Acer Nitro 5 15.6" AN515-54-5812 Black 2020

The Acer Nitro 5 is a budget gaming laptop with a decent GTX 1650 but a weak CPU and only 8GB of RAM. It's upgradeable, which helps, but the reliability scores are concerning. Only worth it if you find it cheap and don't mind tinkering.

The GTX 1650 is the best part of this machine, landing in the 72nd percentile of our GPU rankings. It'll handle esports titles and older AAA games at medium settings without much fuss. The i5-9300H is a different story. Four cores and a 2.4GHz base clock put it in the 18th percentile, which means it chokes on anything CPU-heavy. The 8GB of RAM is a real bottleneck too, sitting in the 6th percentile. You'll want to add another stick immediately. The 256GB SSD is fast but tiny, and it ranks in the 25th percentile. At least there's an open M.2 slot and a 2.5 inch drive bay for upgrades.

Stacked against the Lenovo Legion 5i or ASUS ROG Zephyrus, the Nitro 5 looks like a fossil. The Legion 5i offers newer CPUs and better build quality for not much more money. The Zephyrus is in a completely different league for portability and performance. Even the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7th Edition, while not a gaming machine, runs circles around this thing for everyday tasks. The MacBook Pro M5 is a joke comparison, it's triple the price and ten times the performance. The only reason to pick the Nitro 5 is if you find it dirt cheap and don't mind upgrading the RAM and storage yourself.

At 800 USD, this is a tough sell in a world where newer budget gaming laptops exist. The GTX 1650 is fine, but the CPU and RAM hold everything back. You're basically paying for a chassis with upgrade potential. If you can find it used for significantly less, maybe. But at full price, you're better off saving a bit more for something with a newer processor and 16GB of RAM.

The Acer Nitro 5 AN515-54-5812 is a budget gaming laptop that's getting long in the tooth. It pairs a 9th gen Intel Core i5-9300H with a GTX 1650, which was a decent entry-level combo back in 2019. Now it's mostly a reminder of how fast laptop hardware moves.

You get a 15.6 inch 1080p IPS display, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB NVMe SSD. The storage is tight, the RAM is barely enough for Windows plus a browser, and the CPU sits in the 18th percentile of our database. But the social proof is wild, 97th percentile with a 4.6 star average across over 5,400 reviews. People bought this thing in droves and mostly liked it.

Skip this if you need a reliable daily driver for work or school. The reliability scores are in the 10th percentile, which is a red flag. Also skip it if you want to play modern AAA games at high settings, the CPU and RAM will hold you back no matter what GPU you pair with it. And if you hate opening up laptops, the out-of-box experience with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD is going to frustrate you.

This is a laptop for someone who needs a cheap gaming machine right now and is comfortable opening it up to add RAM and storage. Casual gamers who play older titles or esports games will be fine. Anyone expecting to run modern AAA games at high settings should look elsewhere. It's a starter laptop, not a long-term investment.