This is the fastest gaming laptop with full powered RTX 4050 graphics for under $1000
USD!
It’s Acer’s Nitro 5, and it’s the exact same laptop as last year’s version, except
Acer have updated the GPU to a 4050, meaning that it has the latest features like DLSS
3 frame generation.
It’s available right now for $950, you can find a link to this sale below the video,
but even without the sale $1000 is great compared to the competition.
Take MSI’s GF63 for example, the only other RTX 4050 gaming laptop I’ve reviewed so
far.
Right now on sale this thing costs $20 more than the Nitro, but it’s worse in pretty
much every way, MSI should honestly be embarrassed.
Acer’s Nitro 5 from last year is also available with RTX 3060 graphics, but it costs $172
more than the 4050 Nitro, so let’s see how they compare in games.
Let’s start out with Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p high settings, with the 4050 Nitro 5 highlighted
in red.
In this game it’s actually slightly faster compared to that more expensive Nitro 5 with
3060, despite the 2022 Nitro I tested actually having a higher tier i7 processor, which would
make it even more expensive than the i5 one.
But check this out, the 4050 Nitro is 27% faster compared to the 4050 GF63 which actually
costs more money.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was tested with the game’s benchmark.
This time the 3060 Nitro from last year was slightly ahead, but again mine had a higher
tier i7, but even if the i5 one performs the same, don’t forget it’s $172 more expensive
just to get less than 2 FPS extra - not exactly great value.
The 4050 Nitro was 23% faster compared to MSI’s rip off GF63 with lower powered 4050
graphics.
The newer 4050 and older 3060 Nitros were quite close together in Control as well.
Again the 3060 was slightly ahead, but definitely not worth the 18% higher price tag.
Some of the other 3060 laptops were a little more ahead, but it’s honestly not that much
of a difference at the end of the day.
The 4050 Nitro had a massive 42% higher average FPS compared to the more expensive GF63 this
time, again seriously just embarrassing from MSI, they need to drop that price a couple
hundred dollars minimum.
You might have noticed that I had the Nitro’s 4050 minimum power limit listed as 75 watts,
and that’s because that’s what it actually ran at in the Heaven GPU stress test due to
a voltage limit.
The 4050 generally doesn’t really run above 90 to 100 watts in actual games, despite Acer
and Nvidia saying that this is a 140 watt GPU.
But I’ve already explained that in a dedicated video.
Regardless, the cheaper 4050 Nitro was often matching the more expensive 3060 Nitro.
Add in the benefits of frame generation, and I think at $950 the 4050 Nitro makes sense.
Especially compared to MSI’s more expensive GF63, which let’s face it, is kind of a
joke compared to the Nitro that no one should seriously consider.
It’s not all just about gaming though, there are some problems with the Nitro that you
need to know about before considering buying it, like the screen.
It’s using the exact same 1080p 144Hz panel as last year, which wasn’t great as the
colors just don’t look the best.
It doesn’t get that bright either, I like to see 300 nits at full brightness as a minimum,
but the Nitro was just under this.
It’s less of a concern if you play games in a darker room, but a brighter room may
not be great.
It does at least have a MUX switch though!
Which is actually quite rare in sub one thousand dollar gaming laptops.
There’s no advanced optimus, meaning you have to manually reboot to turn optimus on
or off, but that’s a more premium feature, so not surprising.
For the same reason there’s definitely no G-Sync, but there’s no adaptive sync at
all.
The screen response time was also quite slow at 17ms, but we can see it’s about the same
and within the margin of error range to the 2022 and 2021 Nitro 5, because Acer are still
using the same panel model.
Anyway it’s one of the slower results, but at least it’s still faster than the GF63.
The total system latency is the amount of time between a mouse click and when a gunshot
fire appears on the screen in CS:GO.
It’s similar to last year’s Nitro, but the 2021 models are slower despite having
the same screen, which I suspect is due to them not having a MUX switch.
The GF63 doesn’t have a MUX switch either for that matter, and it’s about 4ms slower.
Don’t get me wrong.
For just playing games at this price point it is acceptable, at least compared to the
competition.
But if you’ve got a bit more budget then it could be worth going up to the $1200 USD
price range or so to get a better screen.
CPU performance was quite good.
I mean it’s basically matching one of the best Ryzen laptops from last year in both
single and multi core performance - Lenovo’s Legion 7, and that costs way more money.
My 2022 Nitro is a bit better, because again that had a higher tier i7 processor from the
same generation, but 12th gen still offers a fairly nice improvement compared to the
Nitro with 11th gen i5 CPU.
To further illustrate just how bad MSI’s more expensive GF63 is, the Nitro was scoring
57% higher in multicore while being a little cheaper.
Unfortunately the performance drops back quite a bit if we unplug the charger and run the
same test on battery power.
The single core score in particular was quite low compared to other laptops tested, and
this also happened on my 12th gen Nitro last year too, so definitely seems like it’s
a Nitro thing and not bad luck.
That said, the multicore score was at least still 33% higher than the more expensive GF63.
Battery life isn’t much different compared to last year’s Nitro, because it’s got
the same battery.
The i5 was able to last a bit longer than last year’s i7 though, and the 4050 lasted
longer than the 3060 in a game, implying it’s more power efficient with both limited to
30 FPS.
I’ll just briefly skip through some content creator test results.
In every case the Nitro was always beating the more expensive GF63, simply because it’s
got a higher powered 4050 and better CPU.
Acer also have the brand new Nitro 16 and Nitro 17 designs this year, but they also
kept last year’s Nitro 5 and just refreshed it with RTX 40 GPUs.
I guess because this existing chassis design is probably just cheaper than the newer versions.
I will review the newer models as soon as I can, I just had to buy this Nitro 5 as it
looked like a 4050 gaming laptop that was finally priced well.
Unfortunately it ended up costing me a whole lot more money to import it here to Australia
to make this video.
But this is made possible with support from viewers like you on Patreon.
You can get access to our discord community and behind the scenes videos with the link
below the video.
As everything else on the Nitro like ports, internals, build quality and design are all
the same, there’s no point covering absolutely everything in this video.
Check out my full review over here if you want to see all the details.
You can also see how the RTX 4050 graphics performs with DLSS 3 frame generation and
ray tracing in this one.
I’ve compared it against the RTX 3060 in 25 games at 1080p and 1440p resolutions.