Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Best Gaming Laptop for $700?! – Acer Nitro 5 (2018)”.
When it comes to gaming laptops, people are always trying to find the most performance with the lowest costs. The question is always: how much performance can I get out of a laptop by paying the least amount possible right now in terms of just performance for a dollar? This is actually the best laptop for the money you get. The new 8th gen, I 580 300 H, processor, 8, gigs of ram and the nvidia gtx 1050 TI for $ 700. This is currently the lowest price you can find on a gaming laptop with these exact specs. It’S also exclusively available at Best Buy, and I think it’s on sale too, which explains the extra $ 100 off. Now I don’t know how long that sells. Gon na be for, but even for $ 800 and the specs you’re getting this is a pretty good deal aside from the specs on paper, is a laptop any good.
Let’S start off with the build, which is actually one of the things I like about the laptop. It’S got an old black theme with the faint red accents for the hinge and a brushed aluminum look. It also doesn’t scream gamer, which is good, because I prefer a more cleaner, looking laptops instead of the aggressive gamer look. The build itself is mostly plastic, as expected for the price. It was a good amount of flex for the screen and slight bowing on the keyboard, but nothing out of the ordinary. Now the lid doesn’t necessarily open easily with one hand, which is what I would have liked, but the hinge itself is built really well. I do like the keyboard. The keys itself are backlit and they’re spaced nicely, I’m very picky when it comes to laptop keyboards. Sometimes the right shift key is hard to reach on other laptops, but here it’s perfect. The only other key after reach out a little bit for is the backspace, but it’s not a deal-breaker.
One thing I notice while typing is that the keys have a relatively longer travel compared to other high-end keyboards. The trackpad, however, is nice. It’S got. Windows, precision, drivers very accurate, no complaints.
It’S also got a good amount of port selection. On one side, we got 2 USB ports with the headphone jack and, on the other side, is the SD card reader HDMI and the USB type-c. The screen is really nice. It’S 1080p IPS with great viewing angles.
It also gets pretty bright at 2:18. It’S so if you’re playing next to a window or any source of light, then you’ll be fine. I wouldn’t recommend that for color sensitive work, because the panel itself is not that accurate. Now this laptop only comes with a 256 bita says the, but it’s easy to add: more storage, just pop off a few screws and you get access to the RAM and the SSD near the back. The battery is a 48 watt hour battery and I’m getting a little over 4 hours of use with a screen brightness of 100 nits and the balanced power plan. So, depending on what settings you have, the laptop on you’ll either get slightly more or less but expect around 4 hours of solid battery life.
On this thing now the speakers are located on the bottom of the laptop and they’re, actually pretty good. They get pretty loud. They’Re, nice and bacey, with decent highs for a gaming laptop. I was actually pretty impressed all right. Let’S talk performance with the 1050 Ti, I was able to game comfortably over 60 fps and fortnight on high settings. Typically, I liked the game over an hour just to see if there’s any throttling present, but there is none that I can see. The CPU temps were in the high 80s, but it didn’t affect performance. Gameplay was smooth and I was getting anywhere from 60 to 80 FPS consistently.
That’S also when the fence kick up and become audible, it’s nothing too crazy. So, if you’re playing with headphones on, then it won’t bother you now. Counter-Strike was a different story, because it’s a less demanding game, so I was able to hit well over 100 fps and max settings. Also, there was no throttling present. The CPU remained that are consistent, 3.9 gigahertz under 90 degrees Celsius. I also ran a 3d mark stress test a few times to double-check and make sure that there isn’t any throttling present and all the numbers look healthy. We got steady, clock speeds and temperatures across the board.
The reason why I’m checking for throttling so much is because last year’s model was known to have thermal throttling issues with the CPU, but for some reason they fixed it with this year’s eighth generation iteration. That’S interesting because the fan design is still the same now for productivity. This laptop is also really good.
I was able to render out a 10 minute 4k file in a little over 12 minutes editing, the 4k files were pretty smooth for the most part. I did set the playback to have quality and scrubbing through the timeline, adding color grading transitions and other effects or overall, a positive experience. I didn’t notice any major lagging or stuttering, so the cool thing about the nitro 5 laptop is that it comes with nitro scents. Pre-Installed, this program basically allows you to control fans feed on both CPU and GPU.
So I did some testing I cranked up the CPU fan to max and it actually lowered the maximum temperature on the CPU by a few degrees in exchange for a much louder fan noise. So that’s kind of the trade-off you get with it. Cooler temps louder, fan noise, but if you are gon na be cranking it up to max I’d strongly recommend using some really nice headphones with noise isolation. Otherwise you will hear it increasing the fan. Speed doesn’t necessarily improve performance. All it does is really lower the temperatures for both the CPU and GPU.
In fact, I tested this by rendering out the same 4k file in Vegas with max fans, and there was no difference in rendering times so in conclusion, for the price and I’m talking about the $ 70 price tag, this is a very solid laptop that can be Used for gaming and productivity, if you guys can pick this up for $ 700, you are getting a really great deal because there is no other laptop out there. With a 1050 Ti and an eighth generation processor for seven hundred bucks, you guys can check it out. Now, for $ 800, it’s still a great laptop, but it is in the tier with other competitor laptops that come equipped with a 1050 Ti. It really comes down to your preference at this point. Do you like the laptops design, if you like the keyboard layout, you like the battery life and, most importantly, does the Nitro 5 offer you the performance that you’re looking for? If the answer is yes to most of those questions, then the Nitro 5 should be on your list to check out, but anyways, I pretty much it. Does it for this video I’ll drop a link below, if you guys want to check it out thumbs up. If you enjoy the video and as always I’ll see you in the next one .