Acer Nitro 5 AN515 Review

Michael Iaboni Avatar

Written by:

Updated 11:20 pm

Expert Rating

86

Acer Nitro 5 AN515 Gaming Laptops offer consistent frame rates and great port variety to ensure a powerful, mobile gaming machine. It’s what makes it a best gaming laptop for Fortnite. But although six pounds isn’t heavy by any stretch of the imagination, it is considered heavy by gaming laptop standards. So be aware of that. Besides its weight, the Acer Nitro 5 An515 is still one of the best gaming laptops especially for FPS games.

Why We Like It – Acer Nitro 5 AN515

The Acer Nitro 5 AN515 is a surprising laptop as the specs lead you to believe the laptop is weaker than it actually is. The combined powers of the CPU and RAM make for having multiple tabs open a breeze, and the GPU is also powerful enough to play the most graphically intense games on high settings at a consistent 40FPS.

Pros
  • Consistent Frame Rates
  • Great Port Variety
  • Comfortable Keyboard
Cons
  • Average Battery Life
  • A Little on the Chunky Side
  • Underwhelming Speakers

Power/Performance

The Acer Nitro 5 AN515 sports an 8th Generation Intel Core Processor i5, a Nvidia GTX 1650 graphics card, and 8GB of RAM. If you’d prefer an Intel Core i7 CPU instead, check out the Acer Predator Triton 500 RTX 2060. Still, performance on the Acer is still good with multiple tabs sure to run without slowdowns. Gaming performance is equally impressive with a steady 40 frames per second even on the highest settings.

Related: If you’re looking for a lighter gaming laptop, especially for Roblox, then check out our Acer Aspire 5 Gaming review.

Battery

The Acer Nitro 5 AN515 has a battery life of about four hours and 22 minutes. While this does exceed the around four hours of battery life of the average gaming laptop, 22 minutes isn’t really something to get excited over. Still, battery life can be conserved if you don’t play games, but then what’s the point? Try the Alienware New M15 if you’d like something more long lasting.

Ports/Expandability

On the left side of the laptop is a Kensington lock, an RJ45 Ethernet port, an HDMI 2.0 slot, a USB Type C port, and two USB 3.0 Type-A ports. On the right side you’ll find a DC-in port, a USB 2.0 port, and an audio jack. Clearly, the laptop can double as a mobile gaming station quite easily too. See the MSI GS65 Stealth Thin for another example of a port-friendly laptop.

See also: If you’re looking for a nice entry-level gaming laptop, then you’ll love our Acer Nitro 5 GTX 1650 review.

Build Quality

At just shy of six pounds, the Acer Nitro 5 AN515 doesn’t quite make the cut as a ‘lightweight’ laptop, and being a little on the chunky side makes it quite cumbersome too. However, the full HD IPS display is a sight to behold. The 0.3 inch thick textured upper bezel provides an 80% screen to body ratio and produces a powerful 103% on the sRGB color gamut.

Value

There’s still more to like about the Acer Nitro 5 AN515. The backlit keyboard is responsive with a 1.4 millimeter key travel which makes for comfortable typing. Unfortunately, the built-in speakers aren’t quite good with hollow bass tones, max volume that barely fills a room, and the distortion that usually comes with max volume being the common points of ire.

Acer Nitro 5 AN515 Wrap Up

The Acer Nitro 5 AN515 is a budget gaming laptop that sacrifices features like the speakers and battery life for a gaming experience that is well above what a laptop of its price should be capable of. Whether this is good or bad, we’ll have to leave up to you to decide. But if you are willing to make those sacrifices, you’ll find a companion in the Acer Nitro 5 AN515.