Acer Nitro 14 review: Honey, I shrunk the Nitro!

Compact laptops with discrete graphics cards are becoming all the rage. I recently tested the HP Omen Transcend 14 and Lenovo Legion Slim 5, while Asus makes the ROG Zephyrus G14 and will soon launch the TUF Gaming A14. Now, Acer has entered the fray with the Acer Nitro 14.

All these machines feature 14 or 14.5in displays with 120Hz refresh rates and RTX 40-series Nvidia GPUs. The HP, Asus ROG Zephyrus and Lenovo machines are pitched as multipurpose laptops for gamers and creatives, or indeed anyone who needs some serious graphics grunt under the hood, while the new Acer and Asus TUF models are primarily designed for gamers.

Acer Nitro 14 review: What you need to know

With its new Nitro 14, Acer has stuck with the tried-and-tested Nitro philosophy: put some serious gaming silicon inside a laptop that looks the part, don’t go too upmarket with the display or sound system, and keep the price down. 

Acer can get away with this because the Nitro 14 will soon get a more powerful stablemate, the Predator Helios Neo 14, with a 3K 165Hz screen and RTX 4070 graphics. The Neo 14 can hoover up sales from serious power users, while the Nitro 14 keeps those who just want a compact, capable and affordable gaming laptop happy.

To that end, Acer has fitted the Nitro 14 with potent GPUs; both the RTX 4060 and RTX 4050 models have a TGP of 110W, which guarantees good gaming performance.

Acer Nitro 14 review: Price and competition

Configuration tested: AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS CPU, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 GPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 14.5in, 120Hz, 2,560 x 1,600 IPS display

In the UK, the Nitro 14 range will start at £1,099 and run to £1,399. The entry-level model features an Nvidia RTX 4050 GPU, AMD Ryzen 5 8645HS CPU, 512GB of storage, 16GB of RAM and a 14.5in, 1,920 x 1,200, 16:10, 120Hz IPS display. For another £100 you can have the Ryzen 7 8845HS chip. The top-end model comes with an RTX 4060 GPU, Ryzen 7 8845HS chip, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD.

Rather annoyingly, the review sample I was sent had a 120Hz, 2,560 x 1,600 IPS screen, which won’t actually be available in the UK, presumably for fear it will steal sales from the Helios Neo 14. Once again Acer’s international release plan leaves me scratching my head.

Given the price of the competition (the Asus TUF 14 starts at £1,499) the Nitro 14 has quite a price advantage. Nitro gaming laptops have always represented impressive value, and it’s good to see that tradition continues with the new model.

HP’s new Omen Transcend 14 (£1,549) is a beautiful little laptop built around a 105W Nividia RTX 4060 GPU and an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor. Its potent silicon and good looks, combined with a high-quality 14in 120Hz OLED display and excellent speaker system, make it a thoroughly desirable laptop.

More competition comes from Lenovo’s impressive Legion Slim 5 Gen 8. Although more expensive at £1,565 for the model with an RTX 4060 GPU and 32GB of RAM, the 14.5in 120Hz OLED screen is very colour-accurate, making this a great compact laptop for creatives.

If you want something a little bigger, the Asus Tuf Gaming A16 Advantage Edition is a bargain at just £849. It’s a well-balanced machine with a potent AMD RX 7600S GPU, a high-quality 165Hz display, good battery life and easy upgradeability. 

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Acer Nitro 14 review: Design and build quality

• Thoroughbred gaming style
• USB-C 4.0
• Soldered RAM with one SSD slot

In typical Nitro laptop style, the Nitro 14 is a chunky black plastic affair that feels solid and robust. At 1.82kg, it’s not as light as the 1.63kg Omen Transcend, and at 21mm vs 18mm, it’s a little thicker too, but no more so than the Lenovo Legion.

There’s a decent range of I/O ports, with a 40Gbits/sec USB-C 4 port, 10Gbits/sec USB-A port, 3.5mm audio jack and DC-in on the left. On the right, there’s a second USB-A port, a 10Gbits/sec USB-C port, HDMI 2.1 and a microSD card slot. Both USB-C ports support DP Alt Mode video and happily took a charge from my 65W and 125W USB-C PD chargers. Wireless communications are managed by a Realtek RZ616 card, which supports 6GHz Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3.

Removing the base plate from the Nitro 14 is simple, so I was rather disappointed to discover that all the RAM is soldered to the motherboard and that there’s only space for one SSD.

Acer Nitro 14 review: Keyboard, touchpad and webcam

• Gaming-optimised keyboard
• Fn-lock only via BIOS
• Lacklustre 720p webcam

You’ll instantly recognise the keyboard layout if you’ve ever used an Acer Nitro laptop. Bar the absence of a numeric keypad and the arrival of the CoPilot key, the Nitro 14’s deck looks and feels like a 2022 Nitro 5.

The highlighted WASD keys and three-zone LED backlight combined with the chunky flat-topped keys make for a thoroughly “gamey” visual experience, while the keys themselves have a firm, clean action, and the deck is pretty solid, some sag only noticeable under heavy pressure. Unique among its direct competitors, the Nitro 14 has four full-sized cursor keys rather than small, hard-to-hit half-height affairs.

Like most Acer laptop keyboards, the Nitro 14 doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut to lock the Fn keys, so you can’t use the media keys without pressing the Fn key. You can change this in the BIOS by setting the Fn keys to work as media keys, but a keyboard shortcut would still be welcome.

The 120 x 70mm touchpad has a glass covering, and apart from being rather small (the smaller 14in Omen Transcend has a 125 x 80mm pad), it works well. The click action on the lower half is positive and quiet.

The webcam proved to be a poor performer, typical of gaming notebooks. It can only capture video at 720p 30fps, and images are always rather noisy and lack colour. At least the AI tile on the CPU means you get the full suite of Windows Studio Effects, such as background blur and automatic framing.

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Acer Nitro 14 review: Display and audio

• Bright 2.5K 120Hz IPS panel
• Motion fidelity is good but not OLED-level good
• Speakers are harsh and lack bass

While Asus ROG, Lenovo and HP have chosen to fit their 14in fighters with 120Hz OLED displays, Acer and Asus TUF go with IPS panels. The TUF 14 refreshes at 165Hz, but the Nitro 14 only manages 120Hz with a claimed 9ms GtG response time. That puts the Nitro at a disadvantage because its IPS screen doesn’t have the same levels of motion fidelity as OLED screens.

That’s not to say the Acer makes a disastrous showing; the amount of ghosting and smearing may be more noticeable under test conditions, but in actual gaming any differences are beyond the human eye’s detection. The Acer Nitro control programme does have an overdrive function, but this makes no noticeable change to the display performance.

The Nitro 14’s display makes a better case for itself in other areas. It’s bright, maxing out at 378cd/m², the contrast ratio is good at 1,198:1, and there’s a fair amount of colour, with gamut coverage of 104.9% sRGB, 74.3% DCI-P3 and 72.3% Adobe RGB. Accuracy isn’t bad, either, with a Delta E variance of 1.95 versus the sRGB profile. There’s no support for HDR content, however. 

Obviously, the OLED screens fitted to the Omen Transcend and Legion Slim are better, but that’s why those laptops cost more than the little Acer. The Nitro 14’s display does just fine for gaming and watching videos, but it’s worth reiterating that the 2,560 x 1,600 panel I tested won’t be available on the Nitro 14 in the UK. Buyers here will have to make do with a lower-resolution 1,920 x 1,200 display.

The DTS-enabled speaker system is loud enough, pumping out 76.5dBA as measured against a pink noise source at 1m, but the soundscape is harsh and lacks bass. Gaming sound effects come across well, but as I write this I’m listening to Everything But The Girl’s latest album, Fuse, and I can’t say I’m enjoying the experience.

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Acer Nitro 14 review: Performance and battery life

• MUX switch
• 110W RTX 4060 GPU
• Solid gaming performance

Thanks to an RTX 4060 GPU running at the near-maximum 110W TGP and an octa-core AMD Hawk Point CPU with a maximum speed of 5.1GHz, the Nitro 14 is quite the performer, scoring a very healthy 423 points in our 4K multimedia benchmark. 

The Nitro 14 allows you to enjoy high frame rates and tear-free G-Sync gaming thanks to a MUX switch and that high TGP. Set to Full HD, Cyberpunk 2077 ran at 104fps at the highest detail settings but without ray tracing, while Returnal ran at 79fps in similar circumstances. 

Given the performance increase you get from engaging DLSS on the latest RTX 40-series GPUs, there’s plenty of headroom to turn ray tracing on and still see high frame rates. With DLSS set to Performance, Metro Exodus ran at 61.2fps in Full HD resolution at the highest ray-tracing and detail settings, and that’s a game that only supports DLSS 2. Cyberpunk 2077 ran at 84fps in similar circumstances without resource-hogging path tracing.

In the SPECviewperf 3dsmax 3D modelling test, the Nitro 14 ran at 89.7fps, neck and neck with the Lenovo Legion but well ahead of the Omen Transcend. Its 65W RTX 4060 could only manage 74fps.

The Ryzen 7 8845HS is a “Ryzen AI” chip with an NPU capable of 16 TOPS (tera operations per second). That’s not much compared with the 45 TOPS the new Snapdragon X Elite SoCs claim to do, but it’s enough to run local AI functions without adding to the CPU’s workload.

The 1TB Hynix SSD in my review machine went like the clappers, recording sequential read and write speeds only a little shy of 6,000MB/sec, which is extremely impressive for a compact laptop.

Battery life was par for the course, with our standard VLC-based video rundown test putting out the lights after 8hrs 8mins. That’s better than the Omen Transcend (7hrs 18mins) but not as good as the Lenovo Legion Slim (8hrs 27mins). For a Windows laptop with a 76Wh battery, the Nitro 14 did about as well as I expected.

Acer Nitro 14 review: Verdict

Unlike the competition, which has tried — not without success — to create a new breed of 14in discrete GPU laptops, Acer has just made a compact gaming laptop. That’s resulted in a cheaper machine that can still run AAA games at higher frame rates. The OLED screens and speaker systems on the Omen Transcend 14 and Lenovo Legion Slim 5 are better, but the Nitro 14 is a fair bit cheaper.

The model with an RTX 4060, Ryzen 7 8845HS CPU, Full HD 120Hz screen, 16GB of RAM and 1TB SSD will only set you back £1,399 and should provide a very similar user experience to the fully loaded model I was sent to test. That’s pretty compelling value for a compact, capable gaming laptop such as this.