A great 1080p budget gaming laptop with an amazing price

These days, it’s quite a challenge to find a decent budget gaming laptop. Almost all of them come with some severe caveat to the overall design, whether that’s a mismatched screen and GPU, poor battery life, meager RAM capacity, or middling CPU performance. The Acer Nitro V 15 (ANV15-41) very much bucks that trend, though, by sidestepping almost every common gaming laptop hiccup, resulting in a surprisingly capable laptop for the price.

And it’s the price that’s the real driver behind all the love up there in that paragraph, that’s for sure. This edition of the Acer Nitro V 15 is listed at just under $900. For that, you get a radically well-balanced build, including an AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS processor, along with 16GB of DDR5 RAM, and a surprisingly potent Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 GPU, which performs admirably, despite being a 75W unit.

That’s all bundled together with a super smooth 1080p IPS screen with a 165Hz IPS refresh rate, baked into a lovely, simple chassis, giving it an air of balance. It’s a treat to use. It’s not perfect; there are a few flaws in the overall spec sheet that hold it back from perfection, but it’s otherwise the best gaming laptop you can buy at this price.

So who’s the target for this laptop then? Simply put, it’s for gamers looking for a solid machine for an affordable price. There’s enough GPU horsepower for gaming at 1080p, and its general system performance keeps it feeling snappy on the Windows desktop. It’s an ideal machine for a student looking for a machine they can use for study, but which can also play games.

Acer’s already built a name for itself in the laptop world, with decades of experience when it comes to designing them, and the Nitro V 15 is a fine example of that. Whether that’s the simple black plastic metallic finish, the clean beveled edges, or the intricate harmony between the internal components, all backed up by a killer price and minimal bloatware, Acer barely puts a foot wrong with the Nitro V 15.

Over the last month, I’ve pushed the Nitro V 15 to its absolute limits, running it in all manner of different scenarios and benchmarks to really see just how well it ticks in day-to-day life. I really wanted to identify just what you could get for under $1,000, and whether that screen resolution really limits you compared to the weird and wonderful high-res screens you get with so many laptops.

Specs

Acer Nitro V 15 specs:

I’ve had a look at a few of Acer’s gaming laptops over the last few months, particularly the Predator Helios Neo 14, along with the Nitro 14, and I can safely say that the Nitro V 15’s overall spec is remarkably well-balanced (I’m going to keep using this phrase, for good reason), particularly given the price. In the US, it’s available for around $900, and that spec even includes a 1TB SSD, unlike the 500GB drive in my review sample.

In the UK, the specs are almost identical, but you get a 500GB SSD and a price tag of £1,000 inc VAT. However, that SSD is a sticking point here, as 500GB is not a lot of storage in the modern era, when the Stalker 2 system requirements demand 160GB of space. With an OS, plus a couple of programs and benchmarks installed on this machine, I only had 106GB left of my 475GB total available space, which is less than ideal. Still, you can make it work if you’ve got a decent broadband connection, and don’t mind doing the delete and re-download shuffle.

The real beauty of this laptop, though, is the GPU and screen combo. Acer’s paired a 1,920 x 1,080 IPS panel with an RTX 4060, which is a remarkably smart move. Time and time again (even from Acer), we see laptops come with an RTX 4060 and a budget priced, only to be paired with some random 3,072 x 1,920 screen or a 2,560 x 1,600 number instead.

That looks great on the Windows desktop, but the gaming experience at native resolution is seriously poor. You’re not going to hit 60fps with an RTX 4060 at that resolution, let alone the 120-240Hz refresh rates often specified on those panels.

As for the chip at the heart of the Nitro V 15, you get an AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS. It’s an older CPU at this point, launching in 2023, and using the the Zen 3+ architecture, but it still comes with eight cores, 16 threads, and a max clock speed of around 4.75GHz if the cooling allows for it.

I’m going to mention that GPU again as well, just briefly. Yes, it is a good pairing with a 1080p panel, but it’s worth bearing in mind that it’s a slightly lower-powered SKU. You still get the full-fledged core spec (which is similar to the full-sized desktop RTX 4060), along with 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM, but this one has a power limit of just 75W.

That’s quite low for a gaming laptop, with the Nitro 14 featuring a 100W limit and the Predator Helios Neo clocking in at a 120W limit. As a result, clock speeds will suffer, and performance is likely to be slower. Still, this GPU’s support for Nvidia DLSS 3.5 with frame generation will alleviate some of those woes, with large frame rate boosts in games that support it.

Features

This laptop’s screen has a pixel density of 141.21ppi, which is a lot lower than most modern-day laptop equivalents, to be clear. I recently reviewed the $5,000 MSI Titan 18, which has a pixel density well into the 250ppi range by comparison. This means pixels are chunkier on the Acer Nitro V 15 than on a laptop with a smaller or higher-resolution screen.

Here’s the thing, though: at 141.21, this Nitro V 15 has a slightly higher pixel density than a 32-inch 4K monitor, arguably the de facto 4K panel size going into some of the best gaming monitors around. The reality is that this level of clarity is absolutely fine. The big advantage is, of course, that it’s paired with a GPU that can actually handle that resolution, unlike a lot of the other options out there (here’s looking at you, Lenovo Legion Slim 5).

It’s a punchy display too. Colors are vibrant, with plenty of saturation and contrast. The darker tones do struggle a little, but I didn’t notice any screen bleed or artifacting during my time testing. Combine that with a 165Hz refresh rate, and this screen is silky smooth, both on desktop and in games. It lacks true HDR support, but that’s honestly not a massive deal on a laptop at this price.

Screen aside, there’s not a huge amount extra that you get with the Nitro V 15 too, which is perhaps unsurprising given the price. You get a fairly standard membrane backlit keyboard, which feels surprisingly responsive under your fingers, and feels crisp and clean, along with a standard trackpad, an HD webcam, some fairly solid speakers, and that’s it.

As for the warranty (for when the hardware goes wrong), Acer, as standard, covers all parts and labor for up to a year. You get a couple of options with that; you can either pay to ship it in (and Acer will ship it back after repairs), or take it to one of Acer’s certified repair shops littered around the planet. Bear in mind that Acer will ship it back to you for free if you ship it to Acer, but if you drop it off at a repair shop, you will need to collect it yourself.

Design

The Nitro V 15 is, on the whole, a lovely piece of budget laptop design.  It doesn’t look over the top, which is often overlooked these days when it comes to gaming laptops. The chassis is sleek, simple, and elegant. It has a sturdy plastic chassis, but there’s a lovely black satin finish to it that staves off any grubby finger marks.

The Nitro branding is subtle, reminding you that it’s there but not screaming about it, or littered in RGB lighting. The bezel around the screen is slightly thicker than I’d like, but it’s hardly noticeable once you’re using it, and that’s really all there is to it. There are no metal elements, no crazy ventilation systems, nothing. It’s simple, direct, and to the point. Nice work, Acer.

On the port side of the machine, the Nitro V 15 is also really well equipped, which is again surprising given the price. You get three USB-A ports, a single USB-C port (USB 3.2, with Thunderbolt 4), along with a separate power supply, HDMI out, and full-fat Gigabit Ethernet port.

You might think a gaming laptop having an Ethernet port is a given these days, but Acer’s own Predator Helios Neo, coming in at $1,400 doesn’t have one as standard. Otherwise, general connection standards are a little on the older side; there’s Bluetooth 5.0 and Wi-Fi 6, but none of the latest spec here. Again, though, that’s not the end of the world, especially at this price.

Cooling is well handled too. The fans aren’t audaciously loud, even under heavy load, and temps remained stable and consistent throughout testing, without hitting any thermal limits, even in the most CPU and GPU-intensive games.

Another major win is the fact that the DDR5 RAM is supplied in SODIMM format as standard, rather than being soldered to the motherboard, meaning it can be replaced if it fails, or if you fancy moving up to 32GB of DDR5 instead. A

Alongside that, the M.2 SSD can also be swapped out for a far larger capacity, which will be particularly helpful if you’ve picked up the 500GB version, or if you fancy grabbing one of the best gaming SSDs out there for it instead, although be aware this will be limited to PCIe 4.0, so don’t go wasting cash on a 5.0 drive. You’ll need a single-sided stick too. All big wins nonetheless.

Benchmarks

Acer might be touting this as one of its latest AI gaming laptops of choice (who isn’t these days?), but what really matters is that raw performance. Let’s face it, outside of the world of DLSS, the majority of AI performance (for now at least) lies solely in the cloud when it comes to gaming. So, for the moment, let’s disregard the “233 AI TOPS” from that GPU, and any other artificial intelligence shenanigans and focus on the real metrics. Namely, that graphical performance.

Here’s the real joy with this laptop. As I’ve already mentioned, combining a reasonable resolution with this GPU is an absolute power play in the world of modern-day gaming laptops (as wild as that is to say). Just having the opportunity to not stretch a 1,920 x 1,080 resolution over a 2,560 x 1,600 display does wonders for image clarity, and eliminates any of the anti-aliased hubbub necessary to really make it work. Combine it with AI upscaling in the form of DLSS, and immediately you’re on to a winner.

Typically at PCGamesN, we run two sets of gaming benchmarks when testing a laptop such as this one. One set at its native resolution (including Cyberpunk, F1 23, and Total War: Warhammer 3), and one at 1080p. Of course, we no longer need to do that in this case; nonetheless, the results are impressive.

Jump into Total War: Warhammer 3, on the Ultra graphical preset, and you’re greeted with 71fps on average, F1 23 nails 40fps, and Cyberpunk with DLSS 3.5 and AI frame generation enabled sails in with 73fps as well. That’s seriously impressive. It beats out both the Acer Nitro 14 and the Predator Helios Neo 14 I tested earlier this year, both of which cost $400 to $500 more, respectively.

In synthetic testing, using UL’s 3D Mark suite (Timespy and Timespy Extreme), the results are a touch more in favor of those two chunkier laptops, but the Nitro V still puts in a good showing across both, with overall scores of 8,773 and 4,153, respectively.

An educated guess suggests those lower scores occurred due to two reasons, the first of which is the reduced GPU power limit holding the 4060 down at 75W, vs the Neo’s 120W and the Nitro’s 100W (all three laptops feature an RTX 4060), and the second being the slightly older CPU architecture and lower clock speeds in the V 15 (as it’s running a Ryzen 7 7735HS versus the Nitro’s 14’s Ryzen 7 8845HS and the Neo’s Ultra 7 155H). Timespy runs a separate CPU benchmark as part of its run sequence and scores the CPU accordingly, pulling down the overall result with it.

That lower CPU performance also translates into Cinebench R24, with the Nitro V 15 scoring just 688 points in the multi-core benchmark and a meager 90 in the single-core tests. Both figures are lower than any other laptop I’ve tested at PCGamesN this year. Still, despite that, and given the cost, it doesn’t massively impact overall performance, unless you’re running heavily multi-threaded software flat out. As long as the CPU isn’t absolutely hammered under load, its performance is fine, especially in games.

Battery

I wasn’t expecting much from the Nitro V 15’s battery when I initially  its battery specs. This laptop comes with a 59WHr battery internally, and Acer’s packed it with a 135W power adapter too. Still, that lower TDP on the GPU and slower clock speeds on the CPU not only allow the V 15 to keep itself cooler for longer, but also gives it an edge in the world of battery life as well.

Typically I run two rounds of testing when it comes to battery benchmarking, again taking advantage of UL’s PC Mark 10. For this, we use the Gaming Battery test and the Modern Office test. We charge the laptop to full, set the screen brightness to 50%, unplug the unit, and run the benchmark. The laptop will then run through the test series on repeat until it reaches around 3% and begins to hibernate.

The results were surprising. Even with a limited battery capacity, the Nitro scored admirably, sailing in with 99 minutes on the gaming benchmark, beating both the Lenovo Legio Slim 5 and Alienware M16 R2, and a whopping 421 minutes in modern office, supplanting the Neo 14 by 20 minutes, and remarkably, the Nitro 14 by 181 minutes.

Subjectively, the battery never felt like a burden either. Using it as a day-to-day laptop, streaming video content, working on it, and browsing the web, it did manage a full day in the office without much of a struggle.

Price

The Acer Nitro V 15 price is $900 for the ANV15-41-R2MS model, which hits the nail on the head for affordability. This gives it a real competitive edge when you look at the internal hardware. OK, so it’s not quite as dominant in CPU tests, but when it really counts, in games, it delivers some impressive performance, out-competing laptops at 1080p that are considerably more expensive.

Yes, technically you don’t get quite as impressive a screen resolution, but at 140ppi, you’d be hard-pressed to really see much of a difference, unless you’re really headbutting the panel.

Verdict

Understated, minimal, and surprisingly capable, the Acer Nitro V 15 is a great budget gaming laptop. Bizarrely, one of its biggest wins appears to come from someone looking at the budget for this laptop, and saying, “Let’s pair this 1080p screen with a realistic GPU and put an attractive price on it.” You’d think that would be common knowledge and a sensible approach in an industry that’s been established for well over 20 years, and yet here we are, commending a laptop and a company for doing just that.

If you’re looking for a laptop that can play the latest games at 1080p with decent settings, while looking good and keeping cool while it does it, and with a low price, then the Nitro V 15 is absolutely worth buying. If you’re in the US, absolutely go for it; if you’re in the UK, well, definitely keep an eye on it (heck, it might even drop down in price in the Black Friday sales, you never know). Just don’t look to this laptop if you want to render that 18-hour 4K epic you’ve got planned as an unofficial sequel to Pacific Rim; you might be waiting a while.