The Nitro 5 has a fast 165Hz, 1440p display, and when playing shooters like Call of Duty Warzone, the motion looks great. I also played the new Doom Eternal DLC, and the only on-screen tearing was in the scene where Doomguy cuts the poor devil in half, which was great. The screen itself did not look 300 nits brighter than advertised. This was noticeable when I was playing the Sable demo, which had great colors, and kept trying in vain to brighten the screen when I was looking for the cool hoverbike parts. The colors were great, but not as bright as I had hoped. The Nitro 5 reminds me of an old laptop because of its size. The exact opposite of the ultra-thin Alienware x14, the Nitro 5 has a thick lid, bezel, hinges, and keyboard base, all of which are thick. While technically portable, you won’t forget you have it if you’re carrying it in a backpack. Vents and ports are located along the sides and back, and the Nitro 5’s all-black chassis, with the exception of the red highlights surrounding the vents on the back, exudes sophistication. In that sense, Acer’s claim of being an understated laptop is not entirely false. The big laptop comes with a suitably large display, a 15.6-inch FHD screen that renders all of the fine details found in recent graphically demanding games. It is also ideal for movies and streaming content. Not all games can take advantage of the 144Hz refresh rate, but if you play at 60fps or higher, you will experience smooth frame rates because of the extra headroom. It also has more USB-A ports than it has had in a long time (one on the left side and two on the right), but only one USB-C/Thunderbolt 4. It is located on the rear end, along with an HDMI output and a port for a barrel connector power cable. Gaming laptops are among the last laptops that do not have the more generic USB-C based power connection because of the power needed to run the discrete GPU.
