elan or Synaptic
01:52drivers from what I've seen recently, so that's really nice. The speakers are located
01:57on the bottom, and they don't sound terrible or anything. They don't sound great, but it's
02:00a $900 gaming laptop. They kind of sound as you would expect. The build quality on the
02:05Nitro 5 is good. It's got a metal top panel, but everything else is plastic, including
02:09the bottom panel. But all the plastic parts feel good. There's access to the 2.5 inch
02:13SATA drive and the RAM slots through some hatches, but if you want to go deeper, you
02:17can remove the whole panel. The battery is down here. It's a 48 watt hour battery, and
02:21I'm getting a little bit less than 4 hours of battery life, and that's with the screen
02:24at 250 nits, so depending on what you do, you'll be around there. Now, so far, everything
02:29sounds good, right? Everything seems proper on this laptop, but this is my one issue with
02:35this thing. The thermal design is not ideal. So if you look over here, you can see the
02:40CPU and the GPU, and there's two heat pipes that pull heat away from these chips, which
02:45get cooled with these two fans, and I don't like seeing gaming laptops designed like this.
02:50So on a regular laptop that doesn't have a ton of thermal output, this is fine, because
02:55I mean, it's a very effective and space-efficient way of cooling things down, but on a gaming
02:59laptop with a GTX 1050 Ti, this is not ideal. And what ends up happening is that the heat
03:04from the CPU has to travel along this pipe, past the GPU, before it can get cooled by
03:09the two fans. And if you use your laptop for a really long time, the CPU builds up heat.
03:13Now, the VX15 is another inexpensive laptop from Acer, and that thing has a much better
03:19thermal design to me. There's still two heat pipes and two fans, but because the two fans
03:24are located on opposite ends, each fan is going to pull heat more readily from the closer
03:28chip, and you just get better thermal performance. Now, if all you're doing is just browsing
03:32the web or just doing light stuff, or even playing games for just really short bursts
03:36for like 15-20 minutes, then you literally will never notice it. You will not see any
03:40kind of thermal issues. But if you play games for a long time, like over an hour, you'll
03:44notice that the CPU temperature starts to creep up and up, and eventually you'll hit
03:47that wall. The one thermal advantage that I would say the Nitro 5 has is that it does
03:51have CoolBoost technology, which is basically built-in software to allow you to control
03:56the fans. Now, the VX15 does not have that, this does, and it can be helpful. The thing
04:02is, you can always get like third-party software to control the fans, but this has it straight
04:06from the factory. So, the fan noise on this thing at idle is not very loud, it's actually
04:10quite quiet. On load, it's a little bit louder, audible, but not too bad. But with CoolBoost
04:16on, this thing is quite loud, and it's still not good enough to maintain really high clock
04:20speeds for extended periods of time, despite it being super loud. So here's the thing,
04:24for $900, the market is very competitive right now. There's a lot of good options to choose
04:29from. The VX15, the Dell 7567, the upcoming 7577, this thing, the Nitro 5, they're all
04:36like kind of in that market. So, if you're going to make a laptop that competes with
04:40this stuff, if you're going to spend the time and the resources like Acer did to make the
04:44Nitro 5, a brand new laptop, why, like, why not make it something just more different?
04:50There's nothing about this thing that makes it a compelling purchase. Okay, I take that
04:54back. There's two things that are unique about this that don't matter to me, but to be fair,
04:59I need to just kind of put this out there for full disclosure. This thing has a design,
05:04like a visual design, that's better than the other laptops that it competes with. The red
05:08isn't super obnoxious, and the rest of it is pretty simple. The screen is also ever
05:12so slightly better than the VX15 and the Dell 7567 screen. They're all IPS, but this
05:17one's just a little bit brighter, a little bit more color accurate. We're talking like
05:212% or 3%. So, if those things are important to you and you don't mind the thermal issues,
05:25sure, go for this thing. But for most people, I wouldn't recommend this. The Acer VX15 is
05:30just better all around. Okay, hope you guys enjoyed this video. Thumbs if you liked it,
05:35subs if you loved it. See you guys next time.
05:42Transcribed by https://otter.ai