Acer Nitro 5 (2022, 12th Gen Core) Review

True budget gaming laptops are difficult to find these days, but the new Acer Nitro 5 makes a strong case for itself. Our review unit—a model sold at Best Buy for just $899.99—is both wallet-friendly and offers solid entry-level performance. Its 12th Generation Intel Core i5 CPU, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU, and 144Hz refresh rate display make for a comfortable 1080p gaming experience. A little more storage would be nice, but the 512GB solid-state drive keeps the price under $1,000, making this a great pick for mainstream gamers looking to save a buck. Players set on 60fps-plus frame rates, though, should look for a laptop with a step-up GPU, such as the MSI Katana GF66.

The Design: A Look That Fits in Anywhere

Acer has gone for a pretty minimalist look with the newest Nitro 5, which is just fine by us. It wasn't long ago that most Nitro laptops (and a lot of gaming laptops in general, especially entry-level models) were covered with aggressive colors and design flourishes, but that has steadily become a design of the past. Garish red and black were especially popular, and while some may still like that much-flogged combination, it was difficult to find an affordable gaming rig that just looked like a normal laptop.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Indeed, the previous Nitro 5 from earlier this year had a different look, and red featured prominently. Its lid corners and rear vents were a bit more geometric, while this new edition has a squarer, cleaner look. The lid is unadorned and smooth, without the muscle lines of the early 2022 version.

It's worth noting that this Best Buy model actually has a different design from the Nitro 5 available on the Acer store and at Amazon, which has some circuit-like lines on the lid. This laptop, with its nearly all-black chassis (a small bit of red remains on the rear vents) and white keycap edges, won't stand out in a cafe or classroom.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Build-wise, the Nitro 5 is perfectly adequate. The chassis is entirely plastic, but it resists much flex and bend through normal use. That's a little less surprising when you consider how chunky the overall design is—this is a pretty thick system—and it serves to make it a bit sturdier.

The keyboard is slightly better than you might expect from a budget laptop. The keys have a nice bounce, and as a bonus the keyboard features RGB backlighting across four customizable zones. The touchpad is serviceable. Overall, the build quality is pretty good, if nothing to write home about.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Size and Display: Fairly Portable, and Gaming-Ready

A 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.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Nestled into this frame is a 15.6-inch display, the longtime standard size. Larger 17.3-inch screens have been around for a long time, with 14-inch and 16-inch screens a more recent trend, but this size represents your go-to, still-portable gaming laptop size. It's an IPS panel with full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) resolution and a 144Hz refresh rate.

That means the screen refreshes the image more frequently during play, leading to a smoother-looking experience—as long as the CPU and GPU can keep up. You can learn more about refresh rates in our explainer, and we'll delve into the components and performance test results in a moment. On paper, that refresh rate and resolution are a good fit for an entry-level gaming laptop.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The exterior feature set is completed with a 720p webcam and some useful ports. The left edge holds the headphone jack, a USB 3.2 Type-A port, and an Ethernet port. The latter is not always included, especially on gaming notebooks; there's more likely to be one on a thicker laptop like this because of the jack's physical size, so that's one benefit to the bulk. The right side includes two more USB-A 3.2 ports, while the laptop's rear holds the power jack, an HDMI video output, and a USB-C port.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Testing the 12th Gen Nitro 5: Entry-Level Gaming Unlocked

Our $899.99 test unit features a 12th Gen (“Alder Lake”) Core i5-12500H processor, 16GB of memory, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU, and a 512GB SSD. That's an appealing entry point for gaming at this price: The GPU is good for the price, 16GB of RAM is better than 8GB, and 12th Gen is Intel's latest platform. The system is configured at 95 watts, which can decidedly have an impact on gaming performance.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Acer also offers a more expensive 140-watt model through its site and Amazon; the only change for its $1,329 price is a step up to a GeForce RTX 3060. For gamers, however, that's a notable bump; the 3050 Ti is a little hit-and-miss when it comes to hitting 60 frames per second (fps) in demanding titles, but the RTX 3060 is a rock-solid 60fps GPU. If you're a performance-focused player or intend to play the most demanding AAA games, this may be worth the cost, but it will yank the system out of the budget range.

Now to see how our Nitro 5 did on our usual suite of benchmark tests. Below are the names and specs of the gaming laptops we're going to pit against the new Nitro 5…

This set of systems illustrates several facets of gaming laptop shopping today. It's not a perfect set, but most 12th Gen Intel systems released to date have been premium Core i7 and Core i9 machines, with virtually none at budget pricing up to now. The 11th Gen Nitro 5 is, naturally, a very similar laptop with a previous-generation processor (albeit a Core i7, not Core i5). The Acer Predator Helios 300 and Katana GF66 are also similar, with a bump up to GeForce RTX 3060 graphics.

Finally, the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 will show you what paying up for a smaller, more powerful system will do, and whether the performance gap is worth hundreds of dollars more. Expect it to lead most if not all of these tests, as it's the most expensive contestant.

Productivity Tests

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.

Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Our final productivity test is workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

On the CPU side, the new Nitro's 12th Gen chip largely held its own despite being a Core i5. On a couple of tests, the superior CPUs led the way, but the margins weren't huge. For such an affordable laptop, the Nitro 5 is a respectably quick performer for everyday use when not gaming.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Two more tests from GFXBench 5.0, run offscreen to allow for different display resolutions, wring out OpenGL operations.

In addition, we run three real-world game tests using the built-in benchmarks of F1 2021, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege. These represent simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive esports shooter games respectively. We run Valhalla and Siege twice at different image quality presets, and F1 2021 with and without Nvidia's performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing. We run these tests at 1080p resolution so results can be compared fairly among systems.

This is the real area of interest for gamers, and the new Nitro 5 acquits itself well considering its price. We frankly don't see many gaming laptops under $900 in today's market, so as the least expensive model here, the Acer's scores are not surprising. Its RTX 3050 Ti does pretty well, but consistent 60fps at maximum settings is a bridge too far.

Still, you shouldn't expect to run games with all their bells and whistles on a laptop this inexpensive, and sliding some visual settings down to medium will achieve perfectly playable frame rates. Performance hounds need to step up to an RTX 3060 or better GPU, which as you can see hikes frame rates significantly.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

MSI's Katana GF66 continues to offer the best bang for your buck as our top budget gaming pick, but even it will run you a few hundred dollars more. The 12th Gen Nitro 5 is one of the best options for shoppers looking to spend as little as possible, while the Acer.com/Amazon version offers superior parts if you'd rather go that route.

Battery and Display Tests

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

The battery life is a definite plus for this laptop, even if some of the alternatives lasted longer. Budget systems and larger laptops are often either short on runtime or power-hungry, but the Nitro 5 clears a long enough threshold to be a positive. Seven hours off the charger (though your runtime will vary, especially if you play games on battery power) is enough to keep you from worrying about the next time you'll be near a wall outlet.

A Budget-Friendly Entry Point for Gaming

The new Acer Nitro 5 doesn't top any benchmark charts, but at $899 there's not much room for complaint. The system is one of the least expensive modern gaming laptops, while offering a good components and features baseline.

Take the screen and storage. A 144Hz display has become today's minimum expectation in any gaming machine, but it is still nice to have at this price, and there are plenty of ports, too. The 512GB SSD will fill up quickly with large game installs, but even pricier systems often have no more storage in their base model configurations. If you're concerned about consistently hitting 60fps at top settings, you should probably opt for an RTX 3060 machine like the MSI Katana GF66, but the Nitro 5 remains an attractive, affordable alternative.