Battery Life, Pricing, and Conclusion
Battery Life
As you might expect for a machine geared towards gaming, the battery life on the Aspire V Nitro isn't outstanding. In our web browsing benchmark, the Aspire managed to survive for 3 hours and 10 minutes. While obviously not as long as the ultrabook computers we have been looking at as of late, over 3 hours is a at least a decent result for a laptop of these specifications.
Pricing
The version of the Acer Aspire V 15 Nitro Black Edition that we looked at here (VN7-591G-70RT) is availble on Amazon.com for $899 at the time of writing. This doesn't fall into the realm of budget notebooks but for the game performance and general component selection it offers, the pricing is aggressive.
Conclusion
For under $900, the Acer Aspire V 15 Nitro Black Edition seems to be a great option for someone looking for a notebook that is capable of playing games, but won't break the bank. If you're only concerned about gaming on the integrated 1080p panel, or an external display of the same resolution, the Aspire V Nitro will be able to handle just about any game with resonable image quality settings.
The build quality of the Aspire V Nitro is impressive for the price range, and it feels like a machine that seems like it will keep going for serveral years.
While looking at buying one of these notebooks, we would highly reccommend choosing a SKU that includes an SSD or adding your own M.2 SSD after the fact in order to make your day-to-day experience of general productivity and browsing a more enjoyable.
Overall, the Acer Aspire V 15 Nitro Black Edition is a great midrange gaming laptop, and brings tough compeition to sub-$1000 laptop market.
BTW, this laptop uses an IPS
BTW, this laptop uses an IPS panel.
I am **SO** glad that Taiwanese manufacturers have started putting IPS panels into their gaming laptops, rather than continuing to use sub-par TN panels with horrible color, contrast, and viewing angles in an attempt to save $20.
IPS contrast is pretty bad as
IPS contrast is pretty bad as well, I’m yet to see a single one much above 1000:1.
Yes and no.
The viewing angle
Yes and no.
The viewing angle affects contrast as well. As per Wikipedia:
“Luminance, contrast and chromaticity of LCD-screens is usually varying with the direction of observation (i.e. viewing direction).”
So the 1000:1 for most TN panels on laptops is only specific to looking at the monitor dead center at 90 degrees to the screen. Even a 5 degree offset horizontally or vertically reduces contrast noticeably.
Sometimes it seems like the
Sometimes it seems like the only reason TN exists is to make IPS look good by comparison.
You’re right, but the problem is that even the reliable 1000:1 you get from IPS is still terrible. VA panels are a bit better in theory, but also suffer from off-center contrast loss. We desperately need to move away from LCDs; literally every other display tech has delivered far better contrast (and image quality overall) – OLED, plasma, even CRT.
Ye, like democracy… IPS is
Ye, like democracy… IPS is bad, but its LIGHTYEARS better than anything else we have. Certainly makes TN look like a jar filled with liquid SHIT.
You can always buy an SSD if
You can always buy an SSD if it doesn’t come with it. That’s what I did with my Acer laptop and it came out cheaper so that’s no biggie.
If only the author had
If only the author had thought of that. Oh, wait, they did! Protip: read the article before commenting.
That’s your expectation.
That’s your expectation. This is an open forum and the fact that a comment mirrors the article doesn’t detract from the validity of the comment. The comment is ironically far more “on-point” than yours.
Someone is having a bad day.
Someone is having a bad day.
Protip don’t be a douche. I
Protip don’t be a douche. I did read the entire article and I mentioned it because he put it as a sort of downside to this laptop and I followed up with that telling my experience.
The comment *in the article*
The comment *in the article* is on the first page. Anyone reading down to the comments would have already seen the point brought up in the article and in a more meaningful context.
Converse to your comment, my comment was imformative as it would let anyone know who read the comments that your comment wasn’t insightful in the least and was addressed inside the article itself.
Protip, don’t post as AC if you want to be taken seriously.
Why do so many new laptops
Why do so many new laptops with Haswell CPUs while Broadwell is out?
In this case, they use
In this case, they use Haswell because it’s a cheaper CPU than the equivalent Broadwell part.
Acer is clearly designing a laptop to try and hit the lowest possible price point for a decent gaming laptop. So paying an extra $40 – $50 for a Broadwell CPU (that will not have any difference in gaming performance) wouldn’t make sense.
In addition, they are probably re-using an existing motherboard design they created for Haswell. So they don’t need to spend any extra time & money engineering a Broadwell-based motherboard.
If they went with Broadwell, they’d probably have a 15″ Broadwell laptop with a GeForce 960M, that would sell for around $1100 – $1300. And laptops with those specs are already a dime-a-dozen. But a laptop <$1000 with a 960M? There arne't too many of those on the market.
Why wasn’t this given any
Why wasn’t this given any kind of award?
Tight Budget Low End Gaming
Tight Budget Low End Gaming Notebook Award?
Impressive one for the price!
Impressive one for the price! Sounds like a good value for money and reasonable price to performance ratio !