$800 for a GREAT gaming laptop? - Acer Nitro 5 Showcase By Linus Tech Tips

This right here is $800 worth of laptop. Which doesn't sound like a lot, but Acer (who sponsored this video, by the way, thank you Acer) is particularly proud of what they've managed to pack into their eighth generation Nitro 5. So let's crack this bad boy open and have a look at it, shall we? All right, so while I pack these boxes open, let's talk the specs of this thing. It's got a Core i5 processor (Which again doesn't sound "gaming" or anything) but if you look a little closer at the specs, the 8th Gen Core i5 8300H, (which is what this thing is equipped with) is actually nearly identical to the last generation Core i7 7700HQ which was kind of the "de facto" standard for gaming laptops. So consider this: Over one generation we are getting slightly better performance actually and at $128 less on the CPU alone so that is a BIG part of why Acer was able to hit this fairly aggressive price point As for the rest of the specs, it's got 8GB of RAM, which as we talked about recently, for gaming anyway, (you know I can't say anything for Chrome users) but for gaming anyway, it's still enough even in current year 2018. It's got 256GB of SSD storage so we have finally gotten to the point where even for like "value models" like this one, we don't have to rely on a larger hard drive in order to have enough space to install a few games, with the fact that it's a PCI Express based SSD being an extra bonus.

AND it's got a GTX 1050 Ti. So the biggest difference between a 10 Series card, like what we've got here, and the last generation 9 series GeForce cards is that it used to be that the mobile version was a cut-down version of what was in some cases not even the same GPU at all, so a 970M, for example, was actually a desktop 960, and then a 950M, which would have been the like, similar position in the product stack to this one, was... (I don't even know what that thing was). So the 1050 Ti is over 100% faster than the 950M that you would have gotten in an $800 laptop in years past. So the point I'm trying to make here is that at this price with these specs, you're going to get a GREAT experience in eSports titles, like you'll be able to crank them and I'd be surprised if you ever dropped a frame, and then even in triple A titles you should be able to drive this 1080p panel at its native resolution at like medium settings.

So all that's left here is for us to uninstall Norton... "You may have to download (Norton) consumer product removal tool... "... and go ahead and get some games installed in Steam so we can take it for a test drive. So I had to run and grab a copy of Doom off an external drive because I don't feel like waiting for 60GB to download, which I guess is a good time to talk about I/O, because... I like having my mouse over on the left so that it doesn't interfere with movement on the mouse pad over on the right, and we've only got one USB 3 over on this side of the type-A persuasion so I'm gonna go ahead and use that second one right in between the HDMI port, we've got an SD card reader... AND a regular wired Ethernet port.

YAY! My external drive, and then over on the other side we've got power in, two more USB ports (though It should be noted these are USB 2) and then a headphone microphone combo jack. One thing that's noticeably better is the display brightness. So IPS displays started showing up on value laptops -what about two years ago I guess, but one of the big issues that they had was that while they have IPS qualities like better colors and better viewing angles, they were typically really dim. This one's actually not too shabby. No, I don't want the game bar.

Like, barely gives you enough time to tell it to never come back "I'm gonna go with EXPERT bots today!" Alright, so we're running anywhere from about 80 to 110 or so frames per second- Damn these expert BOTS... Oh crap, they're all- Yes, they're better than me, thank you. I guess I could have bought a better gun, or I could just... Okay, enough CS:GO. Okay, well for Fortnite's loading, maybe we can just spend a little bit of time with the keyboard actually.

Actually, overall impressions of the keyboard are not bad. It's got a bit of a long keystroke and that does take some getting used to so I found myself missing a couple here and there but if you're a heavier typer you probably wouldn't even notice. Not bad! Really quiet, too. Lets apply the best settings for our system here. Battle Royale, Of course.

Does anyone play the other one? Okay, motions are off because it's terrible. Yeah, I was not expecting all high, too, and- Oh, Okay, it kind of settled in there. So, I'm kind of a view distance guy. I don't really care about any alias use so let's go ahead and have a look at how that looks. Wait.

The ones with arrows are on my team, right? I don't remember. No, that's not bad like, if your goal is: you know, do some schoolwork and you're not expecting crazy battery life because it does have a dedicated graphics card, and then play Fortnite in your off hours, this is not a bad experience. Can you harvest a car? Evidently you can! Yeah, you build stuff. See, I'm harvesting brick right now. This is rock solid now.

It's not doing any of that dipping or anything. It's actually not that loud either. Like, it's, you know, it's not silent or anything, but it's very tolerable. So there you have it. That's pretty much the latest gen Nitro 5.

Overall looking pretty good for 800 bucks if you get it from Best Buy. We have really come a long way actually. So thanks for watching guys. If you dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it: hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum, which you should totally join.

Source : Linus Tech Tips