$800 for a GREAT gaming laptop? - Acer Nitro 5 Showcase
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,183 words · ~5 min read
0:00
this right here is 800 worth of laptop
0:05
which doesn't sound like a lot but acer who sponsored this video by the
0:10
way thank you acer is particularly proud of what they've
0:15
managed to pack in to their eighth generation nitro 5.
0:20
so let's crack this bad boy open and have a look at it shall we
0:34
all right so while i crack these boxes open let's talk the specs of this thing
0:37
it's got a core i5 processor which again
0:40
doesn't sound gaming or anything but if you look a
0:45
little closer at the specs the 8th gen core i5 8300h which is what
0:51
this thing is equipped with is actually nearly identical to the last generation
0:57
core i7 7700 hq which was kind of the de
1:01
facto standard for gaming laptops so
1:05
consider this over one generation we are getting
1:09
slightly better performance actually and at 128 less on the CPU alone so that is
1:16
a big part of why acer was able to hit
1:19
this fairly aggressive price point as for the rest of the specs it's got 8
1:23
gigs of RAM which as we talked about recently for gaming anyway you know i
1:29
can't say anything for chrome users but for gaming anyway is still enough even
1:33
in current year 2018 it's got 256 gigs
1:37
of SSD storage so we have finally gotten to the point where even for like value
1:42
models like this one we don't have to rely on a larger hard drive in order to
1:46
have enough space to install a few games with the fact that it's a pci express
1:50
based SSD being an extra bonus and it's
1:54
got a gtx 1050 ti so the biggest
1:57
difference between a 10 series card like what we've got here and the last
2:01
generation 9 series GeForce cards is that it used to be that the mobile
2:06
version was a cut down version of what was in some cases not even the same GPU
2:12
at all so a 970m for example was actually a desktop
2:17
960 and then a 950m which would have
2:21
been the like similar position in the product stack to this one
2:25
was i don't even know what that thing was so
2:29
the 1050 ti is over a hundred percent
2:32
faster than the 950m that you would have gotten in an 800 laptop in years past so
2:39
the point i'm trying to make here is that at this price with these specs
2:43
you're gonna get a great experience in esports titles like you'll be able to
2:47
crank them and i'd be surprised if you ever dropped a frame and then even in
2:51
aaa titles you should be able to drive this 1080p panel at its native
2:54
resolution at like medium settings
2:57
so all that's left here is for us to uninstall norton
3:03
you may have to download norton consumer product removal tool
3:09
and go ahead and get some games installed in steam so we can take it for
3:12
a test drive so i had to run and grab a copy of doom off an external drive
3:16
because i don't feel like waiting for 60 gigs to download which i guess is a good
3:20
time to talk about io because i like having my mouse over on the left
3:24
so that it doesn't interfere with movement on the mouse pad over on the
3:27
right and we've only got one usb 3 over
3:30
on this side of the type a persuasion so i'm going to
3:33
go ahead and use that second one right in between the HDMI port we've got an sd
3:37
card reader and a regular wired Ethernet
3:40
port yay for my external drive and then over on
3:44
the other side we've got power in two more usb ports though it should be noted
3:48
these are usb 2 and then a headphone microphone combo
3:52
jack one thing that's noticeably better is the display brightness
3:57
so ips displays started showing up on
4:00
value laptops what about two years ago i guess but one of the big issues that
4:04
they had was that while they have ips qualities like better colors and better
4:09
viewing angles they were typically really dim this one's actually not too
4:13
shabby no i don't want the game bar like barely
4:16
gives you enough time to tell it to never come back i'm gonna go with expert bots today all
4:21
right so we're running anywhere from about 80 to 110 or so frames per second
4:27
damn these expert bots oh crap they're all
4:30
yes they're better than me thank you i guess i could have bought a better gun
4:35
or i could just
4:40
okay enough cs csgo okay while fortnite's loading maybe we
4:44
can just uh spend a little bit of time with the keyboard actually actually
4:47
overall impressions of the keyboard are not bad
4:50
it's got a bit of a long keystroke and that does take some getting used to so i
4:56
i found myself missing a couple here and there but if you're a heavier typer
5:01
you probably wouldn't even notice not bad
5:05
really quiet too let's apply the best settings for our system here battle royale of course does
5:10
anyone play the other one okay motion blur off because it's terrible yeah i
5:15
was not expecting all high to uh and oh
5:18
okay it kind of settled in there so i'm kind of a view distance guy i'm not
5:23
i don't really care about any aliasing though so let's go ahead and have a look at how that looks wait the ones with
5:28
arrows are on my team right i don't remember no that's not bad like
5:33
if your goal is you know do some school work and you're
5:36
not expecting crazy battery life because it does have a dedicated graphics card
5:41
and then play fortnite in your off hours
5:44
this is not a bad experience can you harvest a car
5:47
evidently you can yeah you build stuff say i'm harvesting brick right now
5:52
like this is rock solid now it's not doing any of that dipping or anything
5:56
it's actually not that loud either like it's you know it's not silent or
6:00
anything but it's very tolerable so there you have it that's pretty much
6:05
the latest gen nitro 5.
6:08
overall looking pretty good for 800
6:11
bucks if you get it from best buy we have really
6:14
come a long way actually
6:18
so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get
6:22
subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description
6:27
also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our
6:30
community forum which you should totally join