What's that, you say? You need an affordable, portable gaming laptop which won't scream out "look at me, I am a gamer"? You want to have the latest generation nVidia graphics card in your laptop, without having to deal with a bulky, noisy cooling system? Well, then, you may want to take a look at the Nitro series from Acer. Unlike the Acer Predator series, which is aimed at hard-core gamers, the Nitro series combines ultrabook mobility with decent gaming performance, all this with a reasonably low price tag ($ 900 to $1800). Sporting an NVIDIA GTX 960M graphics card and with high-end options such as 4K Ultra HD display, an Intel Core i7 processor, up to 32GB DDR4 RAM and an SSD drive, the configuration can keep up with high-end laptops with a price well beyond $ 2500 . Or can it? In this review we'll take a closer look at the Acer Aspire VN-792G Black Edition and measure its performance in various real-life scenarios.
Unboxing the Acer Aspire V Nitro VN7-592G Black Edition
The laptop comes in a rather underwhelming box, without any distinctive features apart from the name of the model and a detailed specification sheet on its side.
The laptop itself is inside a smaller, more stylish box, with the model and the Black Edition logo on it. The package also includes the charger cables and manuals. Nothing to make the user feel special, but then again, keeping the price range in mind, we can understand the choice of packaging and bundle.
Design and build quality
The laptop looks good without having too much "bling". The rubberized, matte finish feels good to touch, but is a fingerprint magnet and will need regular cleaning. Acer boasts a "Nano Imprint Lithography" process for the top cover, which creates a textured surface that feels good to the touch and adds ultra-violet rays (UV) protection. This will reduce discoloration of the lid if the laptop is left under bright sunlight for long periods of time.
When the lid is open, a red LED bar underlines the chrome center line and hinges assembly with a nice "ASPIRE V NITRO" marking.
On the left side we can find a USB 2.0 port, the headphone jack, an SD card reader and the Kensington Lock mechanism. On the right side, very close together, we have one USB 3.1 port and two USB 3.0 ports, the HDMI and LAN ports, as well as the charging connector. When using multiple external devices you may find it difficult to accommodate the various cables/connectors. The front side has no connectors, while the back only has the cooler exhausts.
On the bottom there are additional venting holes, as well as the speaker grills. There are special holes designed for the Acer Dust Defender technology, which periodically reverses the airflow of the fans in order to reduce dust buildup. The laptop has four speakers which, as we will see later in the review, are surprisingly good for their size.
Overall, the laptop is very thin and light, with ultrabook specs ( 390x263x23 mm or 15.4x10.3x0.9 inches in size, 2.3 kg or 5.07 lb in weight). Opening the lid, the hinges are OK, although they don't look that sturdy. The thin lid means that flexing is inevitable when opening or closing the laptop and more importantly, when applying pressure in the center of the lid, which in other laptops can leave some nasty marks on the screen due to contact with the keyboard. Fortunately, we had no such issues with the Acer Aspire V Nitro Black Edition, but we nevertheless recommend you protect your laptop screen by putting a cloth between the screen and the keyboard when in transport.
Above the Ultra HD anti-glare screen you will find the microphone and the webcam (which has a status LED). The backlit keyboard feels nice, the keys are widely spaced and pressing them gives a good feedback. For users who also need to work on the laptop, the presence of a numeric keypad will certainly increase productivity in office applications. The first objection we have with the keyboard is that the up/down arrow keys are too small, a design choice which will surely displease a more demanding gamer. Also, the power button, placed in the upper right corner of the keyboard, looks and feels exactly like the rest of the keys. Thankfully, the risk of accidentally shutting down the laptop is small due to the inclusion of a small piece of Acer software which easily changes the behavior of the power button if needed.
That being said, the red backlight is a nice touch, matching the color of the LED bar. Although it can't be dimmed (it only has an on/off function), its brightness is not an issue.
The touchpad is large, without distinct buttons, and has a Black Edition logo on its upper edge. The mouse click command can be given either by pressing the lower edges of the touchpad or by double-tapping its surface. Gestures are followed precisely and without any glitches.
Hardware specifications
The Aspire V Nitro Black Edition is not a new line of products for Acer. The previous generation (VN7-591G) was based on the Haswell architecture and had NVIDIA GTX 8xx graphics cards. The new generation (VN7-592G) has a slightly more elegant design and is upgraded with the latest technology available (Skylake architecture, NVIDIA GTX 9xx series graphics card).
The reviewed unit has a 15.6 inch screen and is powered by an Intel Core i5 6300HQ processor (quad core, base frequency 2.3 GHz, reaching 3.2 GHz with Turbo Boost , 6 MB cache), coupled with 8GB DDR4 RAM (2133 MHz, single-channel) and a NVIDIA GTX 960M graphics card with 4GB of DDR5 memory. The Intel Core i5 processor, although 10 - 20% slower than the Intel Core i5 i7 6700HQ (also available for the V Nitro series), makes for a balanced configuration, ensuring that games are not bottlenecked by the CPU.
The model we tested is equipped with 8GB of RAM, which should be enough for all but the most demanding applications, and the DDR4 technology is slightly faster than the old DDR3 standard. The memory module is manufactured by Samsung. Other models of the Aspire V Nitro have up to 32 GB of RAM.
The laptop uses the NVIDIA Optimus technology, which optimizes energy consumption by switching between the integrated Intel HD 530 graphics processor and the discrete graphics card, in this case an NVIDIA GTX 960M with 4GB of GDDR5 memory. The reviewed model has a Sharp Ultra HD IPS screen (with a resolution of 3840x2160 pixels ), so the extra memory of the graphics card is not just for show, since the frame buffers can take a lot of memory space at this resolution. A model with 2GB of memory is also available for models with Full HD screens.
The Aspire V Nitro Black Edition has a wide range of storage options available, ranging from a traditional 1TB HDD to a hybrid SHDD, an SSD and a combination of SSD and a HDD. The reviewed unit has, in our opinion, the best storage configuration for this category, with a Kingston M.2 128 GB SSD and a Seagate Momentus 500 GB 5400rpm HDD. Out of the box, the operating system (Windows 10 Home Edition) and the installed software occupies roughly 21.8 GB of the 118 GB available on the SSD Drive. No optical drive is available, due to the thickness of the unit. Depending on the availability of an Internet connection though, you may not miss having an optical drive.
Speaking of I nternet connections, the Aspire V Nitro Black Edition has a Qualcomm Atheros AR5BWB222 Wireless Network Adapter with support for the IEEE 802.11ac wireless networking standard, giving you the potential for high-speed wireless connections on the 5GHz band. The laptop also has a Bluetooth adapter and a Realtek PCIe Gigabit Controller.
An advantage of the new Skylake platform is the enhanced encryption security provided by the TPM 2.0 chip. You can read more on TPM technology in our article: TPM and BitLocker
The low weight usually translates into small battery capacity, and this seems to be the case for the reviewed unit. The 3 cell Lithium Polymer battery is rather small, considering the components used, and is rated at 52Wh. Of course, we'll put it to the test, along with the rest of the hardware components, to see the actual levels of performance of the laptop. But first, let's take a look at the bundled software. And boy, is it a lot of software.
For a detailed overview of the V Nitro range, you can access the official web page: Acer Aspire V Nitro.
Read the next page of this review to learn about the performance offered by this laptop and the quality of the user experience.
Apps bundled with the Acer Aspire V Nitro Black Edition
The laptop comes with a preinstalled copy of Windows 10 Home. Acer has also decided to install a rather large software bundle on the Acer Aspire V Nitro . Most of the programs are purely optional, but some are actually quite useful.
We start with Acer B uild Your Own Cloud Apps (abApps), which is a collection of tools for increased mobility:
- abDocs, which synchronizes MS Office documents with the Acer Cloud Storage
- abFiles, which synchronizes files between your mobile devices
- abPhoto, which delivers instant picture management and sharing
- Acer Portal, which manages the above applications
The most useful application bundled with the Aspire V Nitro is Acer Care Center, an app which has multiple features:
- Detailed system information, including device serial number and lots of additional info
- System checkup, which tests the hard drives, the battery and the network connections
- System tuneup, which optimizes startup applications, deletes junk files and defragments the hard drive
- System update, which provides verified drivers that are suited to the hardware configuration
- System backup and restore, with an added utility for backing up wireless and LAN drivers for installing different operating systems
- Support, providing the user with different ways to contact the Acer support staff.
Acer Explorer is an alternative to Windows Store which provides apps recommended by Acer, as well as tutorials for Acer BYOC (Build Your Own Cloud) Apps.
Acer Power Management provides three major functions:
- Customization of the built-in Windows power plans
- Information about the battery including the remaining battery life and the estimated time remaining for the battery
- Detection of apps and USB storage devices that could impact the battery life
When the user interface is launched, it will do a scan and then list the applications or USB storage devices that could reduce the battery life.
Acer Quick Access is an app which controls the so-called "Acer Signature Features". One of the features is "Bluelight Shield", which reduces the blue light emitted by the screen in order to protect the user's eyes. The other feature present on this model is "Power-off USB charging" which controls whether connected USB devices receive power even when the laptop is off or hibernating.
Another very useful app is Acer Power Button, which, as its name suggests, controls the behavior of the much-too-accessible Power button.
But wait, there's even more software! Next, we have the McAfee LiveSafe Internet Security Trial, an antivirus with additional features such as password storage and anti-phishing. We reviewed the full version here: Security for everyone - Reviewing McAfee LiveSafe. As you'll see in the article, the program didn't make a very good impression on us, although in this case we didn't have any virus or spyware issues during testing. On top of that we have Avast SecureLine Trial, a secure VPN app which can protect your data even on unsecured WiFi access points.
Last on our list is WPS Office 10 Personal Edition, an alternative to Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It's free and it does a pretty good job editing Microsoft Office documents.
Let's now move on and see how our test subject handles the benchmarks and the everyday tasks.
Performance in benchmarks
As usual, we start off with BootRacer , measuring start-up times. The performance is pretty good by SSD standards and amazing if we compare it to systems which have a HDD: the average startup time is 25.7 seconds (most HDD systems usually take at least twice as much time to boot up).
Next on our list is PCMark 8 , which we ran with two presets: Home Accelerated and Creative Accelerated. With 2723 points on the Home Accelerated preset and 3727 points on the Creative accelerated preset, the Acer Aspire V Nitro Black Edition achieves a decent result in both categories.
The Intel Core i5 CPU does a good job, but it can't compete with its Hyper Threading-enabled sibling, the Intel Core i7 6700HQ .
Of course, we also focused on graphics performance, and for that we used 3DMark Vantage with two presets, Performance and Extreme. As with all our benchmarks, each test was performed three times, in order to reduce inconsistencies.
Here are the average scores:
The scores are consistent with the specs and although they won't break any records, the gaming performance of the laptop is very good for the average gamer.
We also looked at raw hard drive performance, using Crystal Mark 5. We tested both the Kingston SSD and the Seagate HDD drive using 1 GB data. The Kingston SSD has good read speeds, but the write speeds are not that great, especially in the Sequential Write test (we've seen speeds in excess of 500MB/s on some SSD drives).
The Seagate performs just as we would expect from a 5400rpm laptop hard drive, with around 110 MB/s on Sequential tests and under 1 MB/s for the 4K tests.
The difference between the two drives is huge, and we cannot say this enough: if you can afford it, upgrade your system drive to an SSD, especially if you use a laptop. Apart from the greatly increased speed, you also get less power consumption, virtually no noise and, in the worst case scenario, more safety for your data, since SSDs are substantially more resistant to physical damage.
Now comes the tradeoff for the weight of only 2.3 kg /5.07 lb: the battery size. We tested the 3 cell battery using the PowerMark suite, first in the Balanced preset and then in the Entertainment one. In the Balanced test, the battery lasted 2 hours and 42 minutes, which is actually not THAT bad, considering the size of the battery and the components used in the tested version. In the Entertainment preset, the battery lasted 2 hours and 29 minutes, a value that again, although not great, is decent considering the weight of the laptop and the UHD screen.
What we can see from these tests is that the Acer Aspire V Nitro has a balanced hardware configuration, with no extremes and no real weak points either.
Real-life performance
Synthetic benchmarks only tell part of the story, though. We tried to cover all the normal usage situations for this kind of laptop: medium gaming, watching movies, listening to music, browsing and editing documents and pictures.
The first thing that stands out in the configuration we tested is the gorgeous Ultra HD screen with Acer ColorBlast technology, which promises colors extremely close to those of the source image. With extremely good viewing angles (88 degrees in any direction), rich colors and a high level of detail, the screen produced by Sharp is one of the best in its class.
Keep in mind that the Acer Aspire V Nitro also comes in a larger size, accommodating a 17 inch screen, which is better suited for Ultra HD. A resolution of 3840x2160 pixels on a 15.6" display will make your icons and text microscopic, but you can scale them in Windows using Display Properties.
Scaling does the trick most of the time, but you may encounter some issues with font sizes with a number of apps and games. In case this occurs, a workaround is to switch to a lower resolution (full HD for example). We noticed on occasion random one-second blackouts of the screen, but this is most likely a driver fault and should not pose a serious problem.
The Aspire V Nitro Black Edition is very suited for movies, especially if you have a 4K video source, but beware: playing 4K videos in YouTube will take its toll on the processor usage. We registered a 60% CPU load when playing 4 K videos. The speakers are surprisingly good, considering their diminutive size, and provide a loud and clear sound, without distortion even at maximum volume. Due to their location, they get a bit muffled if you keep the laptop in your lap and they also lack bass, but that's to be expected from a laptop sound system.
Gaming on AC power was a good experience, although many games do not support the Ultra HD resolution. We played League of Legends, which even on the highest settings and UHD resolution had comfortable 60+ frames per second. We also played War Thunder, which does not currently support Ultra HD, and made a one-minute recording of the frame rates using Fraps. With a minimum of 42 fps and an average of 68 fps on Full HD with the "Maximum" settings template, the gameplay was smooth and enjoyable. However, we were not thrilled about the temperatures. Using AIDA64, we recorded the temperature in our gaming session, and the results are not the best we've seen.
In general, heat not only translates into higher fan noise levels and uncomfortable temperatures for the user, but may also reduce the lifespan of the laptop, given enough time. Thus, we recommend using a notebook cooler whenever you intend to play games for long periods of time on laptops.
During our other tests (multimedia, browsing), the laptop never got even close to being hot, confirming that the Acer Aspire V Nitro is a machine built for multimedia and not with hard-core gamers in mind. Sound levels were not a problem and even in the extreme cases when working at full power, the fans won't disturb.
Next, we unplugged the unit and got moving, to test the mobility of the laptop. The screen has an anti-glare, matte finish, so even under bright sunlight, the displayed data is perfectly legible. The lightweight of the Aspire V Nitro makes it easy to carry and hold, making it a good companion for the road. Performance-wise, the aggressive power plan drops the processor frequency to a mere 800MHz, making the laptop significantly slower, even under light load. Browsing and document editing won't be affected that much, but more complex tasks will take a serious performance hit. On battery, heat is not an issue even when gaming, as the NVIDIA graphics card is also functioning at lower frequencies. Furthermore, the NVIDIA drivers limit the game framerate to 30fps, in order to conserve energy. We detected some electrical noise (also known as coil whine), which might have something to do with the power-saving states of the CPU. The noise wasn't a problem and it didn't interfere with the normal functioning of the unit. The battery lasted around 3 hours while browsing the Web, editing documents and playing music, and 1 hour and 30 minutes when gaming. While the discharge rate is to be expected considering the battery size, the battery charges in about 2 hours and 15 minutes, which is quite a lot.
The lightweight Acer Aspire V Nitro behaved as expected in our real-life tests and apart from the high temperature when gaming, we enjoyed using it both when connected to the AC line and when on the road.
Verdict
The Acer Aspire V Nitro Black Edition has a balanced hardware configuration, with plenty of horsepower packed into a stylish, light-weight body. It boasts an amazing Ultra HD display, good speakers and solid gaming performance, and the SSD makes it very nimble and responsive in day-to-day tasks. The performance level is below that of the hard-core gaming laptops, but the Acer unit is thinner, lighter and more versatile. The only downsides are the high temperature of the processor under heavy loads and the mediocre battery running time. If you enjoy gaming, multimedia applications and want to pack light, The Acer Aspire V Nitro VN7-592G Black Edition should definitely be on your shopping list, especially considering the aggressive pricing compared to the competition.
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