Acer Nitro 14

AMD puts on a good show, but it still lacks punch

- ZAK STOREY

WE NEED TO stop with this AI nonsense. It’s incredible enough what we can do with it, how it’s radically overhauling medicine, research, and scientific endeavors. Why the heck do we need to advertise it in everything under the sun?

Take the Acer Nitro 14. This is a good gaming notebook range for the price. It starts out at $1,299, has a Ryzen 7 8845HS, 16GB of LPDDR5X (OK, it’s soldered, that’s not great, but you can get up to 32GB), comes with a 512GB SSD (specced up to 2TB), and up to an RTX 4060, all packed into a 14.5-inch form factor, complete with a 120Hz 1,920x1,200 IPS display (and in max config, again you can get that up to 2,560x1,600). What’s the first thing we see on the product page? “Embark on an epic journey with the AI Acer Nitro 14 gaming laptop.” Why? Just why? We all know that AI performance is solely dominated by the graphics card at this point. Yes, AMD’s latest 8th-gen mobile chips do have AI in mind, and better performance thanks to an integrated NPU, but even in the best case scenario, even with the RTX 4060 in our review unit, with just a 100W TDP, they’re going to be, what, 20x less effective? Of course, the marketing shifts to the fact that its TOPS performance predominantly comes from the GPU, but again, the card has been out since February 2023. Hardly revolutionary.