Gadgetory

hey how's it going guys this is Dave - Dee and this is my review of the Acer V 15 nitro black edition with the skylake update now this laptop has always been a very popular device it's relatively inexpensive it's thin and it performs well but recently other companies like Dell and Lenovo and Asus have put out some really strong competitor devices at this price point so let's take a look to see if the V 15 nitro is still a good purchase alright it's a simple block box you get the laptop inside it also comes with some pamphlets and the AC adapter comes in a separate box the top surface is plastic but this kind of corrugated or ribbed texture it doesn't feel particularly premium but I think it looks pretty nice and fingerprints don't show up on this kind of surface the bottom is a soft touch material and there's some big rubber feet here and you'll notice that there's some screws around and you can unscrew them to access the internals but it's a lot more complicated than it seems so after you remove all the screws you flip it over and then you can carefully pop open the keyboard and then you have access to the two Drive slots but to upgrade or replace the memory you actually have to remove the entire motherboard to get underneath so it's a bit of a gnarly process but if you need to you can get it done the build quality overall is good the screenflex isn't too bad and the keyboard is also pretty rigid but a couple things do worry me the first is that soft touch finish so this is stuff that's really nice when it's new but it scratches easily and over time it can look pretty gross but the other thing is this silver hinge area so the hinge itself is fine the mechanism seems solid but the plastic they use is painted silver and if it wears off at the corners and it will over time you'll see this grey plastic underneath the paint and that can look ugly but overall it's a pretty good build now the specs of the review unit I have it's a skylake core i7 running at 2.6 gigahertz a gtx 960m a 15 inch 1080p screen eight gigs of ram a one terabyte hard drive and it's currently going for around $1,000 u.s. so price-wise this is like $50 more than adele 7-5 five nine but around $50 less than the Lenovo Y 700 it's also slightly thinner than both of them now on the right we have most of the ports so there's a couple USB 3s a USB 3.1 and Ethernet jack and the power connection so I actually prefer my power connection on the left side because I'm right-handed for like using my mouse and then on the left side we have the audio jack and SD card slot and then another USB 3 port when you open it up you get that soft touch material all over and there's a number pad that shifts the keyboard again over to the left so the layout is OK but the arrow keys have that thing where you might hit shift when you're trying to press up and the Enter key has this thing where you know what I don't even know why they did this it's just weird but typing is pretty good the keys are a little stiff but I like it more than the del seven five five nine there is backlighting for the keyboard but it's red so some people may not like that and there's also the strip of red light at the hinge that turns on and off with the backlighting the trackpad performs reasonably well it's a smooth plastic surface but tracking is nice and it's pretty responsive but the buttons feel kind of cheap and clicking the buttons isn't very satisfying but overall the trackpad isn't bad the screen is a 15.6 inch 1080p IPS panel now the color accuracy is fair and it comes reasonably well calibrated out of the box but it's not that bright and for an IPS panel the viewing angles are kind of poor but for playing games head-on it's still a solid screen and it's got a matte finish which I always like now there is a 4k option which I've seen it's a nice screen but you'll probably want to stick with the 1080p simply because of the battery life which we'll get into later there's also a 720p camera up top which looks okay the one terabyte drive is 5400 rpm it's expectedly slow and I'd recommend swapping it out for an SSD if you can afford it now if you get some faster drives in there or use fast externals this machine will comfortably handle video edits even with 4k footage and gaming on this thing is great so in the past when I do notebook reviews I play a bunch of games that I like I film some of it and then I talked about my experiences with them so I don't use gaming benchmarks because I'm personally not a fan of putting up benchmark numbers in a video I mean there's a ton of websites for that but I'm not sure what you guys want do you guys want benchmarks do you want me to keep it the way it is like I'm totally open to suggestions let me know in the comments below so this guy will play dota 2 and here's the storm really well on high like easily over 100 frames per second when you're laning and at worst like 50 frames per second on teamfights Rainbow six you can run at high settings and get over 60 frames per second but if you really want to play on ultra it really depends on the map like some of the maps that are darker you can still hit 50 60 frames per second with everything maxed out but if you have a map that's really brightly lit it can drop to around 40 frames per second on Ultra so games like GTA v and witcher 3 you can hit 60 frames per second but you'll need to be on medium graphics settings or lower the speakers are really good they don't have much base but they get pretty loud and they're still really clear at maximum volume even when it's idling the fans will kick in once in a while but it's a quiet fans around 25 decibels but under heavier load the fans can get pretty loud it can hit 40 decibels when you're playing games which is actually one of the louder skylake laptops I've reviewed but the weird thing is that even with these loud fans the thermal situation isn't so good so at the hottest spot it's almost 120 Fahrenheit and this is like 15 or 20% hotter than the inspiron 7:59 or the lenovo Y 700 now it gets hot but I didn't notice any throttling in games even after a couple hours of full load so aside from the discomfort of just higher temperatures it's not that big of a deal because the components can handle this kind of heat it has 135 watt AC adapter and here's a really big orange for a scale so a full charge takes a little bit less than two hours but battery life on this thing is poor it's a 52 watt hour battery which is small even for a 15-inch laptop and I was getting around two and a half hours of regular use with screen at 75% and less than an hour of use while is playing games with screen at max brightness so I mean if you lower the screen brightness you'll obviously get more about her life but yeah better life on this thing is short at best okay recap a servi 15 nitro it's got a plastic build that feels pretty durable but the soft touch finish can show its age if you're not careful it has a 15.6 inch 1080p screen that has nice colors but it's not that bright and viewing it on an angle isn't very nice either the keyboard is decent to type on but the red backlighting isn't for everyone and the trackpad is respectable it's one of the better track pads at this price point inside the core i7 and the gtx 960m have great performance but the temperatures run pretty hot there's also a one terabyte hard drive a spare m2 drive socket and eight gigs of RAM all of which are upgradeable but it's a relatively invasive procedure to get inside there and juicing this is a 52 watt hour battery that'll last you around two to three hours of regular use all right so a couple closing thoughts the V 59 shows a strong performer but there's a couple things you should be aware of if you're interested in purchasing this device first is the battery life secondly are the thermals and both of these are kind of a result of how thin the devices when you have a thin chassis like this you're just going to have smaller fans or weaker fans and you're gonna have less batteries or smaller batteries and that's what you get a device that performs well it's really thin and it's inexpensive but it runs hot and the battery life is pretty short but if those are things you don't care about like you don't care about battery life you don't really care about having a hot laptop this is a good pickup but if you do care about it you might want to look elsewhere that's the end of this review hope you guys liked it thumbs if you did absolutely loved it it's been nice I'll see you guys next time