Acer jumps on the gaming bandwagon
If there’s one category of laptops that is bringing in the mega bucks, it’s those of the gaming variety. The perfect storm of powerful new mobile GPUs combined with booming player numbers has seen gaming laptops experiencing the highest growth rate of all laptops. Acer has taken note of this trend, delivering the Acer V Nitro in an attempt to scoop up some of these gaming dollars. Can a brand that is better known for mainstream laptops deliver a laptop worthy of your entertainment hours, not to mention dollars?
There are four different models of the V Nitro available, and we were sent the VN7-591G-732P Black Edition. This version is dominated by the 15.6 inch screen. Thanks to the display’s sizeable dimensions, this laptop can’t be described as a lightweight, but it’s no brute either, tipping the scales at 2.4kg. It’s not quite as obese as some of the brutish gaming laptops of the past, but you probably won’t want to lug it around all day. Acer has gone for a very subtle design, foregoing the blazing neon and chunky plastic that many associate with gaming laptops. The metal nish should withstand heavy handling better than all-plastic competitors, and it looks signi cantly lighter than it is thanks to the sharp, tapered lines.
The full-sized keyboard is easy to come to grips with and exhibits minimal ex during use. We’re not fans of the woeful touch pad though, which has the annoying habit of moving the mouse cursor as the user lifts their nger off the pad. It made basic desktop duties a pain in the butt, so we’d highly recommend the use of a mouse.
Acer has packed some serious hardware inside the chassis, kicking off with Intel’s zippy i7-4710HQ mobile processor. This cranks up to a blistering 3.5GHz during games, which probably explains the noisy cooling under load. NVIDIA’s GTX 860M GPU delivers the graphics side of the equation, while a whopping 16GB of memory is overkill for anyone who doesn’t do video or image editing. Rounding out the specs is a 1TB mechanical drive; while other versions of this laptop include an SSD, our model did not. This probably explains why desktop performance was so sluggish, a disappointing discovery considering how powerful the CPU and GPU are. We’d highly recommend installing an SSD for this reason alone.
The good news is that game performance was admirable. As our benchmarks show, this machine can happily deliver playable performance provided the owner isn’t too ambitious with the detail settings. It’ll happily churn out smooth frame rates with detail levels set to medium, exactly what we expected from the entry-level GTX 860M GPU.
At $2199, this laptop is facing off against some powerful competition, such as MSI’s GS60, which has a better display, faster GPU and SSD. As such, we can’t help but feel Acer’s gaming laptop is slightly overpriced as a result – if it can shave a few hundred off the price it’ll inhabit a unique price point with a decent balance of performance and mobility. Until then there are better options at this price. BENNETT RING
VERDICT
While it’s beautifully built, at this price the V Nitro needs to have a faster GPU and SSD as a bare minimum.