What'sup guys, Matthew Moniz here and welcome to my review of the Acer Nitro 5 Spin.
This is a 2-in-1 gaming convertible.
It's not a super power house like some of the bigger laptops on the market but it is
light enough that you can carry it in your backpack and still game at the same time.
Now I do like the design.
It's very slim, it's very sleek, I love the brushed aluminum metal on the top.
Everything is made of metal and it doesn't add to much red to it making it look like
your typical gaming laptop.
There's nice accents on the hinge.
When you open it up you have these red chambered edges also look great.
And of course the keyboard and the back lighting is red so once it's closed it looks like a
normal laptop but once you open it up it has that gamer look to it.
Now this is a 2-in-1, which means you flip it up to 180 or 360 degrees use it as a tablet,
you can put it in a tent mode to watch media or you can leave it in laptop mode like most
people do and game on it.
You can buy a separate stylus to use with it if you want draw on it.
Stylus is fine it uses triple A battery that you plop inside of here and the writing experience
is good overall.
The thing that I like most about it is its weight it's not too heavy it's about 4.8 pounds
so slightly heavier than the surface book 2.
Not as light as a regular ultrabook but not nearly as heavy as a typical 6 pound gaming
laptop.
For ports on the left hand side you have your power connector, a full size hdmi port, a
usb type-c port, which is not thunderbolt 3.
So you can't hook up an external egpu to this but you can power the laptop using a usb type-c
power connector.
You have 2 usb 3.0 ports and on the right hand side you have your kensington lock, a
power button, a usb 2.0 port, a full size sd card slot, an audio jack and your volume
rocker.
In terms of upgradeability the only two things that are swappable or upgradeable are the
2 drives.
The first one is 256 M.2 SSD.
You get your typical read and write speeds, which are fine.
Then you have a full size 2.5-inch hard drive.
Kind of impressed to see a bigger drive in here so if you don't like the speeds on this
one you can always swap it out for another ssd.
But unfortunately the ram is not upgradable.
It's soldered on to the motherboard and this configuration only comes with 8 gigabytes.
You have a battery on the bottom right and you have two fans cooling the cpu and gpu.
The display on this is 15 inches and I have to commend acer for putting a good display
on a budget gaming laptop.
Usually laptops at this price point that are gaming laptops have a srgb color spectrum
of around 65 to 70%.
This one has 97% so it's still colour accurate enough that you can use photoshop on it, get
pretty good results.
And it also has great brightness.
325 nits of brightness.
As long as it's over 300 the brightness is good enough.
The only thing that I don't like is the reflection.
This is a very glossy screen, so you are going to see some reflection when you're using it.
Also, I've heard some complaints about the hinge, people saying it's much too stiff.
Personally, I'd rather a stiff hinge on a convertible as opposed to a regular clam shell
laptop.
The problem is when you're flipping it lets say in tent mode or laptop mode or even in
tablet mode.
The hinge needs to be stiff so the screen doesn't wobble.
The webcam on top is 720p so it is HD.
It looks like this.
Kind of grainy, makes me look a little purple, not the best 720p webcam but I'm sure most
people will be fine with it and the audio also sounds like this.
So fine for streaming and your business conference calls.
Sound on the nitro is actually pretty good.
It's coming out of two speakers on top of the deck so it''s hitting you directly in
the face.
So it's always better than having it below the laptop.
The highs are nice and crisp, there's even a little bit of base.
So gamers should be happy with the audio quality.
The keyboard on this is ok.
It's not the best keyboard in the world but it's fine.
The travel distance is ok.
I think it's about 1.3-1.4 mm of travel distance.
You got a full size numeric keypad.
So if you do a lot of excel entry, you're going to appreciate that.
And the trackpad!
It's plastic.
So it's not going to be the best one.
Scrolling, moving around on it is not the most accurate you're better off connecting
an external mouse.
But it's not terrible.
There's a fingerprint scanner on the top left of it in case if you want to use fingerprints
to login to your computer, which is always a lot quicker than typing in a password.
Now there is only a couple of models you can buy of this.
The i7 model which I have right here and the i5 version.
The i7 model comes with 8GB of RAM, a 256 GB hard drive and retails for $950.
It's using the Kaby Lake-R refresh processors.
The 8th generation U series which means it's not as powerful as the HK series.
The only problem the 8th gen, HK laptop processors are not out yet.
With that being said, they're still great processors.
4 cores now instead of 2, battery life is better because the tdp is lover and overall
when you pair it with a GPU you should get great results.
But here's the thing!
I didn't get great results when I was gaming.
In fact, when I was playing Overwatch I was getting frame rates of 40 FPS and this was
with settings set to low.
However, when I went to Fortnite, I would get framerates of 80-90FPS but I would get
a lot of dropped frames.
Making the games unplayable.
The problem is this laptop doesn't really have good thermals and it's causing the laptop
to overheat, thermal throttle and causing bottlenecks when you're playing games.
Now as a gaming laptop this is not the greatest thing in the world.
But as a productivity machine and very very light gaming it does the job fine.
Which brings me to overheating.
Surface temperatures were about 45 degrees celsius, which is a little bit too hot for
my liking.
The CPU inside here should hit around 40 and below.
Also, the CPU it self when it was under full load, I was getting temperatures of 70 degrees
celsius.
Sometimes hitting 90 and thermal throttling and stopping.
I read other reviews because I just wasn't sure if it was my model.
But it seems to be the consensus with a lot of other people who have reviewed this laptop
as well.
So this brings me to noise.
When this thing is idling you get your typical 33-35 decibels.
When it's under full load, you're looking at about 45 to 48 decibels.
So it gets loud, you do notice the fans but they're not unbearable to some bigger gaming
laptops.
Battery life is pretty darn good for a gaming laptop.
I was getting about 6 hours of use before needing to charge and like I said before if
you don't have your barrel plug connector to connect to it.
You can just plug in or use a USB Type-C cable and the laptop will continue charging.
So here's the bottom line!
The Acer Nitro 5 Spin is a good laptop but it's just not a good gaming laptop.
It has a good design, it's light, it's portable.
It has a decent keyboard and mouse.
You got a fingerprint sensor and the sound is great.
The only area that it fails is when it comes to performance.
It thermal throttles, it gets a little bit too hot and I was getting good FPS for a GTX
1050.
A GTX 1050 should get between low-medium settings with pretty good frame rates.
If you're going to buy this you're still getting a great deal for $950 just don't expect to
play all the latest games comfortably!
So that wraps up my review of the Acer Nitro 5 Spin.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
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