Acer Nitro 7 review: An AAA-capable budget gaming laptop!

Acer is really powering up their gaming laptop lineup, and they’re adding it on with the Acer Nitro 7. The Nitro series is one with great performance and screen refresh rate for its relatively low price. If you’re looking for a gaming laptop, then you should consider the Acer Nitro 7.

SIMPLE BUT ROBUST DESIGN

One of the selling points of the Acer Nitro 7 is its thin profile, with a mere 19.9mm thickness on its front chassis, and 23.14mm for the back. It’s thinner than most of the currently available gaming laptops in the market.

Granted, its exterior design is not particularly standout. The Acer logo graces the lid, with red highlights around the air vents and a metallic finish all round. It looks incredibly simple, with a ‘classic’ feel. Keeping to this red-black colour scheme, it’s all over the Nitro 7. The keyboard has red backlighting (no RGB). Definitely a more discrete laptop.

It possesses three USB-A ports (two are USB 3.1), a USB-C connection and RJ45 port. It’ll be fulfilling many consumer needs as necessary.

BATTERY, DISPLAY AND 144Hz

Gaming laptops aren’t necessarily known for their extensive battery lives, but the Nitro 7 is capable of a decent five hour runtime on power saving and a comfortably dim screen. It may not be the best, but it’s not the worst either.

What’s great is its 144Hz, 15.6-inch 1080P IPS display. With its high refresh rate, you’ll be able to see everything much smoother on this screen. Simple actions like moving the cursor or scrolling look seamless on such a display.

Naturally, a game will be able to utilize the 144Hz refresh rate to its fullest, making it about twice as fast and a faster-paced gaming experience. It’s pretty great with a combination of various viewing angles and colours.

Heating wise, it can get quite hot. The bottom chassis is definitely one to heat up the most after an intense gaming session, so don’t have it on your lap.

SOLID PERFORMANCE IN SMALL BODY

Powered with an Intel Core i7-9750H and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti GPU, the Nitro 7 is certainly a capable gaming laptop. Of course, the GTX 1660 Ti isn’t the best graphics card you can get for gaming, don’t underestimate its capability of playing most modern titles at max graphical quality at 60FPS. You can see the results for yourself below:

Fire Strike: 1016 (Graphics – 1110, Physics – 13115);

Time Spy: 429 (Graphics – 372, CPU – 3370);

PCMark 10: 2453;

Fairly impressive results for its weight class, don’t you think? You won’t be seeing the exclusive RTX features like ray tracing and Deep Learning Super Sampling, but that’s probably a bit too much to expect for this price point. More serious gamers could try for something more beefy, for sure, but you’ll be just fine playing your AAA games at best quality at 1080p. 1440p will need something heftier.

CONCLUSION

The Acer Nitro 7 will be a great pick for those looking for a thin gaming laptop for easy carry-on combined with impressive performance. For this price point, it’s hard to get anything better than this!

At this price, something has to give away too. It has a level of heating issues, and the SSD capacity is lacking. The cooling is decent at least, and you can increase the storage capacity without much issue.

Two models of the Nitro 7 is available in Malaysia, and the review unit is the GTX 1600 Ti, at RM5,199. The GTX 1650 model is at RM4,499. The price difference isn’t that wide, so you could definitely try for the 1600 Ti model for better performance. It’s pretty great value for the asking price, so it’s one to keep in mind.

You can have a look at it on Acer’s website.

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