Acer's new-design Nitro 7 gaming laptop packs Nvidia GeForce GTX-class graphics into a 15.6-inch chassis.
While it lacks the gaming chutzpah of the company's even trimmer Predator Triton 500, it's not nearly as expensive (starts at $1,049; $1,199 as tested) and incorporates most of the features budget-minded gamers are looking for.
Its gaming performance, however, is shy of what we expect at this price, with our GTX 1650-powered review unit producing just enough performance for playing today's AAA-level titles with little margin.
Similarly priced notebooks like the MSI GL63 pack stronger GeForce GTX 1660 Ti or RTX 2060-class graphics, limiting the Nitro 7's appeal to just casual gamers.
Its aluminum design, long battery life, and ability to host up to three storage drives have lots of appeal, though, if raw gaming performance isn't all you're after.
Spiff Up Your Arsenal
The Nitro 7 earns points for its semi-professional appearance, not going all-out "gamer." The all-black, all-aluminum exterior looks especially good with its fine brushed-aluminum lid backing, even if it's a fingerprint magnet.
The rest of the metal surfaces have an anodized finish that's easier to keep clean.
Unlike Acer's Predator series notebooks, the Nitro 7 is devoid of flashy branding.
The only real giveaways that it's a gaming notebook are its red keyboard backlighting and touchpad border.
I wish Acer would have switched to blues as it has started doing on its Predator laptop lineup, though.
The red-and-black combo is overused in the gaming-notebook world, especially among budget models.
The Nitro 7's metal construction gives it a vault-like rigidity that should stand up reasonable roughhousing; I could barely budge the palm rest or twist the chassis with force I wouldn't normally apply.
The gotcha is that all that metal adds up to a 5.5-pound carry weight, or almost a pound more than I'd like to lift in a notebook sporting a 15.6-inch screen.
At least it's reasonably thin, at 0.9 inch, and the 14.3-by-10.2-inch chassis is trim enough thanks to a thin-bezel display.
The Razer Blade 15 Base Model is lighter and smaller in every direction, but you'll have to spend several hundred bucks more to get it.
The other quibble I have with the Nitro 7's design beyond the heft is that the fit and finish lack polish.
On my tester, I see noticeable gaps along the front edge where the pieces fit together, and the corners of the chassis and the lid are too pointy.
Otherwise, the one-piece aluminum top is well-finished, with laser-cut keys as opposed to a separate keyboard deck.
Strangely, Acer decided not to cut a hole for the power button, instead making it a keyboard key at the top right corner.
The keyboard has a rubbery feel that I don't love, although the typing surface is reassuringly solid.
The slightly squished number-pad keys are forgivable since the keyboard takes nearly the width of the chassis.
The arrow keys are full-size, but they're shoved into the main keyboard area, truncating the right Shift and number pad "0" keys in the process.
Another subtle gaming touch is the prominent red border around the W, A, S, and D key cluster and the arrow keys.
The Nitro 7 is equipped with an Elan-brand Precision touchpad.
Its matte-finish but slick-feeling surface provides good, accurate finger tracking, and its physical clicks (accomplished by pressing the pad's surface, since there are no dedicated buttons) aren't loud enough to irk people in the vicinity.
The Nitro 7's speakers are positioned at opposite ends of the palm rest.
The only fault of these crisp-sounding speakers is that they don't get loud enough.
I had trouble making out the quieter parts of a movie while seated a few feet away.
The Nitro 7 gets a passing grade for connectivity.
It's not lacking for USB ports, with three USB 3.1 ports along the left edge (two of the rectangular Type-A variety, plus a newer Type-C port)...
This side also holds an HDMI 1.4 video output, an Ethernet jack, and a Kensington-style cable-lockdown notch.
The last item is always nice to have in public places or a college dorm.
Rounding out the connectivity is an audio combo jack and a legacy USB 2.0 Type-A port on the right edge.
Also over here is the AC power jack, located, awkwardly, in the middle.
The included right-angle power connector mitigates this somewhat, as you can route the cable along the edge of the laptop (as opposed to it sticking straight out the side).
A flash-card reader is nowhere to be found on the Nitro 7.
Inside, there's an Intel 9560AC wireless card with 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0.
A Middling Performer
The Nitro 7 configuration I'm reviewing (Acer dubs it with the model number AN715-51-752B) has serious multitasking power, thanks to its six-core, 12-thread Intel Core i7-9750H processor and 16GB of DDR4 RAM.
The former is an uptick from the four-core, eight-thread Core i5-9300H, which is supposed to be available as an option in some configurations of the Nitro 7, although I didn't see any such models available on Acer's US store while I was writing this review.
Storage capacity is where the Nitro 7 really shines, though, accepting up to three internal storage drives.
Most 15.6-inch notebooks support just one or two.
One of our Nitro 7's two M.2 slots is occupied by a 512GB solid-state drive, leaving one slot free for aftermarket upgrades, while the 2.5-inch bay holds a 1TB hard drive.
Windows 10 is installed on the SSD.
Lesser-priced Nitro 7 models start with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
As I noted in the intro, the Nitro 7 isn't a class winner when it comes to gaming performance.
The 4GB GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card in this review configuration is a miles-better choice than the light-hitting 3GB GTX 1050 in the base model, but it's no match for the GTX 1660 Ti that's available in competing gaming notebooks around the same price.
(The Nitro 7 is supposed to be available with the latter GPU at some point.) That said, the GTX 1650 does a reasonable job of showing today's AAA game titles on the Nitro 7's 1,920-by-1,080-pixel screen...
The in-plane switching (IPS) panel provides bright, clear images with ample color and contrast.
Its 144Hz refresh rate is overkill given the GTX 1650 doesn't produce frame rates anything close to 144 frames per second (fps) in most titles.
Support for Nvidia G-Sync would have been nice to see, though.
I used the following notebooks for comparison with our Nitro 7 review unit...
The six-core, 12-thread Intel Core i7 chips in these units are common in gaming notebooks, so it's not surprising to see little differentiation there.
They also all share 16GB of memory and SSD-based boot drives.
The graphics chip is the biggest hardware factor in gaming performance, where the GTX 1650 in the Nitro 7 makes it the underdog of this lot.
Productivity, Storage, and Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark).
The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows.
We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, Web browsing, and videoconferencing.
The test generates a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.
PCMark 8, meanwhile has a Storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the laptop's boot drive.
This score is also a proprietary numeric score; again, higher numbers are better.
Above all, there's consistency in this lot.
The Nitro 7 sits mid-pack in a narrow range of PCMark 10 scores, something we don't see too often in this test.
On the contrary, it's common to see similar PCMark 8 Storage scores in the 5,000-point range on systems like these that sport fast, PCI Express-based SSD storage.
Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads.
Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image.
The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
The Nitro 7 scored about 200 points lower than expected here, an indication that it's throttling its CPU performance under heavy CPU load.
I confirmed this while encoding a video, during which the Core i7-9750H scaled back to 2.7GHz, or just 100MHz above its base frequency of 2.6GHz.
The 45-watt profile of the chips in these notebooks means they'll all throttle under certain conditions, but it seems like the Nitro 7 (and perhaps the Razer Blade 15) are more aggressive about it than the others.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark.
Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image.
We time each operation and, at the end, add up the total execution time.
Lower times are better here.
The Photoshop test stresses CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.
The steadier load that caused the Nitro 7 to throttle its performance in Cinebench didn't follow it to this test, where it snagged the lowest time by a couple of seconds.
(Photoshop is a burstier test, as the laptop gets time to ramp down between filters.)
Graphics Tests
3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting.
We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems.
Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff.
The results are proprietary scores.
When it comes to pixel pushing, the GeForce GTX 1650 in the Nitro 7 isn't within a country mile of the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti chips in the Acer Predator Helios 300 and MSI GS65 Stealth, both of which mixed it up with the RTX 2060 in the Dell.
Recall that in the desktop video-card world, there's a GeForce GTX 1660 between the GeForce GTX 1650 and GeForce GTX 1660 Ti.
There's no such GPU in Nvidia's mobile line, at this writing, so the jump from the lower (GTX 1650) to the higher (GTX 1660 Ti) is a bigger leap.
Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp.
Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes.
In this case, it's rendered in the company's eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario than 3DMark, for a second opinion on the machine's graphical prowess.
The writing on the wall remains in place for the Nitro 7; it's only about 60 percent as fast as the Acer Predator Helios 300 at 1080p here.
The GTX 1660 Ti is just way, way faster.
But don't count the Nitro 7 out yet; let's try some real games.
Real-World Gaming Tests
The synthetic tests above are helpful for measuring general 3D aptitude, but it's hard to beat full retail video games for judging gaming performance.
Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider are both modern, high-fidelity titles with built-in benchmarks that illustrate how a system handles real-world video games at various settings.
These are run on both the moderate and maximum graphics quality presets (Normal and Ultra for Far Cry 5, Medium and Very High for Rise of the Tomb Raider) at native resolution to judge performance for a given system.
The results are also provided in frames per second.
Far Cry 5 is DirectX 11 based, while Rise of the Tomb Raider can be flipped to DX12, which we do for the benchmark.
These numbers put some context on what the GTX 1650 can do.
An average of around 60fps at the high detail settings in both titles means a smooth, visually engaging experience in today's games.
It's hard to ignore how much faster the others are, though, and how much better they could leverage a 144Hz screen.
Video Playback Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test.
(We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop in Airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the Blender Foundation's short film Tears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system conks out.
Unplugged runtime is the Nitro 7's ace in the hole.
Pushing the nine-hour mark is an accomplishment for any 15.6-inch notebook, let alone one geared towards gaming.
Aggressive Cooling
The Nitro 7 quietly and effectively keeps itself running cool.
Its twin fans, which push air out the back right edge of the chassis, are inaudible under normal usage...
They have no characteristic whine or other annoying characteristics under a gaming workload.
Granted, the GTX 1650 graphics card doesn't need an all-powerful cooling system, but it's still not easy to keep a notebook running cool.
Here's how the Nitro 7 looked under a FLIR One Pro thermal camera after a 20-minute session in the 3DMark Time Spy stability test...
The peak surface temperature was an acceptable 107 degrees F, while the surrounding areas were just lukewarm.
The underside of the chassis didn't feel hot to the touch.
Note the cooling grates for the fans...
Internally, the GTX 1650 is well-cooled, reaching just 64 degrees C.
It's rated for a 1,395MHz core clock and a 1,560MHz boost clock, but my logging showed a healthy average of 1,650MHz during this test, a feat it couldn't accomplish without good cooling.
The Core i7-9750H processor also ran cool, topping out at 78 degrees C.
A Classy Choice for Casual Gaming
The Nitro 7 mostly succeeds at blending premium notebook design with gaming-ready performance.
Its all-metal chassis, three-drive capability, and more than nine hours of video-play battery life are anomalies for gaming notebooks in this price range, although its gaming performance is below par for this money.
As tested with a GTX 1650 graphics card, it's no match for the performance of the GTX 1660 Ti you can get in notebooks like the MSI GL63 and the Acer Predator Helios 300 for similar cash.
Hardcore gamers are best advised to shop for one of those.
Otherwise, look to the Nitro 7 for...
