I’m certainly no expert on the latest technology, so imagine my surprise when I finally upgraded from using an ASUS X455L laptop to a higher-tier affordable gaming laptop. It has taken me a week to adjust to my new Nitro 5 Ryzen 7 laptop. It is so different from my previous one, and it makes me realize how much I’ve missed out on the past years. Now that I have had my laptop for almost two years, it is time for me to provide an updated review on this technology. So, we begin an update to my Acer Nitro 5 Ryzen 7 Review.
Table of Contents
What is the Acer Nitro 5 Ryzen 7 2700U with Radeon RX 560X Gaming Laptop?
The Acer Nitro 5 Ryzen 7 2700U with Radeon RX 560X is a gaming laptop. It was Acer’s answer to the age-old question of mixing “affordable” and “high-tier” components to create a mid-tier beast of a device. If you read its specifications and components on paper, it’s certainly impressive for a laptop that costs around ~40000PHP (~800USD) with the Ryzen 7 upgrade. It is configurable for a boost of speed, thanks to its massive storage, and hosts a maximum of 32GB of DDR4 RAM. Its graphics card was supposedly “capable” of handling graphics-intensive games. Unfortunately, despite its promises, this Acer Nitro 5 Ryzen 7 2700U laptop just falls short in terms of performance.
You can continue reading the specs about it here.
What’s it like to have an Acer Nitro 5 Ryzen 7 2700U with Radeon RX 560X Gaming Laptop?
When I uploaded photos of my new laptop on social media, my classmates were quick to ask me what it was like. Its keyboard layout was very different. It was so different that I never once touched the Numpad on the right of the device. My brain just didn’t register that it was there; not even now. It just felt awkward to have the Numpad in that spot.
Before the laptop upgrades, I did a few tests. It had 4GB of RAM and no SSD for the OS when I first got it. Immediately, I put it to the test: I installed five games on the laptop, and the following was what I found:
- It can barely run God Eater 3 with its base specs. GE3 has affordable minimum requirements; Even then, the laptop still struggles to play the game. I had to put everything to the lowest quality to even play, and there are still frame drops.
- Minecraft, as usual, still eats the laptop’s RAM until I turned off the Mipmapping. Even then, the laptop struggles in the form that it still drops a few frames once in a while. Fortunately, games like Terraria and Stardew Valley don’t seem to be an issue.
- League of Legends at the highest quality is certainly runnable, but frames still do drop and the screen freezes while switching in between qualities.
- Soul Worker has rare frame drops, and the screen freezes for a second in some parts of the playthrough (especially the opening sequence).
- Apex Legends crashes at the selection screen (obviously since the game requires 6GB RAM in its minimum requirements).
I previously believed that the problem lay in the RAM. The graphics card. and processor “supposedly” had no problem rendering the games. Some of the games had some positive yields and performed fairly better compared to others in the market. However, upon further testing, that was sadly not the case.
What are the issues with this Gaming Laptop?
Despite all my praise for my new laptop, there are still issues that plague it. My old laptop is no gaming laptop, but it can run Minecraft, League of Legends, and Soul Worker completely fine. It has nearly no difference in its performance; only the Nitro 5 can dish out better graphics and looks better thanks to its screen resolution. I can even say that Minecraft runs better on my previous laptop.
The laptop is marketed as an affordable and performance-oriented gaming laptop; however, it just keeps pushing its Disk Usage to 100%. Even if I had no software running, it still pushes it to 100%. Thankfully, I’ve managed to fix this by turning off Windows Updates after updating Windows again. I’ve also fixed something in the registry; but even then, one simple action pushes it to nearly 100%. I’ve decided to start deleting the multitude of bloatware from both Acer and Windows. Unfortunately, the games I run on it still suffer some frame drops.
However, the issues of frame drops aren’t limited to games. Video editors like Filmora, Camtasia, Sony Vegas Pro, and Web Browsers, especially Google Chrome, also experience some form of “frame drops”. Sometimes, the videos on YouTube are covered by the color green.
This made me realize to make the most out of this laptop, you better max out its RAM first before anything else. The Windows OS simply eats up the entire RAM; even with just Google Chrome, it’s already at 70-90% Memory Usage. Perhaps, get an SSD so the OS runs smoothly and the system doesn’t crawl at a snail’s pace. It happens all the time, especially with the random spikes of memory and disk usage that freeze a game out of nowhere. In a sense, the laptop suffers the most thanks to the bulk of Windows 10.
Unfortunately, it did not end there. Even after the upgrades to my Nitro 5, some issues simply continued to persist. The Ryzen 7 and RX 560 Graphics Card simply fails to cooperate most of the time with software like Adobe Photoshop and Vegas Pro. There was one time when I had OBS running and simply opened a game, which was enough to cause my laptop to slam into a dreaded Blue Screen of Death.
The laptop also suffers from inconsistent performance issues. Sometimes it is capable of functioning perfectly well and running games smoothly; sometimes, it simply doesn’t. Apex Legends is a big victim of the laptop’s inconsistency as it will run smoothly on some days, other days it will run like a PowerPoint SlideShow.
Conclusion
The short answer is No. Especially in this day and age where better technology exists, you should pretend that this laptop does not exist. Acer’s Nitro 5 Ryzen 7 with 2700U with Radeon RX 560X Laptop is more of a foundation of a gaming laptop than anything else. It’s “casual” in the sense that it can still play games and offer high performance in those games, but you will never be able to play newer games. Games like Sekiro, Dark Souls 3, and Elden Ring suffer greatly with this laptop’s specs, and even Dark Souls 1 is not free from the frame drops despite a fully upgraded Nitro 5.
