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Reviews for the Acer Aspire Nitro 5 AN515-51-56UX

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The Acer Aspire Nitro 5 AN515-51-56UX is a 15.6-inch laptop that was released a little over a year ago, but Acer continues to refresh the range with new Intel and AMD processors. However, with a thickness of 28 mm and 2.7 kg on the scale, the Nitro 5 is not really the ideal travel companion. The Nitro 5 does not have the appearance of a typical gaming notebook - no big logos or multicolored lid. But its stylized vents and keyboard with red backlight still prevent confusing this laptop with a simple desktop machine. The keyboard is rather pleasant to the touch and spacious. The ZQSD keys have an accentuated backlight, and there is even a small numeric keypad. The touchpad is soft, responsive and supports multiple gestures of Windows 10. But it is a clickable touchpad, which means there are no right and left mouse buttons. The laptop is equipped with a Core i5 7300HQ, 8 GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 graphics card with 2 GB of dedicated memory. At the graphics cards level, there is no big difference between the GeForce GTX 1050 and the GTX 1050Ti, but it will give a little more room to manage future games. Storage and RAM are both easily accessible from the bottom of the machine. Users can add a 2.5-inch hard disk and/or more memory.

As for the display, the Full-HD screen offers good off-axis visibility, but the colors lack a little sparkle. However, it is a forgivable shortcoming at this price level. As for battery life, do not stay too far away from a power outlet. It has an average battery life of 5 hours 30 minutes on WiFi connectivity. It is rather good for a gaming laptop, but not really for more general everyday use. If a user plays on battery, they should not expect it to last more than two hours. On the other hand, if a user considers this machine as a replacement for a desktop PC, they should be very satisfied with its connections. There are a USB-3.1 Type-C port, two USB-2.0 Type-A ports, a USB-3.0 Type-A port, an SD-card reader, an HDMI output, a headphone/microphone combo jack, and a Gigabit-Ethernet port. No optical disc drive, but the available connections will allow you to use an external drive. Thanks to the device’s rich connectivity, users can easily add a keyboard, a mouse, speakers and even an external monitor to use it as a desktop machine while maintaining good performance to play nomadic if necessary. Its finish is not first class, but it is not inevitably unacceptable, especially if a user plans for a sedentary use.

 

 

Hands-on article by Jagadisa Rajarathnam

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 (Laptop): Mainstream graphics card based on Nvidia's Pascal architecture and successor to the GeForce GTX 960M. Is manufactured in a 14nm process at Samsung and the technical specifications are very similar to the desktop version.

With these GPUs you are able to play modern and demanding games fluently at medium detail settings and HD resolution.

» Further information can be found in our Comparison of Mobile Graphics Cards and the corresponding Benchmark List.

7300HQ: Quad-core notebook processor based on the Kaby Lake architecture running at 2.5 - 3.5 GHz without Hyper Threading (which is supported by the faster i7 CPUs). The chip also integrates the HD Graphics 630 GPU clocked at 350 - 1000 MHz and is manufactured in a 14 nm process (improved compared to Skylake).» Further information can be found in our Comparison of Mobile Processsors.

15.6":

15-16 inch is a standard display size for laptops and offers the biggest variety of products.

» To find out how fine a display is, see our DPI List.

2.7 kg:

This weight is representative for typical laptops with a 14-16 inch display-diagonal.

Acer: The company was founded under the name of Multitech in Taiwan in 1976 and renamed to Acer or Acer Group in 1987. The product range includes, for example, laptops, tablets, smartphones, desktops, monitors and televisions. Gateway Inc. and Packard Bell also belong to the Group and sell their own laptops.

While Acer still had the third largest global market share in the notebook segment in 2008, it ranked 6th in 2016 with a market share of 6% after they had continuously lost market shares.

There are dozens of Acer laptop reviews per month, the ratings are average (as of 2016). Gateway, which has an own laptop line-up, has also belonged to the Acer Group since 2007.

80%: This rating is not convincing. The laptop is evaluated below average, this is not really a recommendation for purchase.

» Further information can be found in our Notebook Purchase Guide.