Acer Nitro V15 review: A very cheap but rather good gaming laptop

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a gaming laptop with a price tag substantially less than £1,000 must be utterly awful in at least one way. Acer’s new Nitro V15 would seem to have its work cut out, then, because the price usually hovers around £700.

So what’s the catch? Speakers that sound like a cat being strangled? Battery life that can be measured in minutes? An utter inability to run AAA games? A display little better than an Etch A Sketch? Antediluvian hardware? A keyboard with more bounce than a trampoline?

In a nutshell, no. As we’ll see, other than the rather dull display, the Acer Nitro V15 is an impressively well-made and well-balanced gaming laptop that represents excellent value for money.

Acer Nitro V15 review: What you need to know

To show my hand early in the game, the Acer Nitro V15 is the only cheap gaming laptop I’d recommend to someone whose friendship I put any value on. By cheap I mean sub-£800, but even if we jack the price ceiling up to £1,000 the V15 still holds its own.

Just like the Force, gaming laptops work best when in balance, and that’s what Nitro V15 is – balanced. No one feature is glaringly bad, which is usually the case with budget gaming notebooks.

If there is a weak spot it’s the screen, but keep in mind that this is a budget machine and I think this is a sacrifice worth making. If you do want a gaming laptop this good with a more colourful display, the simple fact is that you will have to pay more.

Acer Nitro V15 review: Price and competition

Configuration tested: AMD Ryzen 7 7535HS CPU, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 GPU, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 15.6in 144Hz 1,920 x 1,080 IPS display. Price when reviewed: £699

The Nitro V15 is available with a selection of Nvidia GPUs and Intel and AMD processors. The RTX 2050 is best avoided if you want to play even moderately demanding games, while the RTX 4050 and RTX 4060 models are a smidge on the pricey side, starting at £1,050.

The RTX 3050 machines with AMD Ryzen 5 CPUs are much more affordable and offer what I think is a great balance between quality, performance and price.

As always, however, there are alternatives to consider:

•  Lenovo’s LOQ 15IAX9I is good value at £740 and is blessed with a great display, easy upgradability and a good keyboard, but the Intel Arc 530M GPU struggles with demanding games and battery life is poor.
• If you want something a little more potent, the Asus Tuf Gaming A16 Advantage Edition is still a bargain at £1,200. It’s a well-balanced machine with a powerful AMD RX 7600S GPU, a high-quality 165Hz display, good battery life and easy upgradability.
• When Acer gets its UK retail supply sorted, the entry-level Acer Nitro 14 with the same RTX 3050 GPU as the V15 should be available for around £1,000. An impressively compact affair, it’s the essence of a good gaming laptop, just a whole lot smaller.

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Acer Nitro V15 review: Design and build quality

• Chunky and solid
• USB-C 4.0
• Easy to add more RAM and a second SSD

The Nitro V15 is a chunky black plastic affair that feels well screwed together. There is a little flex to the lid, but no more than you’d expect from any laptop without a fully laminated glass screen. The main body of the Nitro V15 is as solid as a rock and feels as though it would take a lot to break it.

The design is rather anonymous with no flash lighting effects other than the two blue status LEDs on the right-hand side, but that’s not always a bad thing. Not everyone wants a gaming laptop with an adolescent design aesthetic.

At 1.9kg the V15 is on the lighter side for a gaming laptop and, at 24mm thick, it’s thinner than many, too. It’s no MacBook Air, but you can still drop it into a small backpack and cart it around all day without issue. The 135W DC charger is on the petite side, too.

Take a tour of the V15’s flanks and you’ll find a 5Gbits/sec USB-A port and a 3.5mm audio jack on the right. Meanwhile the left houses two more USB-A and one USB-C 4.0 port, the latter supporting DP Alt Mode video and PD charging, along with a drop-jaw Gigabit Ethernet jack, DC power jack and HDMI 2.1 video output. There’s no memory card slot, though, which is a minor inconvenience.

Getting into the V15 is a straightforward operation, which can be achieved with a Philips rather than a Torx screwdriver. Once inside, you can easily access the two SODIMM slots and twin 2280 M.2 SSD mounts; in my review unit, one of each was empty. Both fan vents are in plain view if they need a blow-out, and the battery is easy to remove. All gaming laptops should be this easy to work on and upgrade.

Wireless communications are handled by a MediaTek MT7921 card, which supports 2.5GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1 – it’s hardly the latest word on either front, but you’ll get no better at this price level. The same is true of the 512GB Kingston SSD, which produced mediocre sequential read and write speeds of 3,069MB/s and 2,001MB/s respectively.

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Acer Nitro V15 review: Keyboard, touchpad and webcam

• Solid keyboard with numeric keypad
• Fn-lock only via BIOS
• The 720p webcam is noisy but bright

The keyboard isn’t particularly in keeping with the gaming aesthetic, so you have to make do with a basic white backlight and without the plastic highlight that surrounds the WASD keys on regular Nitro laptops.

There are, however, plenty of positives here. The keyboard deck is reassuringly solid, the typing action pleasant and the keycap graphics highly legible with the backlight on or off. It’s also a usefully expansive keyboard with a compact numeric keypad to the right, dedicated CoPilot and Nitro Sense buttons and full-sized left/right cursor keys. The 120 x 80mm plastic touchpad is accurate, positive and quiet, which is all I ask for.

The only minor annoyance with the keyboard – and it’s typical of Acer – is that there’s no Fn lock on the keyboard. To put the function keys into Media mode, which is how I like them, you need to access the BIOS. This is easy enough to do, but still a bit of a palaver and it means you can’t quickly switch between the two modes if you need to.

The 720p webcam won’t win any awards for quality either, but at least images look well lit across a variety of lighting conditions. The camera also comes with Windows Studio Effects – background blur, eye contact and automatic framing features – which I didn’t expect.

The camera isn’t an IR model, though, ruling out facial recognition as a means of unlocking the laptop, and there’s no fingerprint scanner, either.

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Acer Nitro V15 review: Display and audio

• Drab screen
• Decent motion handling
• Loud and surprisingly tuneful speakers

The RTX 3050 Nitro V15 comes with a cheap 144Hz AU Optronics IPS display, and it’s not great. Peak brightness is a mediocre 236cd/m2 and it looks pretty dull as well.

In testing, I found it was able to reproduce only 58.6% of the sRGB colour space, which equates to a mere 41.5% of DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB.

With so little colour available, accuracy is also low. The Delta E vs the sRGB profile comes in at an average score of 4, which is considerably worse than most laptop screens I’ve tested recently. Viewing angles are wide, though, and motion fidelity is good, with ghosting and blurring both on the low side.

For gaming indoors, the screen is generally acceptable but Returnal, in particular, looked rather washed out and, away from gaming, videos can look wan and lifeless. Here is where the V15’s budget nature is more obvious.

The 2 x 2W audio system buried inside the V15, on the other hand, sounds great. To start with, there’s volume aplenty with a peak output of 78.5dBA measured against a pink noise source at 1m, and there’s nary a hint of distortion at maximum volume.

The sound is full and well balanced with good levels of detail and separation, all underpinned with a reasonably firm and solid foundation of bass. I’ve heard much worse from much more expensive laptops. On this front, the V15 has genuinely impressed me.

Acer Nitro V15 review: Performance and battery life

• Solid AAA gaming performance
• Fans are loud in Performance mode
• Good battery life

In its original guise, the mobile version of the RTX 3050 GPU was hampered by having only 4GB of VRAM, but since February of this year it’s been available with 6GB. So, despite the relatively low 65W TGP and the age of the basic design (it was launched in early 2021), the RTX 3050 makes a very good case for itself inside the V15, even when faced with the latest games.

If the GPU is a little long in the tooth, the 6-core 4.55GHz AMD Ryzen 5 7535HS is more up to date, having been released in March 2023. A handy blend of performance and efficiency, it comes paired with AMD’s Radeon 660M integrated GPU, which gives the system a decent level of graphics performance if the services of the Nvidia GPU are not required.

In our 4K multimedia benchmark, the Acer Nitro V15 scored 267, which is a healthy result and well clear of the 200 level at which talk of system performance becomes more or less moot. At that level, a laptop will do pretty much anything you ask of it and do it quite quickly.

In the Cinebench R23 multicore CPU test the V15 scored 10,204, putting it on a par with laptops with an 8-core Intel Core i5-12450H or Apple M3 CPU inside, proving that core count isn’t everything.

The Nvidia GPU did a sterling service running Cyberpunk 2077 at 40fps and Returnal at 54fps, both at the highest detail levels with no upscaling and no ray-tracing. The less demanding Wolfenstein Youngblood ran at 73fps with ray-tracing and the highest detail levels enabled.

Rounding out the graphics tests, the Nitro V15 returned an average 59fps from Metro Exodus with the help of DLSS, a demanding game at even low levels because ray-tracing is always on. The SPECviewperf 3dsmax 3D modelling test ran at a similar 52fps.

By opting for an RTX 30-series GPU you’ll be forgoing the latest Frame Generation tech which is restricted to RTX 40-series cards, given the big price difference between the RTX 3050 and RTX 4050 models of the Nitro V15, I reckon the entry-level models more than deserve their spurs.

Before I stop talking about graphics performance, it’s worth noting that the V15 doesn’t have a MUX switch. If you want to get the best performance out of it, you need to put the laptop into Performance mode using the Nitro Sense software. This quickly runs the fans up to full speed, where they make a fair old racket – 54.5dBA according to my sound meter, measured from 1m.

At least the cooling system works. After prolonged stress testing, the internal temperature never topped 67℃, while the external casing didn’t get above what I’d describe as warm. And even after six hours of running flat out, the GPU continued to run at 100% while the CPU levelled out at 77%, which bodes well for prolonged gaming sessions.

Thanks to a paltry 58Wh capacity I was expecting a poor showing when it came to battery life, but the V15 almost managed to hit the ten-hour mark in our video rundown test, which is a superb showing for a budget gamer and proof of just how efficient AMD’s Zen 3+ architecture is.

Acer Nitro V15 review: Verdict

The RTX 3050 Acer Nitro V15 represents good value at Acer’s RRP of £799, but at £749 it’s even more of a bargain. The only real weak spot is the display, which is rather low rent, especially when the screen on the similarly priced Lenovo LOQ 15IAX9I is much better. However, the LOQ struggles with AAA games whereas the V15 doesn’t.

And that’s the key thing. Despite the low price, the V15 is still a genuinely competent gaming laptop with a fine keyboard, excellent upgrade options and surprisingly long battery life. It’s also well made and pretty stylish, and if you want something substantially better, you’ll have to pay a lot more. That’s a testament to the underlying value of the Acer Nitro V15 and why I recommend it so highly.