Acer Nitro 5

Portable performance on a budget

- CHRISTIAN GUYTON

AFFORDABLE GAMING laptops (and we use the word ‘affordable’ loosely here) are a tricky proposition. Of course, you could spend upwards of $3,000 on a high-end laptop with a powerhouse GPU and a 4K screen, but plenty of gamers want a desktop alternative that won’t break the bank. Unfortunately, many of these laptops have, over the years, struggled to perform well enough to justify their price tags, with GPUs like the GTX 1650 and now the RTX 3050 just not quite measuring up.

Thank goodness, then, for the GeForce RTX 3060. It’s the perfect budget GPU, balancing top-notch 1080p performance with relatively low power consumption and a sensible price—assuming you can get one at RRP. This is the graphics card at the heart of Acer’s latest Nitro 5 laptop, a capable and flexible gaming machine priced at a wallet-friendly $1,129. There are cheaper (and more expensive) Nitro 5 models available, but our review unit sits in the middle of the bunch.

Joining the RTX 3060 is a Ryzen processor, the 5800H, a departure from the Intel chips more commonly found in Acer’s gaming laptops. It’s backed up by 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a 512GB SSD. It’s all par for the course; there aren’t any components or features here that we would be surprised to see in a budget gaming laptop, from the pedestrian selection of ports to the 1080p screen.