Acer Nitro V15 gaming laptop review

This is the Nitro V 15, a modern entry-level gaming laptop from Acer. Hot off the factory line. It comes with an RTX 5050, an Intel Core i7-13620H, high refresh rate IPS panel, a luscious chassis, and is backed up by no less than 16GB of RAM. DDR4 RAM. Yeah… you read that right.

Not the modern DDR5 kits that have been injected into some of the best gaming notebooks we've tested in the last four years. No, it's that ageing memory standard, which first debuted in this particular portable form factor all the way back in September of 2015. Almost as old as my entire career. Yikes.

I wonder why that is... Well, as you probably already know, the pricing of memory in recent months has absolutely catapulted skywards. As manufacturers and fabs pivot their supply lines to feed the burgeoning beasts that are the "trust me bro, it's very green", AI datacenters, the limited stock heading to the consumer field (i.e. us lot looking for a good laptop deal), is quite rapidly evaporating.

As a result of that, we're seeing a dramatic shift in just how these particular budget laptop SKUs are spinning up. From all manufacturers, too, not just Acer. Drops from 32 GB down to 16 GB on memory have become commonplace. SSD capacity has trended downwards too, dropping from the usual complement of 1-2 TBs of the PCIe good stuff, all the way to the lowly slums of just 512 GB in some cases. That leaves you with a little under 370 GB once Windows is installed. Yet this may well be the first time we've seen a manufacturer backtrack onto an older memory standard entirely. And it does not do the Nitro V any favors, that's a fact.

Now, perhaps I am being a bit harsh here, the V 15 clearly does have a target audience, that much is clear. Market conditions are a thing, and Acer is likely struggling to source parts at a reasonable price, much like the rest of the industry is.

This laptop is aimed at trying to hit that $1,000 price point. I get it, I do, the angle is to provide an option for gamers who aren't quite as willing to drop two grand on a laptop now, because Grandma needs her AI-powered data harvesting ChatGPT caricature to share on her Insta feed. Certainly not when there are other, more pressing bills to pay anyway.

I mean It doesn't quite manage to hit that $1,000 mark, at least not in the US, where it retails at $1,079 (it slides under at £925 in the UK), but there is at least some justification as to why these hardware concessions are there. Though there's a chance you might see it drop below that mark if there are any good sales this year.

There are some positives in the spec sheet, too. The Nitro V 15 comes equipped with a pretty impressive 165 Hz IPS panel, which is beautifully clean to look at. In my particular unit, backlight bleed was non-existent, and ghosting was contained nicely. There have been reports online of some inconsistency with the panels from other reviewers, so do bear that in mind, but it should be covered under warranty if you do have any issues like that. Gaming on it, though, and desktop use, buttery smooth. It's awesome to see these kinds of panels at this price point. Perhaps the only good news in the PC industry right now.

The actual internal hardware is overall just alright, in the very British sense of that word. It's okay. Not amazing, not terrible. Acer's picked the RTX 5050 for the Nitro V 15's GPU solution, and that comes with 8 GB of VRAM, and a 75 W TGP allowing it to clock up to around 1,651 MHz, at least in my testing. It's not quite on par with something like the RTX 5060 found in other versions of the Nitro V 15 with their 85 W TGP, or the Lenovo LOQ 15 Gen 10, with its ridiculous 115W TGP, but it does okay at 1080p, at least with some help from DLSS anyway.

As for the CPU, that's Intel's somewhat ageing Core i7 13620H, and another reason we're sat on DDR4 memory. It's a 10-core chip split across six performance cores and four efficiency cores, delivering a grand total of 16 threads (the performance cores are hyperthreaded here). Technically, it's capable of ramping up to 4.9 GHz at full tilt, but expect performance to be lower than that thanks to the, err, I'll call it "thermal limitations of the form factor".

The only other major bugbear I have with this thing is the storage setup. It comes with a single 500 GB SSD, Kingston's OM8PGP4512Q-AA OEM drive. That's a PCIe 4.0 solution, not too dissimilar to Kingston's own NV2, albeit a bit faster on the sequentials. It's a TLC drive running off the back of Phison's E21T controller sans DRAM cache, and it's kinda slow, with max sequentials topping out at the 4,700 MB/s mark, or at least advertised anyway.

That 500 GB capacity, though, once Windows is installed, leaves you very little room to hoard any games or other programs for that matter, so you will be playing the delete and re-download shuffle quite often. I'd highly recommend swapping it out for something a bit more substantial later on, or heavily investing in some form of chunky external drive if you can afford the bank loan required for that. At this point, I am starting to wonder when we'll end up back on 2.5-inch SSDs again, given the way things are going.

So then, the big elephant in the room, performance. The good news is that DDR4 might not matter that much for gaming, but the extra bandwidth available thanks to those higher frequencies found on its successor does have quite the dramatic impact on overall computational performance.

Take a look at 7-Zip's compression figures there. Compared to something like Gigabyte's Gaming A16 with its (admittedly 32 GB of) DDR5 clocked at 5,200 MT/s, and even with the same processor, percentage change is around 66% by comparison. That sucks. Particularly as this spills over into other tasks as well. If you're looking at doing some light video rendering or dabbling in Photoshop, you're going to be held back significantly compared to its DDR5 alternatives. That wouldn't be an issue if it wasn't for the fact that you can still get the Gigabyte A16, for only a little more.

Cinebench's multi-core figures are also lower compared to the same chip in the Gigabyte laptop, although that could be chalked up to Acer's poorer cooling solution, as the CPU topped out at 102 degrees, compared to the A16's 89. Likewise, GPU temps weren't exactly low either, with both gaming and system temperature scenarios being considerably higher than their Gigabyte counterparts. Not ideal, particularly given that that setup was running an RTX 5060 with an 85W TGP in a very similarly designed chassis.

In-game, that RTX 5050 sort of delivers. At 1080p, it does struggle with the big flagship titles, certainly when ray tracing is enabled. Cyberpunk, for instance, only averaged 19 fps (although that did boost to 55 fps with DLSS set to quality and frame-gen on), and although sort of playable, Black Myth Wukong settled in at 33 fps, and F1 2024 at 36 fps, respectively as well. Both of which are still a far cry from the heady heights of that 60 fps sweet spot the vast majority of us know and love.

The Nitro V 15 is a casualty of its time. At any other point, I'd expect this laptop to retail at probably $800 - 900. But because it's in this warped bubble of SSD and memory pricing, it loses out compared to laptops that are already available, already on the market, sitting in retailers' warehouses. That Gaming A16 that I so lovingly keep referring to is only $220 more, and it's in stock now. That's not a lot when you consider you're almost doubling performance in-game, getting twice as much storage, and twice as much memory on a more modern standard.

It's a shame because on the surface, the Nitro V 15 is a lovely thing. It's got a crisp, clean design, beautiful screen, good selection of ports, a great keyboard and trackpad, and if the price was right, a solid entry-level spec. But for the money, it's just not worth it.