Gadgetory

hey how's it going Dave 2d here and this is the Acer nitro 5 now this is a laptop that's geared towards that whole inexpensive gaming market it's 900 bucks it's got a GTX 1050 TI 256 gigs of SSD and a KB Lake chip in here I mean there's a lot of stuff that I like about this thing but if you'll notice the title of this video I don't openly recommend this thing to everybody and the reason why is because I feel like there's a better option than this for people who are actually interested in this and it's not because this is a bad laptop this is actually a very good laptop but as you'll see there's something a little bit better than this so the things that I do like about it first I really like the build quality this thing looks less gamer I should say than the average cheap gaming laptop so it has a red strip down here but it's not that bright cherry red is more like a muted metallic burgundy color it's still red it's not my favorite thing but I think it's a lot better than a lot of gaming laptops and everything else on the top at least is black even that logo the Acer logo is just simple black and the components they've chosen in here are good the 1050 Ti is that sweet spot for inexpensive 1080p gaming the port selection is pretty standard for this price you're getting three USB A's in 1 use PC not Thunderbolt 3 though I like the screen it's not amazing it's an IPS screen and it looks not bad I mean it's a $900 gaming laptop you're not gonna get 4k color accurate screens at this price so yeah I'm happy with the screen the keyboard and the trackpad are also both good the keyboard is comfortable to use nice layout the one thing that's a little bit weird on the layout is that the shift and the up arrow are really close together now I personally didn't have any issues using it but I think it'll depend on how your keyboard habits are if you don't know if you hit your shift in a particular way you might hit the upper at the same time but I don't have any issues trackpad is also really good Windows precision drivers acer has totally gone into the whole windows precision driver thing they don't use anymore ilan or synaptic drivers from what I've seen recently so that's really nice the speakers are located on the bottom and they don't sound terrible or anything they don't sound great but it's a $900 gaming laptop they kind of sound as you would expect the build quality in the Nitro 5 is good it's got a metal top panel but everything else is plastic including the bottom panel but all the plastic parts feel good there's access to the two and a half inch SATA drive and the RAM slots through some hatches but if you want to go deeper you can remove the whole panel the batteries down here it's a 48 watt hour battery and I'm getting a little bit less than four hours of battery life and that's what the screen at 215 it's so depending what you do you'll be around there now so far everything sounds good right everything seems proper on this laptop but this is my one issue with this thing the thermal design is not ideal so if you look over here you can see the CPU and the GPU and there's two heat pipes that pull heat away from these chips which are cooled with these two fans and I don't like seeing game laptops designed like this so on a regular laptop that doesn't have a ton of thermal output this is fine because I mean it's a very effective and space efficient way of cooling things down but on a gaming laptop of the GTX 1050 Ti this is not ideal and what ends up happening is that the heat from the CPU has to travel along this pipe pass the GPU before we get cooled by the two fans and if you use your laptop for a really long time the CPU builds up heat now the VX 15 is another inexpensive laptop from Acer and that thing has a much better thermal design to me there's still two heat pipes and two fans but because the two fans are located on opposite ends each fan is gonna pull heat more readily from the closer chip and you just get better thermal performance now if all you're doing is just browsing the web or just doing light stuff or even playing games for just really short bursts for like 15-20 minutes then you literally will never notice it you will not see any kind of thermal issues but if you play games for a long time like over an hour you'll notice that the CPU temperature starts to creep up and up and eventually you'll hit that wall the one thermal advantage that I would say the Nitro 5 has is that it does have cool boost technology which is basically built in software to allow you to control the fans now the VX 15 does not have that this does and it can be helpful the thing is you can always get like third-party software to control the fans but this has it straight from the factory so the fan on is on this thing at idle is not very loud it's actually quite quiet on load it's a little bit louder audible but not too but with cool boost on this thing is quite loud and it's still not good enough to maintain really high clock speeds for extended periods of time despite it being super loud so here's the thing for $900 the market is very competitive right now there's a lot of good options to choose from the VIX 15 the Dallas I'm 567 the upcoming 75 77 this thing the Nitro 5 they're all like kind of in that market so if you're going to make a laptop that competes with this stuff if you're gonna spend the time and the resources like acer did to make the nitro 5 a brand new laptop why like why not make it something just more different there's nothing about this thing that makes it a compelling purchase okay I take that back there's two things that are unique about this that don't matter to me but I to be fair I need to just kind of put this out there for full disclosure this thing has a design like a visual design that's better than the other laptops that it competes with the read isn't super obnoxious and the rest of it is pretty simple the screen is also ever so slightly better than the V X 15 and the Dell 7 5 6 7 screen they're all IPS but this one's just a little bit brighter a little bit more color accurate we're talking like 2 or 3% so if those things are important to you and you don't mind the thermal issues sure go for this thing but for most people I wouldn't recommend this the Acer V x-15 is just better all-round okay hope you guys enjoyed this video thumbs be liked it subs of you loved it see you guys next time