2018 Acer Nitro 5 in 2024 – Ryzen 2500U + RX 560 Laptop Still Usable??

This is an Acer Nitro 5 from 2018, and this video is part of my series of seeing how old machines handle these days. This is, if my memory serves me right, Acer’s first all AMD laptop, sporting a Ryzen 5 2500U with 8GB of RAM, and an RX 560 with 4GB of VRAM, plus a 128GB M.2 SSD and a 1TB hard drive. Don’t be fooled by the 2 in the CPU name though, this is actually a first gen Ryzen part – it’s Zen. Zen 1 if you will – not Zen+, Zen 1. That means this isn’t exactly a powerhouse, plus this being a “U” SKU chip means it’s ultra-low-power. It’s just a 15W chip, which compared to modern Intel chips that suck back 100+ watts, this is nothing. As you might expect, that means CPU performance is, well, pretty naff. Cinebench shows this as having notably worse performance than the much, much older i7 4700MQ in the Chillblast machine at 2400 points versus 3000, and of course it absolutely pales in comparison to a modern chip with over a factor of ten more performance. Single threaded is actually a fair bit worse too, getting dangerously close to the 740QM’s 411 points in the ancient Asus G53J. Blender has the BMW scene within two minutes of the 4700MQ, but the Gooseberry scene is a lot closer to the 740QM, taking just shy of two whole hours to render one frame. For context, the 13980HX in the STRIX Scar 16 took under eight and a half minutes. What progress! The most surprising thing for me though was the power figures. This little thing only sucked back 6 watts! Ok, so there’s a bit of context you need. The way HWInfo reports the power for this chip means that is the core only power. The rest of the chip did draw around 12 watts at peak, but considering the performance, that is actually really impressive!

For gaming though, the RX 560 is actually still pretty capable – the bottlenecks are definitely elsewhere here. In CS2 at 1080p on low settings I got a pretty poor 48 FPS average, and 30.5 FPS in the 1% lows. Compared to the Chillblast machine with the 765M this is poor, as that netted 57.6 FPS average, and of course compared to our modern machine isn’t far off a full power of ten less performance. I think this performance is limited by the 8GB of RAM, the hard drive, and the low TDP CPU. Siege is much better, netting 100 FPS average, compared to just 58.9 FPS on the Chillblast machine, and a much better 1% low figure at 77 FPS versus 44 FPS. It’s still pretty naff compared to the modern machine – on medium settings actually – but still. And the same can be said for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which was actually pretty playable at 49 FPS average, compared to just 20 and 17 FPS on the older machines. It’s only CS2 that had a significant bottleneck – and that’s something I tested and retested, including doing windows and BIOS updates too, but nothing helped. 

Part of that experience though is 100% down to the hard drive. Even the loading time to load the map was just laughably long – here, I’ll play this in real time while I explain what’s going on here. See, the two older machines are old enough that they came with hard drives – and only hard drives. For the G53J an SSD was a pipe dream, and while the chillblast machine does actually have mSATA slots – think of them as the precursor to M.2 – it was never populated as mSATA drives weren’t exactly common, nor all that cheap. This Nitro 5 on the other hand was born right in the dual-drive era, where companies knew they had to provide an SSD as the boot drive, but didn’t want to splash out on a usable sized drive, so would opt for basically as small as they could, in this case 128GB, and then they’d include a hard disk drive for your “mass storage needs”. In theory this is the best of both worlds, right? Well sort of, but no. See, because the two older machines didn’t have an SSD, when they got too slow to use, their owner replaced the hard drive outright, but because this does have an SSD – albeit a tiny one – I’ve never seen the need to swap out the hard drive or replace the SSD with a bigger one. You certainly could, and if you were just given this as a hand-me-down or something that’d be one of the two things I think you’d have to do to make it usable, but if you are considering upgrading from this to a newer machine, or upgrading the machine itself, I think that might be a harder decision. Right, has the map finished loading yet? No? Jesus. Ok, well I can tell you it took almost three minutes just to load the FPS Heaven benchmark map, AKA Dust 2. That sort of experience carried on to the gameplay too with stuttering like mad until every single asset had loaded into RAM – although that’s the other problem. 8GB of RAM, even on a low power CPU like this, just isn’t enough. This really needs 16GB, and luckily it’s just SODIMMs so you can easily replace it. Hell they’ve even left an access panel for both the RAM and hard drive so you don’t need to take the entire thing apart. 

To decide whether upgrading this thing would actually be worth it, we need to look at the rest of the package. The keyboard is exactly like modern Acer laptops, which is to say a touch on the mushy side, but perfectly usable, backlit, and for the first time the second layer functions all actually work! Amazing, I know! The track pad is fine, a little clunky but big enough. IO is alright – there’s only one type A USB 3 port, but four USB ports total including the USB C port, and then HDMI, Ethernet, SD card reader, DC in and a combo headphone and microphone jack round out the IO. Of course the important one is the display, which on this is a 1080p 60Hz IPS panel – so we are already off to a meagre start. 60 hertz isn’t exactly ideal for gaming, and even a cursory glance at some high speed footage of Aperture Grille’s Frog Pursuit test shows that with any amount of fast motion, you’ll get a blurry, smeary mess. The panel isn’t even fast enough to finish drawing the frame at 60 hertz, and takes up to two frames to clear an image off the screen, which really isn’t great. You’ll struggle to hit those trickshots on this thing, that’s for sure!

Realistically, with 16GB of RAM and either an upgraded M.2 SSD or a replacement SATA SSD for the hard drive, I think this is still a pretty capable gaming machine, at least for those less intensive titles. Anything esports will play well, and even more intensive games can do decently well on low settings, so it’s definitely still viable even for gaming. The display is actually probably one of the biggest limiting factors in how good the experience will be, but as I said for a hand-me-down machine, or super cheap used, this isn’t bad for kids-first-gaming-machine.