Acer Nitro V15 RTX 4060 Review – Not Enough POWER! 

Acer has made one pretty confusing choice with this Nitro V15 laptop, and that is the power profiles. This £1,000 machine is rocking a Ryzen 7 7735HS 8 core 16 thread chip with 16GB of DDR5 RAM, an RTX 4060 Laptop GPU with 8GB of VRM, and a measly 512GB SSD. That spec is generally fine – save for the now tiny SSD although we’ll get back to that later – but what’s confusing is the power profile. Take a look at this list of GPU power limits – on even a last-gen Nitro 5 an RTX 4060 Laptop GPU can push up to 140 watts of power, but on this thing it gets just 75 watts! That’s almost HALF the power, and so unsurprisingly, it performs about half as good. Well not quite but you get the idea. Oh, and no MUX switch either…  While we’re at it too, the CPU is limited to a maximum of 65W in the maximum power mode, or more like 45W while gaming. Considering it’s an AMD chip that isn’t too bad, but still on the lower end as you’ll soon see.

Performance wise, in games anyway, you can expect pretty mediocre performance across the board. In CS2 it is at the bottom of the chart – even in the painfully loud performance mode – in fact it’s even lower than an RTX 4050 equipped Nitro 5 I reviewed a little while ago. That’s embarrassing! In Cyberpunk it’s a little better, beating out an equally power-limited RTX 4070 in the Schenker Vision 16 Pro, and that 4050 Nitro 5, although still a fair ways away from other 4060 Laptop GPU based machines like the Core 16 and Focus 16 – and even Acer’s Helios NEO 16. Shadow of the Tomb Raider again has it down at the bottom, sharing space with that Nitro 5 and quite a way behind the Vision 16 Pro. Fortnite again has it at the back, a good 10 to 15 FPS behind anything not power limited or remotely spec comparable. Flight is the same, kind of painful story – like the Helios Neo 16 which also has a 4060 Laptop GPU gets 45 percent more performance than this Nitro V15. That’s not great. Hitman’s built in benchmark lets me break out the CPU and GPU data, and this is the GPU data, where we can finally see some differentiation between the 4060 in this and the 4050 in the Nitro 5, but honestly not by much, and considering the Vision 16 Pro manages such impressive performance despite its limited power profile, the V15 kind of stands out (and not in a good way). Unsurprisingly, Siege is the same story – hell it’s over 50 FPS slower than the Vision 16 Pro, which makes me think the CPU isn’t all that hot for single threaded games either. And lastly in Starfield it is a bit closer – the performance spread across the board is generally tighter anyway so that’s not so bad.

As for the CPU, unsurprisingly, it’s not so hot either. The 12450H in the Nitro 5 actually has significantly better single thread performance at nearly 1,700 points in Cinebench R23, compared to just 1525 points on this 7735HS. Multithreaded is better – thanks to having two more cores – and that carries into other all-thread tasks like rendering in blender – but not by much. It’s technically faster than the 13700H in the Vision 16 Pro, but that’s both power and thermally constrained especially in the longer Gooseberry render. Power and thermals wise, the 7735HS isn’t bad. In the high power turbo mode it peaked at 65W, but was stable at more like 54W. It only hit around 80°c too which is mighty impressive – although the fan noise was frankly unbearably loud both while rendering and gaming in that high power mode. The regular mode was much better, at the cost of some performance (about 10W on the CPU less). 

As for the display, Acer claims this should offer 300 nits and 100% sRGB coverage – neither of which are particularly impressive, although for this sort of price point that is at least decent. Happily, according to the SpyderX2 anyway, you can expect about 10% more brightness than claimed at 336, with a decent for an IPS panel 1180:1 contrast ratio, and right around 100% coverage of the sRGB spectrum, and around 81% of DCI P3. That isn’t bad, especially for a more budget gaming laptop.

As for the gaming related metrics, by default you’ll get a fairly slow panel. While it does run at 165 hertz, the pixels take their sweet time to change colour, and therefore actually draw a new frame. By default anyway, this panel takes an average of 9.5 milliseconds to render a frame, which isn’t the absolute worst I’ve tested – those are like 20 milliseconds – but only 10% of the transitions fit within the refresh rate window, meaning when we look at the high speed footage you can see that there is at least one ghosted frame on screen alongside the current frame, and that it takes at least one frame worth of time to draw the current frame. If you happen to have a dig around in the NitroSense app, you’ll find somewhere in there the option for “LCD Overdrive” you probably want to toggle that on, because that drops the initial response time down to 5 milliseconds, and 73% of the transitions fit within the refresh rate window. That’s much better – although the overshoot is impressively high there. Taking a look at the high speed footage, you’ll see that overshoot is pretty obvious. It’s not on for long enough for you to really notice in person, but perhaps Acer could tone it down just a tiny bit to meet a better sweet spot… But on balance I think I’d still leave overdrive on.

As for the keyboard, that’s fine. It’s a little soft for my taste, but it’s fine enough anyway. The trackpad is the same – no major complaints. All of that adds together to a somewhat confusing gaming experience. The display is pretty decent – smooth, reasonably fast, reasonably vibrant and bright – but the performance just isn’t there to back it up. It’s fine – especially on esports titles – but in more demanding games like Cyberpunk or Starfield you’d find yourself reaching for low or lowest settings right out the box. For a £1,000 laptop I’d like to expect a little more. With more power this would be great – although a quick look inside reveals why that isn’t possible. The heatsink solution is really pretty limited with just three heatpipes for both the CPU and GPU, with two of them being shared as well. This results in an awfully loud and not overly heat-efficient solution that means Acer has had to keep the power limits pretty low – anything higher and you’d overwhelm this cooling package, and that’s a shame.

The good news is you can upgrade at least the RAM and storage – in fact there is even a second M.2 slot open for you to expand on the wholly insufficient 512GB SSD that this comes with. For context, the sum total of the seven games I benchmark comes to around 566GB – meaning to be able to actually test all these games I have to uninstall some before I can install others. I can’t imagine having only 512GB of storage in my main PC with how damn big games have gotten. GTA V is 100GB. Starfield is 100GB. Flight sim is 180GB. Whatever the latest COD is I think is 300GB. That’s more than HALF this entire machine’s storage capacity, so yeah if you do get this, stick another M.2 drive in it. As for the battery, that’s a frankly tiny 58Whr unit which is fine enough for this sort of budget, but let’s just say you won’t be getting “all day battery life” from this. IO wise you’ve got three USB A ports, one Type C port, HDMI, Ethernet, DC in, combo headphone and microphone jack, and that’s about it. 

On the whole I’m left a little disappointed by the Nitro V15. I have generally really liked Acer’s Nitro 5 line – of which this is the successor to – so to see this be ‘gaming lite’, despite being the same sort of price point as before, is a shame. Maybe chalk it up to inflation, but I think this is the reason you should be really careful to look up the TGP figures for any given machine – because the 4060 Laptop GPU that’s in this won’t offer anywhere near the same performance that the same chip, but with nearly double the power can – even from Acer’s own product line. It’s also just really, really loud.