This mainstream gaming notebook
A name like V17 Nitro Black Edition inspires images of fast cars and powerful engines. Acer, not normally a company associated with high-performance systems, might be trying to change its image, it seems. And indeed, on the surface, the V17 packs some decent hardware, such as a gimmicky 3D RealSense camera. But while some parts are good choices, others leave us wanting.
The V Nitro series is available in two sizes, the 15.6-inch V15 and the 17.3-inch V17 we’re reviewing. And that’s where we first encounter some anomalies. Despite having a larger chassis, the V17 is only available with a 1080p display, where the smaller V15 is available with 1080p or 4K IPS displays. The battery is also a fairly small three-cell 52Wh capacity, which impacts battery life in a negative way. The core hardware is otherwise the same, so the only reason to go with the larger laptop is if you prefer lower-DPI displays. There is some good news—for gaming purposes, 1080p is a much better fit for the graphics card. But that brings us to the next concern: Acer’s choice of Nvidia’s GTX 960M.
There’s a big gap in performance and features between the GTX 960M and 965M. The 965M uses a trimmed-down GM204 GPU, while the 960M uses Nvidia’s first generation of Maxwell hardware, GM107. That means certain DirectX feature level 12.1 options are missing, along with VXGI (Voxel Global Illumination). The bigger concern is that the 965M offers 30–40 percent more performance compared to the 960M. In many games, that will be the difference between running high versus medium quality at 1080p.
Even though we think the GTX 965M would have been a better choice, the V17 still has decent performance; it surpassed our zero-point Alienware 14 in every test with the exception of battery life. Three hours of video playback is quite short, even for a mainstream gaming laptop, and if you happen to fire up a game, the V17 will only last about 45 minutes. Turning on Battery Boost can help, at the cost of frame rates, but getting more than an hour of unplugged gaming will prove difficult.
What really separates great laptops from the merely average isn’t just performanceoriented insides, it’s the entire experience, and this is where the V17 falls short. The keyboard is quite good, we’ve no complaints there, but the clickpad is another matter. It’s unresponsive and lacks precision, and while any gaming on this laptop will almost certainly be done with an external mouse, there’s no reason the integrated trackpad shouldn’t work well. It’s 2015—etting the trackpad right should be a simple matter.
That’s not the only flaw we encountered. There’s a phenomenon known as “coil whine” that typically occurs when a small capacitor or coil begins to vibrate and emit a high-pitched noise. We’ve seen this on GPUs, motherboards, and network adapters, but in the case of the Acer V17, our test laptop exhibits the problem when the GTX 960M fires up. Do anything without engaging the discrete GPU and it’s fine, but as soon as a game starts running, we hear a high-pitched noise. This problem is usually unit-specific, so while this particular V17 has coil whine, another V17 may not, but it does speak to issues with quality control.
The V17 is decent overall, and the size and modest performance allows it to run without making a lot of noise. The price is attractive, especially now you can find it for $200 under the MSRP, but there are many competitors with higher-quality materials that simply look better, and they don’t fail the touchpad test. If you like large displays and are after a mainstream gaming notebook, you could do far worse for the price. – JARRED WALTON
SPECIFICATIONS
CPU Intel Core i7-4720HQ
RAM 2x 8GB DDR3L-1600
GPU GeForce GTX 960M 4GB
Display 17.3-inch, 1920x1080 IPS
Storage 256GB SSD, 1TB HDD, DVDRW
Connectivity HDMI, Ethernet, SD reader, 2x USB 3.0, 2x USB 2.0, 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.0
Dimensions 16.7 x 11.5 x 1 inches
Weight (Lap /Carry) 6.61 / 7.89lb