Acer Aspire V15 Nitro (VN7-591G) review

Acer is known for its down-to-earth, business-friendly laptops, but the Aspire V Nitro notebook line is its first real attempt to capture gamers with deeper pockets than budget-minded family PC buyers.

The Aspire V15 Black Edition (black is the only colour available at the moment) is a mid-range 15.6in model priced at £850, placing itself in a busy and competitive area of the performance laptop market. Be aware that there are many configurations of this laptop on the market including ones with lower specification parts and a few with Ultra HD screens costing more than £1,000. Make sure you know which you’ve selected before you buy (our review model is NX.MQLEK.002).

Acer has set the Nitro apart from its other, more reserved laptops with a stylish, textured matt black lid and gunmetal hinge accent below the screen with embossed “ASPIRE V NITRO” logo which can be seen both when the screen is open and closed. The soft-touch matt black palm rest completes the look, making it one of our favourite laptops of the year in terms of design.

It’s very thin at 2.4cm at it thickest point and pretty light, too, at 2.4kg. This doesn’t include the rather weighty power brick, though, which you will definitely need to have on you at all times. You pay for the laptop’s svelte build with poor battery life, which we measured at just 2 hours 48 minutes in our general use test, although this is par for the course for similarly specified gaming laptops.

The keyboard has red LED backlighting, although this is a subtle effect in anything other than night time conditions. The keys themselves don’t have a huge amount of travel but we found the small distance to be sufficient for long periods of typing and gaming. We never had problems with missed keystrokes, either.

Sadly, the touchpad isn’t quite as good as the keyboard. It’s an all-in-one design, placing the physical “mouse” buttons below the touchpad itself, with the pad clickable about a quarter of the way down. In itself this isn’t a problem, but we did find ourselves frustrated by the slightly-too-grippy coating on the pad which left some movements such as two-fingered-scrolling feeling juddery and unpleasant for our fingers.

There are four speakers housed in the chassis, and we were astounded by how good they were. They’re loud, have perceptible stereo separation and even have some bass presence, which is tremendously impressive. This, combined with how quietly it runs even under load, sets it apart from almost every other gaming laptop we’ve ever tested.

You get three USB3 ports, HDMI, a gigabit Ethernet connector and a 3.5mm headset jack on the right side of the laptop. Inside, there’s dual-antenna MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) Wi-Fi for enhanced throughput with compatible routers with multiple antennae.

PERFORMANCE

Inside, the V15 Nitro has a quad-core 2.5GHz Intel Core i7-4710HQ processor, which is a proven powerhouse backed up by 8GB of RAM and a 1TB hard disk with 8GB of SSD cache. In our multimedia benchmarks it managed an impressive overall score of 91, scoring highly in the image rendering test (96) and the multitasking challenge (97), although it faced a tougher challenge in the video conversion test where its score dropped to 81. In real terms, this laptop is lightning fast when browsing the web and editing documents, and will be capable of editing videos and dealing with high resolution photos, too.

Processing performance is matched with gaming prowess, thanks to the mid-range Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M graphics chip, which has impressed us in the past. In our Full HD Dirt Showdown tests with 4x anti-aliasing and Ultra graphics settings, the V15 Nitro was able to produce an average frame rate of 41.1fps, which is very playable. In the tougher Crysis 3 test on High settings, performance dropped to an average 26.5fps. We wouldn’t call this enjoyable, but it only takes a few tweaks, such as switching to medium settings and lower anti-aliasing, to bring this up to a more stable 35+fps. At this price, you can’t expect much more and most modern games will be able to run on Medium or High settings.

DISPLAY

We were also pleased with the 15.6in Full HD screen, which sits a rung or two above the panels you’ll find on cheaper laptops. sRGB colour gamut coverage was measured at 84.7 per cent, which is good for a laptop and about what we’d expect at this price. This coverage is backed up by decent 1019:1 contrast ratios and reasonably low blacks of 0.31cd/m2. It’s not a visual feast but anyone going from a cheaper laptop to the Acer Aspire V15 Nitro will definitely see it as a major step up.

CONCLUSION

We’re really impressed with Acer’s first proper foray into the gaming laptop market. The Aspire V15 Nitro is handsome, well built and is a competent performer in every task you’re likely to throw at it. Not only that, it’s also £50 cheaper than comparable efforts from Chillblast and Scan, although both the Chillblast Defiant 2 Mini and the Scan 3XS Graphite LG156 have much better collect and return warranties versus Acer’s paltry one-year return to base cover. Nonetheless, for mid-range gaming performance, there isn’t much that can beat the V15 Nitro and it wins our Best Buy award.

BUY NOW