Acer Nitro 5 Full Review: Best Gaming Laptop Under 1 Lakh in Nepal?

The Acer Nitro 5 is a gaming laptop on the more budget-friendly side out of their lineup, coming in below their Helios and Triton options, so let’s check it out in this detailed review and see what it’s offering.

Design, Screen & Build Quality

The lid is black plastic, most of it is a smooth matte finish while the sides have a triangle grooved texture. Inside its all matte black with plenty of red accenting, and the build quality seemed about average for a plastic machine, with no sharp corners or edges anywhere.

The dimensions of the Nitro 5 are 36.3cm in width, 26cm in-depth, and 2.5cm in height, so while not as thin as many others it’s got noticeably thinner bezels compared to the older 2018 model. The 15.6” 1080p 60Hz 8-bit IPS screen has a matte finish, viewing angles looked fine, and there’s no G-Sync here.

I’ve measured the color gamut using the Spyder 5 Pro and got 95% of sRGB, 69% of NTSC, and 74% of AdobeRGB. At 100% brightness, I measured the panel at 300 nits in the center and with an 880:1 contrast ratio, so decent results for a gaming laptop. The Nitro Sense software allows you to enable or disable LCD overdrive, but I didn’t personally find this to make a noticeable difference.

There was some screen flex due to the plastic build, but the hinges felt pretty sturdy and are found out towards the far corners. It was possible to open it up with one finger, the weight was pretty evenly distributed and it felt fine sitting on my lap. Fingerprints show up easily but are kind of hidden by the matte finish, and as a smooth surface, they were easy to clean.

On the left from the back, there’s a Kensington lock, gigabit Ethernet, HDMI 2.0 output, USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-C port, no thunderbolt though, and two USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A ports. On the right from the front, there’s a 3.5mm audio combo jack, USB 2.0 Type-A port, status LEDs, power input and an air exhaust vent.

On the back, there’s an air exhaust vent on the left with some subtle Nitro branding on the back red plastic, while the front is just plastic with more of that triangular texture that was found on the lid.  Underneath there are air intake vents found up towards the back and the rubber feet did a good job of preventing movement while in use.

Camera, Keyboard & Trackpad

The 720p camera is found above the display in the center. The camera looks alright and the audio sounds ok. The keyboard worked alright, the keys were a little mushy but overall I liked typing with it. It’s only got red backlighting which lights up all secondary key functions and brightness can be adjusted in 4 levels or turned off by pressing the function and F9 or F10 keys.

There was some keyboard flex due to the plastic body, especially in the middle, but I never found this to be an issue during normal use. The touchpad has a good size nice and big. But it’s not the most accurate touchpad that we had used because it is not made up of glass but it is using windows precision drivers.

Audio

The two speakers are found towards the front left and right corners, and I’d say they were pretty average, there was no bass and they sounded a little tinny. At maximum volume, they got loud enough while playing music, and the Latency Mon results looked good.

Battery

Powering the laptop is a 4 cell 58-watt hour battery. I’ve tested it with the screen brightness at 50%, background apps disabled, and all keyboard lighting off. While just watching YouTube videos it lasted for 5 hours and 15 minutes, and it was using the Intel integrated graphics due to Nvidia Optimus. The 135-watt power brick that Acer includes with the Nitro 5 appears to be adequate for these specs, I wasn’t seeing any drain during my testing.

Thermal

Let’s move onto the thermal testing. Just to recap, on the bottom of the laptop we’ve got some air vents towards the back for air intake, then air is exhausted out of the back. Testing was completed in an ambient room temperature of 21 degrees Celsius, so expect different results in different environments. At idle both the CPU and GPU were on the cooler side, no issues there. The rest of the results are from combined CPU and GPU workloads and are meant to represent worst-case scenarios as I ran them for extended periods of time.

Performance

Acer Nitro 5 undeniably has one of the best gaming performance under the price of 1 lakh in Nepal. This Acer Nitro 5 features the latest Intel® Core™ i5-9300H Processor 2.30 GHz Quad-core (4 Core™) CPU which one of the best performing processors for the price.  Powered by the Intel Core i5-9300H process, the laptop handles all the day-to-day tasks without a fuss.

Nitro 5 comes with the 8GB of RAM with a clock speed of 2666MHz. With abundant RAM under the hood and because of its high-speed capabilities, you can multitask or switch between a number of apps without any issues.

This laptop has been equipped with the capable GTX 1650 graphics card with 4GB of video memory. And this makes the Acer Nitro 5 one of the best gaming laptops for the price.

I have played games like FIFA 20, WWE 2K20 and Fortnite and all these games run smoothly with good fps and without any lag. Similarly, I also played Apex Legends Season 3, and it ran at 60fps under max settings void of any trouble.

Final Verdict

Overall the Acer Nitro 5 gaming laptop runs on the hotter side and thermal throttles on both the CPU and GPU while gaming with the fans on auto speed. Acer Nitro 5 is an excellent budget gaming laptop under Rs. 1 lakh in Nepal with a powerful 9^th gen processor and decent graphics card which can handle almost every game without any problems. Though it has a plastic build quality, it has a great processor along with 128GB of high-speed Solid State Drive (SSD) on the board. With Additional Hard disk, you can launch all sorts of apps and games in no time. Talking about the pricing of this laptop, you can get it for around 98k-1lakh in Nepal. For me, this is one of the best gaming laptops under 1 lakh without any doubt.

Specifications of Acer Nitro 5