Acer Nitro 5 AN515-56 15.6 inch Gaming Laptop (Intel Core i5-11300H, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD, NVIDIA GTX 1650, Full HD 144Hz Display, Windows 10, Black)

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Upgradability is one of the Nitro 5's strengths. Behind the bottom panel are two M.2 slots (one occupied by the 1TB solid-state drive) plus a 2.5-inch drive bay; screws for the latter are in the box. As I noted, the memory is also upgradable; both SO-DIMM slots are occupied in my unit by DDR4-3200 modules. (Photo: Molly Flores) That’s about it for direct competition with an RTX 30 series GPU. Over at HP, you’ll find a choice of Omen gaming laptops, but they all come with the previous-generation RTX 2060 GPU (which admittedly still supports ray-traced visuals). Acer Nitro 5 (AN515-45) review: Design and key features There’s no point beating about the bush, since this thing goes like the clappers. Our standard 4K media-processing test returned the second-highest score we’ve ever seen from a laptop, with a total of 323 points. We use two gaming simulations to measure the 3D performance potential of a PC. In UL's 3DMark, we run two tests: Sky Diver (lightweight, capable of running on integrated graphics) and Fire Strike (more demanding, for high-end gaming PCs), both of them DirectX 11-based. Unigine Corp.'s Superposition is the other; it uses a different rendering engine to produce a complex 3D scene.

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage.

As this is an early hands-on, we weren’t able to test out the performance, but Windows 10 felt snappy while we used it. The included components certainly suggest that the Nitro 5 in any configuration will offer a great gaming experience, and we can’t wait to really put it through its paces.

The Nitro 5’s screen is a bit on the weak side and the battery life is verging on the dismal, but other than that it’s hard to fault the Nitro 5 when it offers such stunning performance at such a low price. These games have become largely CPU-limited even at the more demanding presets, so the differences among this group are minimal. That said, the numbers suggest that the Nitro 5 will have performance to spare for running games at its native 1440p resolution. Battery Rundown TestA good portion of more premium laptops' cost goes toward a thin design, but a chunkier chassis like this is much cheaper. The Acer measures 1.06 by 14.1 by 10.7 inches (HWD) and weighs 5.51 pounds, reasonably mobile as gaming laptops go but heftier than a modern daily driver. It may not be the first machine you'd want to take with you everywhere, but it's acceptably trim for a budget gaming rig.