I ordered the Acer Nitro 5 (model AN517-51-76V6) for my daughter in 2020 when schools moved to fully remote classes due to the pandemic. I figured if I was getting her a laptop, might as well make it a fairly decent gaming laptop. The Acer Nitro 5 had good specs and the price tag was reasonable (purchased via Amazon), particularly considering demand had skyrocketed due to everyone being on lock down and needing laptops for work and school. The Acer Nitro 5 was a full sized 17.3″ laptop running an Intel Coffee Lake 9th Gen i7-9750H 6-core processor, a NVidia GeForce RTX 2060 6GB graphics card, 2 x 8GB DDR4 memory sticks @ 2666MHz, and a 256GB m.2 NVMe drive. These were very capable and quite powerful components for a gaming laptop, and still are 3 years later.

The laptop featured a very nice 17.3″ full HD (1920×1080) widescreen LED-backlit IPS display with 144Hz refresh rate and 3ms response time, an HD webcam (1280×720), and Waves MaxxAudio sound technology.

The right hand side of the Acer Nitro 5 had an audio jack (headphone and mic combined), a single USB 2.0 port, and the power in port. The left side had the Kensington lock, an RJ45 ethernet port, HDMI 2.0 port, USB 3.1 type-C port, standard USB 3.0 port, and a powered USB 3.0 port. The wireless was powered by Intel Wireless-AC 9560 802.11ac Gigabit WiFi 5. The keyboard was backlit, but not for individual keys. The cooling was pretty good with twin fans (one for the CPU, one for the GPU) and dual exhaust ports, which allowed the CPU and GPU to run at higher boost clocks without excessive throttling. Weight came in at around 5.9lb, which wasn’t bad for a 17.3″ gaming laptop. The laptop had a ~60WH Li polymer battery, and claimed 6-7 hours life, but that must be with very light use because there was no way it would go that long if you were gaming. The machine came with Windows 10 Home, and also supports Windows 11.

Now for the negatives. The case was mostly plastic and didn’t feel very sturdy. After a little over a year (right after the warranty expired), one of the fans started to crap out and became increasingly noisy over time. Then some of the keys stopped working on the keyboard, which I found out was a fairly common complaint with this machine. The keyboard issue was resolved with an external USB keyboard so we were able to continue using the machine for a while longer, however by early 2022 one of the fans seized up completely and the machine was overheating and shutting down, and due to urgency, I replaced the Acer with a Sager (which I probably should have gone with in the first place). The Acer Nitro 5 was gathering dust for some time, however I was eventually able to source a replacement keyboard and fans from China. The fan replacement was no problem, the keyboard turned out to be much more difficult, so at some point I will attempt to finish repairing the machine, but for now it remains out of commission and may be sold ‘as is’ for parts.

Overall it was a very solid gaming laptop while it was fully functioning (and not just gaming – the 6-core CPU was a real workhorse), just a shame Acer appeared to have used some cheap components to bring the price down. Following are some pictures sourced from Amazon, where I purchased the machine.