Acer Nitro V16 Review

Introduction

The Acer Nitro V16 aims to provide a decent gaming laptop option for folks who want to play well at 1080p.

Okay, the Ryzen 7 8845HS processor and RTX 4060 combo may not set the world alight, but they’re respectable internals for a more affordable gaming laptop that actually provides a good experience. Alongside this, you get 16GB of fast DDR5 RAM and a capacious 1TB SSD, as well as a solid 16-inch 1920×1200 165Hz IPS screen.

For the £1099/$1099.99 asking price, that’s quite reasonable, especially as some laptops with the 4060 laptop GPU inside can cost a lot more, such as the MSI Crosshair 16 HX D14V.

I’ve been testing the Nitro V16 for the last few weeks to see how well it performs and if it’s one of the best gaming laptops around.

Design and Keyboard

• Chunkier, plastic frame
• Solid port selection
• Decent keyboard and trackpad

The Nitro V16 has the chunky look and feel of a gaming laptop, with a weighty chassis that totals 2.5kg. That is reasonably light for a large-screen gaming option, and means it is portable than some other equivalent-sized choices.

The chassis here may be plastic, but as a result of its heft, build quality is generally solid with no real flex or creaking. A lot of its thickness is due to dedicated vents and cooling for the internal components.

Being thicker than a lot of ultrabooks has the advantage of giving the Nitro V16 an enviable set of inputs on any laptop, with them split across the left, back, and right sides. On the left, you’ll find a proper Ethernet port, USB-A and headphone jack, while the rear houses a DC-port for charging, full-size HDMI and USB-C. The right side has a second USB-A.

Being a larger laptop means you get a full-size keyboard in a sensible layout, complete with arrow keys, nav cluster and function row. It’s reasonably comfortable to type on, too, and is bestowed with a bright orange backlight, in-keeping with the Nitro theme.

The trackpad is of a decent size too and provides good room for your fingers, while coming with accurate and responsive tracking.

Display and Sound

• Serviceable resolution and smooth refresh rate
• Decent colours but meagre brightness
• Speakers are of typical laptop quality

The Nitro V16 doesn’t necessarily spring any surprises when it comes to display, opting for a tried-and-tested 16-inch IPS screen complete with a 1920×1200 resolution and smooth 165Hz refresh rate for responsive inputs while gaming.

For the most part, it’s a solid display, with reasonably deep blacks out of the box at 0.12 and a passable 890:1 contrast ratio. Peak brightness here hits our 300 nits target, just, at 307.8 nits, meaning you could conceivably take this laptop outside if you wish. 

Going up to peak has the effect of worsening the black level to 0.30, though, while the 7100K colour temperature isn’t all too impressive.

Colours here are fine for mainstream use, with 100% coverage of the mainstream sRGB gamut, while both the Adobe RGB (78%) and DCI-P3 (79%) results are just under the requisite level where you could potentially use the Nitro V16 for more colour-sensitive workloads.

The Nitro V16’s speakers are, as with most laptops these days, downwards-firing, and offer audio that can get plenty loud, but little else, with a thin and hollow sound at times. You’re much better off making use of the headphone jack on the left side.

Performance

• Respectable 1080p gaming performance
• Ray-tracing needs upscaling here
• Decent RAM and speedy SSD config

Inside, the Nitro V16 may not come with cutting-edge parts from AMD or Nvidia for the processor and graphics, but what’s here does the job. For the CPU, we’ve got an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS from 2023 with eight cores, 16 threads and a boost clock of up to 5.1GHz.

In the Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 benchmarks, it provided some decent results against comparably priced gaming laptops with similar chips inside in single core runs, although it lags behind in the multi-threaded tasks against the likes of the Intel Core i7-14700HX that has more than double the total cores.

The RTX 4060 laptop GPU inside helps to provide a decent score in the 3DMark Time Spy test, while in the gaming tests at 1080p. Without any upscaling or ray-tracing, it managed a result of 72.32fps in Cyberpunk 2077 and 70fps in Returnal, which are pretty respectable. Esports titles at 1080p won’t be a problem, with a result of 117fps in Rainbow Six Extraction.

Adding in DLSS with the new Transformer Model in Cyberpunk 2077 pushes the result up to 76.34fps at 1080p, while native-ray-traced 1080p isn’t a strong suit for the Nitro V16 with a 28.93fps average. Adding in DLSS brought this up to 45.85fps, which is a fair bit stronger.

16GB of DDR5 RAM is enough here for mid-range gaming, while the 1TB SSD is decent for storing even a reasonably large games library. It’s decent in terms of speed too, with measured reads and writes of 4987.31 MB/s and 4662.95 MB/s respectively.

Software

• Reasonably clean Windows 11 install
• Acer NitroSense is a useful system app
• ExpressVPN & McAfee pre-installed

The Nitro V16  comes running Windows 11, and as it comes with one of AMD’s Ryzen 8000 series of laptop chips, there is AI functionality baked in. Hence the inclusion of Microsoft’s Copilot key on the bottom row of the keyboard, which acts as a shortcut key for Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant. 

However, that’s as far as the AI powers go, as this laptop doesn’t have enough AI horsepower to be designated as one of Microsoft’s shiny Copilot+ PCs.

There is a range of Acer-specific software pre-installed, such as Acer JumpStart which is essentially a hyperlink to the Acer website, while NitroSense allows you to check on your system’s vitals, fiddle with fan speeds and set different profiles depending on what kind of tasks you’re working on, be it office or gaming workloads.

Apart from this, there’s ExpressVPN and McAfee anti-virus installed as additional programs, should you want or need them.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 5 hours 1 minute in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for half a working day

As for battery life, the Nitro V16 has a decent 59Whr cell inside, although with its proper components and larger display, I didn’t necessarily have the highest hopes for its endurance.

With the brightness set to the requisite 150 nits, the laptop lasted for 5 hours and 1 minute in the PCMark 10 battery test, which is fine, if unremarkable. It means you’ll be spending a lot of time by the mains, although you’ll need to do this anyway to get the most out of the Nitro V16.

Charging it back up again won’t take too long, thanks to the 135W DC charger. With it, I was able to get the Nitro V16 back to half charge in just 25 minutes, while a full charge took 80 minutes.

Should you buy it?

FAQs