The Acer Aspire V 15 Nitro (VN7-591G-70JY) ($1,799.99 as tested) is a midrange gaming laptop that updates the less expensive Acer Aspire V 15 Nitro (VN7-591G-75S2)($999.99 at Buydig) with a new high-resolution 4K display, more storage, and extra RAM. The price has increased accordingly, putting it in the same range as the Editors' Choice MSI GS60 Ghost Pro 3K($2,139.99 at Quill). But how does it stack up with the new hardware and price tag? Not as well as we'd hope.
Design
V 15 Nitro( at Amazon) may carry a midrange price, but from the outside, it looks a whole lot like the entry-level Acer VN7-591G-75S2. The chassis is identical, measuring 0.94 by 15.3 by 10.1 inches (HWD) and weighing 5.3 pounds. It's not as slim and light as the MSI Ghost Pro (0.8-inch thick and 4.4 pounds) or th`e HP Omen 15( at Amazon) (0.8-inch thick and 4.7 pounds), but it is slimmer than the MSI GE62 Apache( at Amazon) (1.14 inches thick and 5.16 pounds). The laptop has an internal metal frame, with a plastic chassis and lid. The lid has the same matte-black color as the chassis, but also has a ridged texture across the lid. The hinge is bare metal, with "Aspire V Nitro" stamped into it.
The 15.6-inch display is an impressive 4K panel with 3,840-by-2,160 resolution. There's no touch capability, but it's a step up from even the 2,880-by-1,620 screen on the MSI Ghost Pro. The screen features In-Plane Switching (IPS) technology to provided bright colors and wide viewing angles, and it has a matte finish that reduces glare and reflection. The audio is equally impressive, with four built-in speakers and Dolby Digital Plus Home Theater surround sound offering plenty of volume and bass with minimal distortion.
The keyboard is the same backlit, chiclet-style model we saw on the Acer VN7-591G-75S2, with red glowing letters and a matte-black finish. There's no adjustment for the intensity or the color of the backlight, but it's still an excellent keyboard, with generous vertical travel, and a pleasantly springy feel. The extra-large touchpad offers great gesture-control support for Windows, but for gaming you'll want a separate gaming mouse.
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Features
This premium version of the Aspire V15 Nitro has the same set of ports and connections as the less expensive model. On the right you'll find three USB 3.0 ports, a full-size HDMI-out port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, and a headset jack. The left side has a Kensington lock slot, while an SD card slot can be found on the front edge of the system. Wireless connections include Bluetooth 4.0 and dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi, though at this price I'd expect to see the faster and more reliable 802.11ac offered.
Inside, the storage is both speedy and spacious, thanks to a 256GB solid-state drive (SSD) paired with a larger 1TB hard drive. The first provides a speedy boot drive, while the second offers spacious storage for all of your games and media.
While most gaming systems in this price range will be relatively free of preinstalled apps and bloatware, Acer does have a few extra apps loaded onto the system. You'll find a handful, like retail apps from Amazon and Ebay, along with more useful apps like Amazon's Kindle Reader, Evernote, and a few other odds and ends. The system also includes Nvidia's GeForce Experience, which provides a single dashboard for installing and updating the drivers for the graphics card, along with several baked-in features, like ShadowPlay, for recording and sharing video during gameplay, GameStream, for use with the Nvidia Shield, and Battery Boost, which offers optimum gameplay and battery life for on-the-go gaming. Acer covers the Aspire Nitro V15 with a one-year warranty.
Performance
The Aspire V 15 Nitro is outfitted with a 2.5GHz Intel Core i7-4710HQ processor—the same CPU used in the HP Omen 15, the MSI Ghost Pro, and the Acer VN7-591G-75S2. Paired with 16GB of RAM, you would expect great performance from the system, but the results in our tests are rather disappointing. In PCMark 8 Work Conventional, the system scored 1,644 points, significantly below the scores of the HP Omen 15 (3,400 points), the MSI Ghost Pro 3K (2,988 points), and the Acer Aspire V 15 Nitro (3,160 points). Cinebench performance was also low, with the Aspire V15 Nitro scoring just 515 points while most other competitors scored 650 points or more. These scores aren't bad—they're well within the range of most gaming systems, and thus well ahead of the average consumer laptop—but they are noticeably lower than the competition.
The system is also equipped with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M with 2GB of dedicated memory. This led to respectable scores in 3DMark Cloud Gate (14,632 points) and FireStrike Extreme (1,760 points). While this produced playable performance in our gaming tests—34 frames per second (fps) in Heaven and 62fps in Valley, both at 1,366-by-768 resolution and Medium-quality settings—it didn't offer the sort of performance you need for 4K gaming. When tested at full 4K resolution, gaming test scores dropped to single digits, which means current games will not only be unplayable at full resolution, it will essentially reduce them to choppy slideshows. Part of this disparity between display capability and performance is the result of the GPU, which is really intended for gaming at 1080p.
The other issue is the display. Even the most expensive gaming rigs are opting for 3K displays instead of 4K, because the resolution of the display currently outstrips the sort of usable performance offered by mobile graphics hardware. The bottom line here is that for the best gaming performance, you'll want to drop the resolution to something closer to 1,920 by 1,080, which means you are probably better off buying a less expensive configuration of the Aspire V 15 Nitro, like the Acer VN7-591G-75S2, our top pick entry-level gaming laptop, which also costs several hundred dollars less.
Finally, there's the issue of battery life. Gaming machines aren't really known for long-lasting batteries to begin with, but the bright 4K display has four times as many pixels as a full HD screen, and that extra power draw shortens things considerably. In our battery rundown test, the V 15 Nitro lasted just 2 hours 54 minutes. The less expensive Acer VN7-591G-75S2, using the same 3-cell battery, lasted 4:10 in the same test, while the HP Omen 15 lasted 4:17. Most other comparison systems fall between the two ends, averaging 3:15.
Conclusion
Often, upgrading a lower-tier product with premium components results in a better end product, but for the Acer Aspire V 15 Nitro (VN7-591G-70JY), that's not the case. The increased RAM and storage capacity is a small change, and most of the higher price is attributable to the new display. The 4K display looks great, but the fact that the gaming hardware can't take advantage of it makes it difficult to justify, and contributes the shorter battery life. If you really want the Acer Aspire V 15 Nitro design, do yourself a favor and stick to the less expensive Acer Aspire V 15 Nitro (VN7-591G-75S2), our Editors' Choice for entry-level gaming laptops, which offers better performance in gaming and longer battery life. If you want something in the same price range with increased performance, consider the midrange gaming Editors' Choice MSI GS60 Ghost Pro 3K, which offers slightly longer battery life and significantly better gaming scores.
Acer's Aspire V 15 Nitro updates an existing 15-inch gaming laptop with a gorgeous 4K display, but it doesn't make up for lackluster performance and short battery life in testing.
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