Acer Nitro V 15 Review: possibly one of the best budget gaming laptops right now
For folks looking for a performance beast, the Nitro V 15 gets a solid thumbs up from us
Review Summary
Expert Rating
When shopping for laptops under Rs 70k, there are a handful of options in the market. Laptops like the Colorful P15 and Lenovo IdeaPad offer excellent value for money, and there’s always the ASUS TUF series to consider. Even Acer has its own ALG AL15G, which offers a nice design coupled with good performance.
However, Acer also has the Nitro V 15, which pairs up a 13th-gen Intel i5 processor with the RTX 3050 for under 70K. Of course, to achieve that, Acer has done some cost-cutting. But what are those, and should you as a possible customer be worried? We decided to test the laptop through its paces to see how it fares across a range of games and workflows. Read on for our in-depth review of the Acer Nitro V 15.
Table of Contents
Design and Display
Starting with the design, the Nitro V 15 comes with a plain lid, with some blue-and-silver stripes and the Acer Nitro logo on top. In case you haven’t noticed, the Nitro logo is basically half of the Acer Predator logo, possibly to signify that you get half the quality and performance of Predator laptops, for half the price. Nonetheless, the 15-inch laptop chassis weighs around 2.11kg, making it portable enough for most backpack users.
The laptop passes the single-handed opening test with ease, though the hinge does wobble quite a lot. The average build quality can be seen around the keyboard area as well. There’s noticeable flex, not only in the dead centre of the keyboard but even around the arrow keys.
As for the display, the laptop comes with a 15.6-inch LCD panel with 144Hz refresh rate. It’s not the best display on the market by any means, considering that 1080p with 144Hz is practically the base standard in 2024 for a gaming laptop. Additionally, the panel’s approximately 300 nits of brightness leaves one asking for more.
In terms of colours, the panel does feel a bit washed out. It’s not to say that it’s a shabby display, but there’s an evident lack of vibrance from the display. General media consumption and eSports gaming work well. But if you’re planning to enjoy single-player titles and explore the beautiful worlds inside, I’d suggest boosting the saturation a bit at the very least or opting for an external monitor if you can. Again, none of this means that the Nitro’s display is bad, it’s about what you’d expect at this price point.
Ports, Audio and I/O
In terms of connectivity, on the left side, the laptop features an RJ45 LAN port, a full-sized HDMI port, dual USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports, and a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port. Then, over to the right side, there’s another USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port, coupled with a 3.5mm headphone/microphone combo jack.
The laptop’s panel isn’t that great, so I don’t mind the absence of an SD Card reader. The good news is that the Type-C port on the Nitro V 15 comes with support for USB Power Delivery. Unfortunately, Acer doesn’t specify the exact wattage, and in our testing, the peak power it was able to accept was around 45W. That’s enough to charge your laptop in case of an emergency but don’t go about expecting to game on USB-C power.
As for the audio, the laptop features bottom-firing speakers, which are decent enough. The speakers do get loud enough but lack quality at high volumes. The sound is harsh, there’s no evident bass, and the overall audio experience is quite hollow. A good pair of headphones are strongly recommended with this laptop, for more than one reason, which I’ll talk about in a bit.
Also, while the laptop’s 720p camera is another disappointment, its microphone with AI Noise Reduction works very well. It’s not as good as NVIDIA Broadcast, but it does manage to eliminate background noise relatively well, without making your voice sound too robotic. All of that is done in real time. When on video calls, the other party would love to hear your voice but do try to avoid turning the camera on.
Keyboard and Trackpad
Next up, we have the keyboard, which, I’d argue, is one of the best keyboards on a gaming laptop at this price point. It’s well-spaced out, the font is nice, and the feedback is very good. The key travel is just right, and overall the keyboard feels very comfortable to type on. There’s no RGB lighting here, just a single-zone white light underneath. That being said, I personally would opt for a keyboard with a good typing experience and compromise on the RGB lighting, than the other way around.
As for the touchpad, manufacturers know that the consumer will be using a gaming mouse at the very least, which is why they ship their machines with inferior touchpads. The story is the same for the Nitro V 15. It gets the job done, thanks to its decent size and palm rejection. However, the surface could have been a bit smoother.
Performance and Battery Life
Under the hood, our unit comes with an Intel Core i5-13420H processor coupled with a single stick of 16GB DDR5 RAM clocked at 5200MT/s. There’s the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU with a max TGP of 65W and a 512GB WD SN740 NVMe SSD. The Gen4 SSD works very well, as you can see in the CrystalDiskMark benchmark below.
Speaking of synthetic tests, the 13th-gen i5 paired with the older RTX 3050 does work very well. The Acer Nitro V 15 has great results across the board, scoring over 10,000 in CineBench R23’s multi-core benchmark. The 65W GPU is also pushed to the brim, which results in great scores of 5169 and 11280 in 3DMark Time Spy and Fire Strike benchmarks respectively.
It’s worth noting that the 75W TDP variant of the RTX 3050 that we saw on the Acer ALG does manage to outperform the Nitro V 15, albeit by a slight margin.
Thankfully, this difference isn’t of much significance while gaming. The Acer Nitro V 15 easily manages to run most AAA titles at 60 FPS when run at a combination of High and Ultra settings. Some titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2 do require you to dial the settings down to Medium and High, but 60 FPS is very easily achievable. Speaking of Cyberpunk, you can also enable NVIDIA’s DLSS to easily reach close to 100 FPS with other settings set to High.
Of course, for lighter eSports titles like Valorant, CS2, and Rocket League, the Nitro V easily nets well above 240FPS. While that’s a lot more than the laptop’s panel, the good news is that you can hook up the laptop to a 240Hz monitor for competitive gaming without any issues.
The Nitro’s excellent gaming performance (for its price) should also be credited to its cooling system. The dual-fan setup gets ridiculously loud, reaching levels of 85dB, which is another reason why you need to get a pair of gaming headphones. The good news is that the temps are also restricted at the 85-degree Celsius mark. In my 4 hours of continuous benchmarking, the CPU touched the 87-degree mark just once, while mostly hovering around the 84-degree mark only, while the GPU was capped at 63 degrees. There’s no throttling to be noticed, and the laptop is quite responsive.
Inside, the thermal department is equipped with an easy-to-upgrade system. There’s an extra SODIMM slot for upgrading the RAM to 32GB, as well as an additional M.2 slot for more storage. However, do keep in mind that the second slot supports Gen 3 SSDs only.
Below it all is the 57 Wh battery, which performs surprisingly well. In PCMark 10’s video loop battery test, the laptop lasted close to 7 hours, which is quite impressive. Considering that this is a gaming laptop with an H-series processor, and keeping the laptop’s price in mind, that’s a solid win. It goes without saying that you can’t be gaming on battery life, and while there is support for USB-PD, you do need to carry the power brick to be gaming on the go.
Verdict
As configured, the Acer Nitro V 15 will cost you Rs 69,990 in India. While the 65W TDP RTX 3050 does seem underpowered compared to other options that offer a 75W variant, there’s not a lot of difference in gaming performance. As for day-to-day usage, the 13th-gen Intel i5 definitely impresses, and combined, the Nitro V 15 offers excellent performance for its price. The display, speakers, and build quality could all have been better, but for folks looking for a performance beast, the Nitro V 15 gets a solid thumbs up from us.Editor’s Rating: 8.5 / 10
Pros:
- Excellent performance
- Thermals in check
- Plenty of connectivity options
- Great battery life
Cons:
- Display lacks vibrance
- Poor audio output
