Acer Nitro V15

Verdict

The Acer Nitro V15 is an underpowered gaming laptop for 2024, offering middling performance overall, as well as a disappointing Full HD display. It at least comes with an excellent port selection and solid battery life, although is far from a sensible choice in this day and age.

Introduction

Acer’s Nitro V15 feels immediately dated for a laptop in 2024, largely down to its choice of discrete GPU inside.

For reference, that GPU is an RTX 2050, the same as is inside another recent middling Windows laptop – the Asus Vivobook 16X – that we’ve tested. At least the Nitro V15 offers a more modern CPU in an AMD Ryzen 5 7535HS as well as 16GB DDR5 RAM, a 512GB SSD and a 15.6-inch Full HD 144Hz screen.

If you want one, this laptop is going to run you £749, which is reasonably affordable for a laptop with a discrete GPU inside, and pits it up against mid-range Windows productivity laptops such as the Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 3 and top-class Chromebooks such as the Acer Chromebook Spin 714 (2023).

Whether this particular Acer candidate is one of the best laptops tested though remains to be seen. Let’s find out.

Design and Keyboard

• Reasonably sturdy build quality
• Excellent port selection
• Tactile keyboard and responsive trackpad

In spite of its underpowered specs, the Nitro V15 is intended as a gaming laptop. That becomes evident when taking a look at its design, with meaner looks and an all-black frame. It’s reasonably sturdy too, with solid plastics used in its construction, and a sleek metal lid.

With this in mind, the 2.1kg mass makes it heavy for a laptop of its screen size, considering it weighs more than the likes of the Asus Vivobook X 16 and HP Envy x360 15 (2023), if this laptop is pitched at the student market, that is. For a gaming laptop though, it’s more reasonable, as the likes of the Lenovo LOQ 15 and its contemporaries are in and around the 2kg to 2.5kg range. It makes the Nitro V15 carry some heft, and can make it a little fiddly to take on the go, but you can still put it in a bag if you want to.

Being slightly thicker and heavier than the average 15.6-inch productivity laptop means the Nitro V15 offers a much stronger port selection, which is handy.

It is a little lop-sided as most of them are contained on the left side, although I’m still grateful for the inclusion of a pair of USB-A ports, a USB-C, HDMI out and a full-size Ethernet on that side. The right side houses a further USB-A, as well as a combi audio jack and Kensington lock.

Another plus point of the Nitro V15 is its keyboard. Despite a shorter travel, it’s snappy and tactile with nicely rounded keys and a sensible layout. It is also backlit, with a crisp white glow underneath the keys. The trackpad is solid enough too, with muted buttons that offer a reasonable level of responsiveness when pressed, while it isn’t necessarily the biggest I’ve used on a laptop of this size.

Display and Sound

• Smooth, reasonably detailed output
• Weak colour accuracy and brightness
• Speakers can get loud, but are imprecise

Traditionally on more affordable laptops such as the Nitro V15, it’s on the front of the screen where they skimp out the most. On paper at least, the 15.6-inch Full HD 144Hz panel should offer a responsive and generally solid experience, although it isn’t as strong in reality.

Images do look reasonably detailed and motion handling is solid with a 144Hz refresh rate, while a measured black level of 0.09 is excellent for an LCD panel.

Elsewhere though, this is a thoroughly disappointing display. A lot of this is down to its iffy colour accuracy, with my colorimeter measuring just 63% coverage of the mainstream sRGB colour space, while the 47% Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 coverage means you should stay well clear of any creative workloads with this laptop.

Elsewhere, the contrast ratio of 830:1 is just okay, as is its 6900K white point, and its peak brightness of just 230.6 nits means you should only be using the Nitro V15 indoors. Out of the box, it was just 30.3 nits, making this one of the dimmest displays I’ve used in a long time.

As for its speakers, they carry a lot of volume, although don’t have much else. They’re otherwise quite thin and lack any form of precision. You’re better off using a cheaper gaming headset for the sake of spending a little more money for heaps better audio.

Performance

• Ryzen 5 7535HS offers solid CPU performance
• RTX 2050 is underpowered in 2024
• Okay SSD speeds and a sensible capacity

A lot of the heavy lifting for the Nitro V15 is done by its CPU, a reasonably modern AMD Ryzen 5 7535HS, which is a six core/12 thread CPU that powers this laptop to reasonable scores in our processor benchmark tests such as Cinebench R23 and Geekbench 6. Scores here are higher than comparable Chromebooks, but behind other affordable ‘gaming’ laptops, making the Nitro V15 a pleasant halfway house.

The presence of an RTX 2050 in theory would offer some welcome help for more graphically intense workloads, although with 4GB of VRAM, it is restrictive compared to other laptops a little way up the price ladder with more modern and potent choices. Its score in the 3D Mark Time Spy test is only slightly ahead of more modern ultrabooks without a discrete GPU and falls way behind the likes of the Lenovo LOQ 15i, which offers a score that’s 2.5x better than the Nitro V15 with an RTX 4050 inside.

That also translates into poor gaming performance, too, with the results at 1080p in Cyberpunk 2077 (27.01fps) and Returnal (35fps) hardly being impressive.

More eSports oriented titles such as Rainbow Six Extraction yield better results with 69fps, although you’re better off looking for a slightly more modern gaming laptop for even better results. Turning on ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 only made things worse, with a measured result of 17.94fps with the RT: Ultra preset, and there isn’t even any support for DLSS to save the day, either.

The Nitro V15’s SSD offers a sensible capacity for day-to-day working with a 512GB size, although offers meagre performance with 3812.10MB/s reads and 2212.63MB/s writes. This is perfectly fine, although something quicker would have been welcome.

Under load, this laptop also gets quite noisy with a lot of fan noise, while also getting reasonably warm. You’ll want to keep it on your desk for the most part.

Software

• Some bloatware present
• NitroSense offers some useful functionality
• Copilot is here, although with very limited support

Unfortunately, the Nitro V15 comes with a couple of unwanted pieces of bloatware with both McAfee Antivirus and ExpressVPN installed by default, with the former causing some unwanted popups and notifications.

Acer also bundles a range of different apps with this laptop with varying degrees of usefulness. The most functional of these is NitroSense, which allows you to check on system temperatures at a glance, as well as change the fan profile depending on what tasks you’re undertaking and choose everything from battery charging modes to changing the Acer logo on the boot screen.

Otherwise, there’s Acer Jumpstart, which is simply a hyperlink to the Acer website and Acer QuickPanel which gives you the chance to configure AI settings for your microphone and webcam for better conferencing performance. The Nitro V15 also has DTS:X Ultra installed for tailoring the speakers’ audio for different content types.

This laptop also comes with Copilot support to give you access to Microsoft’s AI assistant, although lacks the advanced features found on Copilot+ PCs such as the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 with AI integration in everything from Photos to Paint.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 7 hours 20 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for one working day

Acer’s claim for the Nitro V15 is for it to last for just four hours before it conks out, although my testing actually demonstrates it to put in a much stronger showing.

In dialling the brightness down to the requisite 150 nits and running the PC Mark 10 battery test, the Nitro V15 lasted for nearly double Acer’s claimed lifespan and went for 7 hours and 20 minutes. That’s a decent showing for a half-hearted gaming laptop, although falls behind the likes of the Spin 714 (2023)’s result of 11 hours and 6 minutes.

The Nitro V15’s 135W adapter is able to charge the 57Whr capacity cell with reasonable swiftness too, taking just 26 minutes to reach 50% charge, and 70 minutes to go from zero to full.

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