Acer Nitro V15 (2025) review

The budget gaming laptop sector is booming, as the CPU and GPU gains of the last few years are trickling down nicely and you can get a very fast frame rate at 1080p for a lot less than you’d pay for something like an Alienware 18 Area-51. You’re not getting quite the same level of GPU power or build quality either, but a cheaper laptop like the Acer Nitro V15 can still produce the goods. And the heat. And the noise.

Acer has taken a trip back in time for the V15, with the model sent to PCG for review sporting a Core i7 13620H processor. That’s a Raptor Lake chip with ten cores split between four P-cores and six E-cores for 16 simultaneous software threads thanks to the 13th Gen coming before the death of P-core Hyper-Threading. It’s a chip from 2023, but its max turbo frequency of 4.9 GHz means it’s still competitive, even if it puts out a lot of heat and drives the Nitro’s cooling system crazy.

The heat production, and the attendant spinning of the fans, is one of the drawbacks that the comparatively cool-running Core Ultra chips have partly solved. This chip feels like a throwback to the old days of gaming laptops that would come close to the edge of combustion while rendering your frames.

Put the machine into Turbo mode, and you’re going to want to do that just to eke every drop of power out of it to feed the relentless hunger of the 165 Hz screen, and you’ll shortly know about it. The CPU’s max operating temperature is 100 °C, and it reached it while running a gaming benchmark in testing. It’s not going to be a problem for the chip, which will happily run at the kind of temperatures more commonly encountered in a nice hot cup of tea, but you’re also not going to get any more out of it. It’s done.

The Acer Nitro V15 is a bit of a chunky beast, though as an old-school 15.6-inch gaming laptop you shouldn’t go in expecting a svelte ultrabook. The casing is black, the Nitro logo looks like that of a heavy metal band, and there's a pattern of lines across the lid that’s actually kinda nice. The keyboard lights up in orange, which matches the copper (or at least copper coloured) fins of the cooling system you can see through the casing grilles. There's a couple of little rubber feet underneath to lift them clear of your desk.

It’s a plastic casing over a metal frame and the whole thing, at more than 2.1kg (4 lbs 10.4 oz), is pushing on the boundaries of true portability, but it’s more at home on a desk than on your lap anyway. There's a full-size HDMI port so you can hook it up to an external screen.

And you might want to. There's good and bad in the Nitro’s display. It’s a 165 Hz 1080p IPS that’s a good match to the RTX 5060 GPU in terms of resolution and frame rate, but when interrogated with a colourimeter could only produce 66% of the common sRGB colour gamut, and just 50% of the DCI-P3 wide colour system preferred by serious people with thick-framed glasses who make ‘cinema’. As such it can look washed-out, and you’re not going to be getting the same kind of colour vibrancy out of the screen as from one of the better IPS screens or (of course) an OLED.

The maximum brightness of 300 nits isn’t bad, though—there are certainly less bright screens out there. Other corners have been cut too: the RAM is DDR4 rather than 5, and the SSD transfers at acceptable speeds for a PCIe 4.0 drive, but is nothing special. At least it’s 1 TB in the review model, though there are Nitros out there with 512 GB drives.

When it comes to playing games, the 1080p screen turns out to be an asset. Turn on the RTX 5060’s party tricks—DLSS upscaling and 2x Multi Frame Generation—in Cyberpunk 2077 and you’re looking at almost 80 fps. Increase the MFG to 4x and it’ll do over 140 fps, and that’s at the Ray Tracing Ultra setting.

Moving on, we’re looking at 48 fps in Baldur’s Gate 3 (easily boostable with a little DLSS), 60 fps in Black Myth: Wukong, close to the same in Metro Exodus with ray-tracing, and a CPU rendering result in the exhaustive Cinebench 2024 tests, which regularly reduce processors to quivering piles of sand, that beats the Core Ultra 9 in the Acer Predator Triton 14 AI. For a cheap machine, it’s a surprisingly competent showing.

There's more to a gaming laptop than just its performance, however. The Nitro has quite a nice keyboard, but the built-in speakers produced some dreadful crackling that, if it wasn’t just the review sample, will have gamers reaching for some wireless cans or a headset—never a bad idea with a laptop anyway. There's a single USB-C port, which hits the giddy heights of USB4, as well as three USB 3.2 Type-A sockets, so there's a lot of connectivity on offer. Wi-Fi is version 6E, which is good enough, and there's an Ethernet port for those who prefer to remain tethered to a router. You can’t charge through the Type-C port, instead using a dedicated brick with a simply enormous tip that you’ll have to find room for in your bag as the battery life while gaming is only two hours, though it can stretch to more than six if you’re just using it for watching videos.

Which brings us to the vexed question of value. The Nitro has an almost identical setup to the Gigabyte Gaming A16, right down to the 85 W GPU, but Gigabyte’s machine comes with more RAM and has a 16:10 IPS screen for just a tiny bit more money. The Asus TUF A14 costs a fair chunk more for a smaller, lighter machine with a higher resolution and a 5060 that goes all the way to 110 W. The Nitro is a serious machine that’s found a way to provide high frame rates for a relatively low cost, and that needs to be celebrated, even if you might not be able to hear yourself partying over the noise of its fans.