Your best bet is in the RTX 3060 models, available from 1200 EUR in Germany and 1100 GBP in the UK, but make sure you’re getting the better-quality FHD screen or even the QHD option if possible. That base FHD panel is just not good enough for this day and age at these price points. Acer Nitro 5 (AN515-57)’s display (CMN1521) is PWM-free which is definitely good for your health no matter how long you plan to stay in front of the laptop. Finally, the camera is placed on top of the screen, flanked by microphones. It’s OK for occasional calls, and I might argue slightly better quality than what you’ll normally get on mid-range laptops these days. Battery life What we have here on this sample is the base-level 144Hz panel made by AU Optronics, which is a fairly poor panel choice, but in line with what the competition offers in this segment on the base specs: 60% sRGB color coverage, 250-nits of brightness, and slow response times, despite the 144 Hz refresh rate.

The Nitro 5 also comes with Nvidia’s latest RTX 3050 GPU, giving you the power you need to obliterate the most demanding games. The all-new Ampere architecture features enhanced ray-tracing cores and high-speed G6 memory to provide the most photo-realistic gaming experience ever. However, don’t forget that most of the laptops in this class ship with single-rank memory, and that’s going to quite significantly impact the performance of those AMD configurations, especially in some combined workloads and games. For what is worth, the Nitro 5 series is among the last laptops to still allow space inside for a 2.5″ storage drive (and the connector is included in the box). However, that does mean there’s only room for a smaller battery on this series. The lid doesn’t feature a fully flat design and that’s mainly because the laptop is trying to look like a sports car with the two distinguishing details that are placed on both sides of the lid. You can open it with a single hand (with a slight wobble after you release it) and you’ll see that the two side-placed bezels are normally sized but unfortunately, we cannot say the same thing for the upper one and for the fat “chin”. The Web camera is orthodoxly positioned so no surprises here.There’s still only a 58Wh battery inside the Acer Nitro 5 series, as the rest of the space is occupied by the 2.5″ storage drive. This is smaller than what the competition offers these days. We also ran some Workstation related loads on this Intel i7 + RTX 3070 configuration, on the High-Performance profile:

The outer shell temperatures are pretty good, though, with only some hotspots around the components. No complaints here. The Nitro 5 also features Acer’s CoolBoost technology which can automatically boost fan speeds by a further 10% when needed. Here’s what we got on our review unit, with the screen’s brightness set at around 120 nits (~70 brightness).In short, the refreshed AN515-57 devices can be configured with Intel Tiger Lake 45H and NVIDIA Ampere GPUs – that sounds modern enough no matter if you’re going to use it for gaming, office, some productivity task, or something else. As always, the base configurations are a bit shy when it comes to power but the best possible one sounds intriguing for a Nitro 5 chassis (and perhaps it’ll be challenging for the cooling as well) – an Intel Core i7-11800H and GeForce RTX 3070 (100W). We think that’s the first time when a Nitro device can house such a powerful graphics solution. For people who don’t need so much power, there are a lot more not-so-powerful and wallet-punishing setups. In the past, some Nitro laptops were suffering from high CPU and GPU temperatures during heavy loads but right now things are changed. The inefficient and hot Intel Coffee Lake and Comet Lake-H CPUs are gone for good and the refreshed laptops with the Intel Tiger Lake-H CPUs don’t heat too much as the previous-gen devices thanks to the newer CPU chips. So, let’s see how capable the new one is. In terms of upgradability, this laptop left is speechless – for that kind of a price tag, it has two SODIMMs, two M.2 slots (one for PCIe drives and the other can handle both PCIe and SATA standards) and a regular SATA port – thumbs up! When it comes to comfort, this one offers a normal experience during load – not too silent but not too loud at the same time. Still, given the AMD AN515-45 Nitro 5 has been available in stores for a while now, you might find it for less than a matching AN515-57 configuration, which would leave you enough to upgrade the RAM within the same total cost. As for the AMD model, that’s going to last longer on a charge, run more efficiently, and most likely offer superior CPU sustained performance; at the same time, though, the combined and gaming experience would be more aggressively impacted by Optimus and the fact that these laptops ship with single-rank memory. So if you opt for an AMD variant and plan to game on it, consider upgrading the RAM as well.

The RTX 3070 configurations would demand 200-300 USD/EUR extra over the 3060s, for a roughly ~20% gain in GPU performance. Normally, I wouldn’t recommend a 3070 in this sort of chassis, but our test unit performed really well and even outmatched the 3070 Predator Helios 300, so unless Acer somehow limit the retail models with future BIOS updates, the 3070 configurations might not be a bad deal here. Just beware of those internal temperatures. Explore Comet and discover a constellation of products from washing machines and fridge freezers to air fryers, 4K TVs, laptops, consoles and more - it’s easy to find everything you need for your home in the Comet universe. Nonetheless, I’d look for a configuration with the higher-quality BOE panel (300+ nits, 100% sRGB, faster response) that we’ve tested on the previous Nitro 5 2021 model, it’s a much nicer screen overall and better suited for fast-paced games, thanks to the improved response times. Hardware and performance

The Acer Nitro 5 (AN515-57) is a refreshed device that surprises us with its decent performance. The price tag of it isn’t too wallet-stretching but at the same time, it offers a lot of bang for its money. The build quality is just fine for this kind of notebook, sure, that’s an all-plastic build but the device feels sturdy and rigid despite its not-so-premium build materials.