Acer Nitro 5 RTX 4050 Review – CHEAP GAMING LAPTOP!

£729. That’s how much this Acer Nitro 5 costs, brand new, from Argos of all places. In today’s inflated world, £729 is one of the cheapest gaming laptops on the market – certainly from a more reputable brand anyway, and with a reasonably modern spec. For that, you get an 8 core CPU, RTX GPU, and even a 144Hz display! What’s not to like then? Well, a lot. See, it’s really, really easy to mislead people with buzzwords and skewed specs. That “8 core CPU” is an i5 12450H, which has FOUR full-fat performance cores, and four low-power efficiency cores. That means that, in terms of performance, you have around 5 cores worth of performance, despite ‘having’ eight cores total. You also only get 8GB of RAM in this model, which as you’ll find out, really isn’t enough for modern triple A games. You also only get 512GB of SSD space, which can hold, like, three games. Maybe. As for that “RTX GPU”, it’s an RTX 4050 mobile with 6GB of VRAM and a 140W total graphics power rating – AKA the lowest end RTX GPU available. Oh, and that 144Hz display is a real ‘treat’ too… Despite all that, for the price tag, it’s pretty hard to argue this isn’t a decent amount of machine for your cash, right?

Well, to answer that one, let’s take a look at how it performs. Now my results are going to be a bit skewed here because I haven’t tested any other RTX 4050 laptops, nor anything else all that close to this price range, so you can expect to see this at the bottom of every chart, but what’ll be interesting is seeing how close it gets to the higher end machines, and just what performance it can offer outright. I want to start by just showing you the results I collected for the Nitro 5 on their own. Here they are – you can see we get over 200 FPS in both Rainbow Six Siege on Medium and CS2 on Low, you get 137 FPS average in HITMAN 3, 116 FPS in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, nearly 80 FPS in Cyberpunk on Medium, 72 FPS in Microsoft Flight Simulator, and it even ekes out over 60 FPS in Starfield on Low. On the face of it, this seems like a great performer – and to a degree it is.  

Now let me show you a few comparisons. While CS2 offered more than playable levels of performance, It’s nearly a full 100 FPS lower than the next laptop I’ve tested, likely thanks to a much faster CPU. Cyberpunk too is a good 25% down on the next machine up, again likely thanks to the CPU and RAM config primarily. Hitman is by far the most interesting result though, because Hitman’s built in benchmark splits out both the CPU and GPU performance, and I show the GPU side – so these are the GPU specific results. Even when you isolate the GPU on it’s own (as best as you can anyway), you still get a significant performance difference to even a 4060 with 8GB of VRAM. Still, the performance on tap here isn’t all that bad, at least for gaming.

For any productivity and creative workloads, especially with this spec, you’re really going to struggle. Owing to the fact this is really just a quad-core with extra steps, the multi-threaded performance is abysmal by comparison. It’s the slowest by a decent margin, although the single-threaded performance isn’t all that bad. This is a 12th gen chip so the architecture is on the older side (by two generations), but it’s still reasonable, which is likely why we got reasonable gaming performance. Blender isn’t any better, with the Gooseberry render in particular taking a little over 19 minutes to render. That’s not great. Interestingly, it’s a reasonably efficient chip, drawing a peak of 56.5W during the Gooseberry render, and hitting an expected 94°c at peak. That’s not so bad, considering the GPU can choke back 140W!

One thing I should note here that it’s really pretty easy to get into the Nitro 5, and inside you’ll find a DDR5 SODIMM slot just waiting for an extra 8GB of RAM – which would unlock a decent chunk of performance too – plus not only a spare M.2 slot, but also a 2.5 inch drive bay. Personally I’d rather have a larger battery, as the 57Wh unit included is pretty lacklustre, but hey if you want more storage, you can have it! Interestingly, the SSD they’ve gone with here isn’t a cheap DRAMless drive, it’s a Micron drive with DRAM. That’s a surprise on what feels like a very cost-cutting machine. So yeah, I’d budget for some more RAM and another SSD if I were getting this – or just get the model with more storage and RAM from the factory… 

One of the most important aspects of a gaming laptop is the display. It doesn’t matter how many frames the GPU can draw, if the display sucks, your gaming experience sucks, and sadly, this display is horrific. Like, genuinely, this display is one of the worst I’ve ever used on a gaming laptop. That isn’t an overstatement or exaggeration, and I have the data to prove it. Using my open source response time tool, I measured the response times. Now normally I’d test with a fixed RGB 5 offset tolerance, but for this display, both for accuracy’s sake, and to show just how bad this thing is, I’m going to use the much more lenient (and outdated) VESA standard of 10% of the light level tolerance. Despite that significant advantage, the Nitro 5’s “144Hz” display takes, on average, over 16.7 milliseconds to draw a frame, with some taking upwards of 25 milliseconds. That means this is a 60Hz panel – that’s what you’re effectively getting. It takes 16.7 milliseconds, on average, to actually finish drawing a frame, which converted to a framerate is 60 hertz. That means any motion on screen, like, say, in a video game, is a blurry, smeary mess. It’s incredibly difficult to aim well when the display hasn’t finished drawing where your opponent actually is. Here’s Aperture Grille’s Frog Pursuit test in slow motion to show you what I mean – you have multiple ghosted frames on screen at once at all times. Like, there’s what, four, five ghosted frames there? Now imagine that’s an enemy and you have to work out which one is the right one to aim at, while your crosshair blurs around too! 

Equally, latency seems to suffer too. OSRTT reported 8.3 milliseconds of on display latency, which is over double what I’d want to see here. At 144 hertz, I’d expect to see the average be more like 3.5 milliseconds, so for this to not even reach that with the fastest result – that being 4 milliseconds – isn’t promising. That’s likely thanks to the 4050 being fed through the integrated graphics built into the CPU. That leads to a less-than exceptional gaming experience. While I’m getting like 200 FPS in Siege, I can’t see the enemies, nor aim at them, so it doesn’t really matter. The display alone is adding a significant level of challenge – and not a challenge you’d enjoy. 

One of the other reasons you can’t see anything is the brightness. This tops out at just 250 nits, and unlike the OLED panels I’ve used recently where 250 nits is more than adequate, this is really very dim – especially in my bright studio. It does have a reasonable contrast at around 1300:1, but that doesn’t really help here. I also noticed almost immediately how dull the colours looked. It looks flat and muted, and it turns out that’s because  this can barely render a colour. This covers just 67% of the sRGB colour space – the smallest colour space we test against – meaning the panel is just unable to saturate red, green or blue to any degree. That means all content – whether that be games, youtube videos, or films – looks bland and dull. It also entirely rules out any form of content creation. And, to add insult to injury, the colour accuracy result is dreadful too. The SpyderX2 reported an average DeltaE of 9.21, with the majority of the results literally off-the-charts levels of bad. So yeah, it ain’t great. 

Another important element of a gaming laptop is the keyboard, and, as a reprieve from the display, I’m happy to report that it’s fine. It’s fine. It’s a bit mushy and soft for my liking, but it’s decent enough for gaming, and serviceable for typing. The trackpad is fine too, no issues there. The IO isn’t too bad either. You’ve got three USB A ports, one type C, one HDMI port, ethernet, a combo headphone and microphone jack, and DC in. Not bad! 

So yeah, is this worth the money? If you’re using this with an external display most of the time, sure! If you need to look at the built-in display, definitely not. While I appreciate this is a budget laptop, there’s an acceptable limit for how slow and dull a display can be, and this soars straight past it. It doesn’t matter if this gives you 1000 FPS in Cyberpunk or CS2, the display makes it a limited and more difficult gaming experience. With even a moderately faster, more vibrant panel – even if that added £50 to the price – this would be a fantastic option, but as it stands, I can’t in good conscience recommend this. I’m going to try and get some comparable options in to see how they stack up too, so if you want to see those reviews, make sure you hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss them. Equally, if you want to be able to test displays like this, you can pick up one of the open source response time tools I make right here at home at OSRTT.com.