Acer Nitro 14 Review – CHEAP 14” Gaming Laptop with “AI”…

I don’t know about you, but I’m really sick of “AI” branding on otherwise good bits of tech. This Acer Nitro 14 – an otherwise decent machine, and one that has remarkably little to do with AI at all – has the phrase plastered all over its marketing materials. The product page on Acer’s website for this bad boy contains no less than 25 uses of the phrase “AI”. “AI for Gaming”, “AI for Creating”, “AI for Productivity and Entertainment”, “RTX for AI”, “Discover the RTX AI advantage”… It goes on and on and on. It drives me mad, mostly because it’s completely meaningless. So, let’s scrap the AI crap and focus on the real stuff, like the fact that this is actually a really nice machine and one that I actually recommend. Let’s find out why. 

So what actually is this thing? This is the Nitro 14, a 14.5 inch, relatively thin, relatively light, budget gaming laptop from Acer. Their Nitro line can be a little hit and miss as Acer tries to balance features with price tags, but honestly I think they got this one right on the money. Considering the price tag – that we’ll get to shortly – this is a remarkably premium and well built device. Of course it’s no Macbook Pro, but for a budget Windows gaming laptop, it sure does feel nice. The keyboard is Acer’s pretty standard fully RGB backlit affair, it’s a little mushy as all gaming laptops seem to be, but it’s perfectly nice to use. The trackpad is pretty massive, taking up basically all the available space, and as you’d expect tracks really well. IO wise you get an HDMI port, two USB 3 type A ports (one per side) and two USB 4 type C ports (also one per side) which I think also support USB PD as well as display outputs. You’ve got a barrel jack for DC in, a combo headphone jack, and a MicroSD card reader.

The display is somewhere Acer has sort of cut a corner to meet the price tag, but not so much that it’s a problem. This is a 1200p 120Hz IPS panel with, in my testing, over 100% coverage of the sRGB spectrum, or 80% of DCI P3, just shy of 350 nits of peak brightness, a 1400:1 contrast ratio, and a DeltaE of 1.86 on average, making it a decent content consumption display. The accuracy does mean it isn’t too bad for content creation, although it isn’t quite as rich as higher end panels offering more like 90 to 100 percent coverage of DCI P3. Still, at least for everyday use this really isn’t bad. For gaming, well it isn’t exactly amazing. With the LCD Overdrive setting in the Nitrosense app disabled, you’re looking at 23.4 millisecond on average for the response time. That translates into quite a smeary experience, especially with fast motion. Take a look at the high speed footage of Aperture Grille’s Frog Pursuit test – see how long the trail is behind the purple frog? It’s actually so slow that it doesn’t really finish drawing the frame at any point before moving again. That’s how slow it is. With overdrive on it does get better, down to 16.27 milliseconds, but that’s still basically 60Hz, so again looking at the high speed there’s still quite the trail. It’s a little better, but still not what I’d call great. It’s still perfectly playable to be sure, but it’s not a fast display. Luckily input lag is spot on, especially thanks to the onboard MUX switch that switches between the RX 780M onboard the CPU and the RTX 4050 dedicated GPU. 

Actually, since we are talking specs, let me walk you through it. My model at least comes equipped with a Ryzen 7 8845HS 8 core, 16 thread CPU, which has an RX 780M GPU built in. That comes with 16GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 512GB NVMe SSD, and then there’s the RTX 4050 with 6GB of GDDR6 VRAM too. That SSD is the bane of my reviewer existence, as my usual test suite of games now encroaches on a terabyte, so with only 500GB to work with I have to rotate out the games just to be able to test them all – and it means you’ll only fit one or two games on this thing before thinking about an upgrade, which unlike larger machines like Acer’s own Nitro V15 is going to be a fair bit harder as this doesn’t have a spare M.2 slot inside just waiting to be populated. You’ll need to replace the main drive, which means at minimum reinstalling the operating system, or at least cloning the existing drive which will need another system handy. I do wish they’d charge £10 more and put a 1TB drive in this thing instead… Anyway, the other thing you might notice in here is the distinct lack of RAM. The 16GB included is about all you’ll get here, as there aren’t any modules ripe for upgrade here. One thing that shouldn’t need an upgrade though is the thermal paste – as the sticker on the palm rest says, this bad boy already has liquid metal, which might explain why this thing runs remarkably cool for a gaming machine. 

The cooling solution is remarkably quiet, despite sporting dual fans, even under load – although I think I know why. While the CPU is free to draw a little over 80 watts under full CPU loads – although stabilises at 75W – and runs relatively cool for a laptop, let alone a thin one, at around 80°c under full load – the GPU is limited to a maximum of 60 watts. That is incredibly low for a gaming laptop, with many 3060 based machines I’ve tested running at up to 140W or more, so a 4050 at 60W likely won’t be great, right? Well surprisingly no, it’s actually really good. At the native 1920×1200, even Fortnite on DirectX 12 High with no TSR runs above 60 FPS, Microsoft Flight Simulator runs at over 75 FPS average, Starfield on low hits 84 FPS average, Cyberpunk on medium hits 107 FPS, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is nearly 123 FPS, Hitman 3’s GPU data reports 135 FPS average, CS2 is up at 231 FPS and Siege hits 241 FPS. That’s all really not bad – all of those games, even the intensive ones, are totally playable, and if you want to make more use of the 120Hz display you’ve still got room to drop the settings a little. That’s really not bad!

At 1080p for the sake of comparison, you’ll find the Nitro 14 matching or beating the Nitro V15 – an RTX 4060 based machine – and the Triton Neo 16 – also a 4060 machine. In CS2 the Nitro 14 hits 217 FPS average, beating the 209 of the V15 and sitting between the Triton Neo’s performance and turbo mode runs. Cyberpunk has the N14 doing well, beating the V15 by 6 FPS – not bad considering both the power and spec difference. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is about the same, with the Nitro 14 ahead of the Triton and V15, at least slightly. Microsoft Flight Simulator has the V15 2 FPS ahead of the Nitro 14, so essentially tied there. Hitman 3’s GPU data shows the actual difference here. The V15’s 4060 is a good 12 FPS faster than the 4050 in the Nitro 14, which makes a lot of sense. The actual in game FPS is likely very similar, if not slightly better in the N14’s favour though. Siege again has the Nitro 14 ahead of the V15 despite the spec disparity, and by almost 10 FPS no less. In short, this really does seem like a decent performer, despite the low spec GPU and minimal power limits. 

Likely a decent amount of that performance difference comes from the CPU allowing the GPU more room to breathe compared to the V15. The 7735HS in that offers 24% less performance than this 8845HS in Cinebench multithreaded, and 22% slower in the Blender Gooseberry render too. This 8845HS keeps up with the 13900H and 155H chips from Intel pretty well, and even the M2 Pro from Apple. 

On the whole the actual gaming experience feels pretty decent. The performance itself is solid, and while the display isn’t exactly the smoothest, it’s certainly crisp enough and does deliver an enjoyable gaming experience, even if it isn’t exactly a pro esports machine. The keyboard feels nice too, and means that actually gaming on this thing is a good time. Of course what makes it better is that, at least at the time of filming, you will only have needed to spend £850 to get this thing. For an entire gaming laptop – and a pretty nice one at that – that seems like a great value for money. Genuinely, the build quality would make you think this was a £1,500 machine, not almost half that, and the performance is on par with pricier machines too. While I do wish they’d charge you £860 and put an actually usable sized drive in here – especially because upgrading it yourself isn’t exactly simple due to the lack of a second drive slot inside here – on the whole I can still recommend this thing. Good job Acer.