Acer Nitro 14 review: Proof that gaming laptops don’t have to bankrupt you

The Acer Nitro 14 is a gaming laptop that’s all about value. I have a soft spot for this type of laptop: Expensive gaming laptops are impressive, but you don’t have to spend a lot of money for a great gaming experience. There’s something beautiful about any laptop that delivers solid performance at a low price. But you’ll have to accept some compromises to keep the price down.

Further reading: Best gaming laptops 2024: What to look for and highest-rated models

Acer Nitro 14: Specs

The Acer Nitro 14 includes an eight-core AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS CPU. AMD launched the Ryzen 8000 CPUs back in December 2023. It’s not one of AMD’s latest Ryzen AI CPUs that are just rolling out, but it’s a solid CPU with reasonable gaming performance, as we’ll see in the benchmarks.

The Nitro 14 also includes an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 GPU, 16GB of LPDDR5X memory, and a 512 GB solid-state drive. It’s a reasonable package for gaming on a budget, but Acer doesn’t provide any configuration options: This is the one hardware configuration available.

Since that’s the case, it’s worth flagging that the 512 GB SSD may be a little on the small side in a world where some games are coming in at over 100 GB each. I prefer having some extra space to work with, as the uninstall-a-game-to-make-room shuffle can get annoying.

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS
• Memory: 16 GB LPDDR5X
• Graphics/GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060
• Display: 14.5-inch 1920×1200 IPS display with 120Hz refresh rate
• Storage: 512 GB PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2 SSD
• Webcam: 720p webcam
• Connectivity: 2x USB Type-C (One USB4 Full Function, one USB 3.2 Gen 2), 2x USB Type-A (USB 3.2 Gen 2), 1x HDMI 2.1, 1x combo headphone jack, 1x microSD card slot, 1x DC power in, 1x Kensington lock slot
• Networking: Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3
• Biometrics: None
• Battery capacity: 76 Watt-hours
• Dimensions: 12.77 x 10.16 x 1.03 inches
• Weight: 4.4 pounds
• MSRP: $1,299 as tested

Acer Nitro 14: Design and build quality

The Acer Nitro 14 has a classic-looking design. This 14.5-inch laptop is all black – except for the silver Nitro logo on the lid and below the screen and the orange plastic fins on the back of the machine. It’s a little chunky, but not hugely so. At 4.4 pounds, it’s on the heavy side compared to some other 14-inch gaming laptop.

This laptop’s chassis is made entirely out of plastic. There are no metal components here, as there are on some more expensive laptops. That’s one of the ways Acer is keeping costs down.

You don’t need the fanciest, most expensive laptop to have a great gaming experience, and this machine proves it.

While plastic doesn’t feel as “premium” to the touch as metal, the build quality feels good and sturdy. There’s no weird flex to the laptop’s chassis. The hinge action is particularly solid and smooth, and it’s easy to open the laptop with a single hand.

The laptop’s cooling system also works well. Hot air is directed out both sides of the laptop, as well as the back. While gaming, the hot air spraying out the sides of the laptop wasn’t particularly intense, and it wasn’t annoying on my mouse hand — a problem that many other gaming laptops do have.

The Acer Nitro 14’s keyboard deck does get a little hot while running intensive games, but not unusually so. However, most of the heat stays in the middle of the keyboard. The WASD area stayed very reasonable to the touch.

Acer Nitro 14: Keyboard and trackpad

The Acer Nitro 14 includes a full-size keyboard with three zones of LED backlighting. Out of the box, the keyboard is configured to animate between different colors, and it looks great if you’re a fan of the rainbow LED gamer aesthetic. (Of course, you can configure the backlight however you like).

Like many other parts of this laptop, the keyboard feels fine. It’s not an unusually snappy keyboard, and you won’t rave about it to anyone. But the keys are responsive. While the action feels mushy, it doesn’t feel bad. It’s fine. It won’t slow you down when typing or gaming. You aren’t going to get the best key feel on a value-focused gaming laptop.

I’m a fan of the full-size arrow keys on the keyboard — no half-height arrow keys here, as you see on many modern laptops. There’s also a dedicated NitroSense key that launches the Acer NitroSense software, where you can change power profiles on the laptop. At the top-left corner of the keyboard, there’s a Turbo button that overclocks the hardware and turns the fans to maximum when you press it. (Also, there’s a Copilot key to open Microsoft’s AI chatbot).

The trackpad on this machine is a good size, and the palm rejection worked well while I was gaming. It’s reasonably smooth to glide your finger over it, but it is made of plastic — a good glass touchpad feels much nicer. I’m not a huge fan of the click-down feeling on the touchpad, which doesn’t feel as crisp and responsive as the ones on some more expensive machines. Like some other aspects of this machine, it’s usable — but not great.

Acer Nitro 14: Display and speakers

The Acer Nitro 14’s display isn’t the highest-resolution or brightest display you’ll find. At 14.5 inches with a 1920×1200 resolution, it’s well paired to provide good gaming performance with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 GPU. The 120Hz refresh rate and 3ms response rate are solid, the colors look good, and the display also uses Nvidia G-Sync to reduce tearing.

It’s a dim display, though. At just 300 nits of brightness, this is unusually dim. When I review a gaming laptop with display with 400 nits of brightness, I note those are on the dim side. This laptop has a display that’s 25 percent dimmer than the average dim screen.

Whether this matters depends on your taste and how you’ll be using the laptop. If there will be sunlight falling on the screen, you’ll definitely notice the low maximum brightness. But if you’ll be using the laptop indoors in a darker room, you may be fine with its brightness.

You’ll find laptops with higher resolution displays, OLED screens, 144Hz or faster refresh rates, and more brightness elsewhere. But they’ll often be more expensive.

The Acer Nitro 14’s display doesn’t look bad. It’s perfectly serviceable. But if you’re considering spending more money on a gaming laptop, you can get a laptop with a better display.

The integrated speakers are nothing to write home about. There’s a real lack of bass — laptop speakers in general lack bass, but these really do. They don’t get particularly loud, but they do get loud enough. They don’t have notably crisp audio or a wide soundstage. But they’re here, and they worked, and I happily gamed with them. At this price point, that’s fine — especially since most gamers will prefer plugging in a headset or external speakers, anyway.

Acer Nitro 14: Webcam, microphone, biometrics

The Acer Nitro 14’s webcam is a compromise. It’s a 720p webcam, so it looks noticeably grainy compared to the 1080p webcams that are becoming standard on many modern laptops. It works, but this isn’t the ideal machine for video conferencing — although you can always plug in a USB webcam, if you like. This machine does come with Windows Studio Effects, a package of AI effects with features like blurring your background and forcing eye contact, which is nice.

The three-microphone array also doesn’t sound particularly impressive, despite the AI-based “Acer Purified Voice” technology. It did a good job of picking up my voice, but it wasn’t with the highest sound quality. I recommend an external headset or USB microphone, especially for voice chatting while gaming — but that’s a good idea on any gaming laptop, anyway. Both the microphone and webcam are certainly usable in a pinch.

The Acer Nitro 14 also doesn’t include any biometric hardware. You won’t be able to sign in with your fingerprint or facial recognition. You’ll be entering a PIN or typing your password instead. It would be more convenient to have at least one biometric option for Windows Hello.

Acer Nitro 14: Connectivity

The Acer Nitro 14 features a decent selection of ports. On the left side, it provides a USB Type-C port (USB4 Full function), a USB Type-A port (USB 3.2 Gen 2), a combo audio jack, a DC power-in jack, and a Kensington lock slot.

On the right side, the Nitro includes a USB Type-C port (USB 3.2 Gen 2), a USB Type-A port (USB 3.2 Gen 2), an HDMI 2.1 port, and a microSD card slot.

That’s a good selection of ports, complete with two USB-C ports and two USB-A ports, one of each on each side. Some budget gaming laptops would have cut a few of these ports to save some money. The only thing potentially missing is an Ethernet port for wired networking, but of course you could use a dongle for that.

For wireless networking, this laptop provides Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. The Wi-Fi worked well — and, while it would be nice to see Wi-Fi 7, this laptop is right at a cutoff point. The next generation of laptops look like they’ll have it as a standard feature. For the price, the lack of Wi-Fi 7 hardware is totally understandable. You probably won’t have a Wi-Fi 7 router yet, anyway.

Acer Nitro 14: Performance

The Acer Nitro 14 delivered solid gaming performance with its AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS CPU, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 GPU, and 16 GB of RAM. The cooling system did a good job, with the laptop’s keyboard staying a reasonable temperature – especially around the WASD keys.

As always, we ran the Acer Nitro 14 through our standard benchmarks to see how it performs.

First, we run PCMark 10 to get an idea of overall system performance. While this benchmark is designed to measure performance holistically, the CPU’s performance is a huge factor.

With a PCMark 10 overall score of 7,961, the Acer Nitro 14 exceeded similarly spec’d laptops we compared it to on this benchmark, including the HP Omen Transcend 14 and Alienware m16 R2.

Next, we run Cinebench R20. This is a heavily multithreaded benchmark that focuses on overall CPU performance. It’s a quick benchmark, so cooling under extended workloads isn’t a factor. But, since it’s heavily multithreaded, CPUs with more cores have a huge advantage.

The Acer Nitro 14 achieved a score of 6,771 on the multithreaded Cinebench R20 benchmark. That’s a good score and exceeded most of the other PCs we compared it to here. The Alienware m16 R2, with its Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU, did beat it. That’s no surprise as that Intel CPU has 16 cores, while this AMD CPU has eight cores.

We also run an encode with Handbrake. This is another heavily multithreaded benchmark, but it runs over an extended period. This demands the laptop’s cooling kick in, and many laptops will throttle and slow down under load.

The Acer Nitro 14 finished the encode process in 863 seconds, or just under 14 and a half minutes. That was a better score than most other laptops we compared it to – though, again, the Alienware m16 R2 pulled ahead. (That machine is 50 percent more expensive than the Acer laptop here, though).

Next, we run graphical benchmarks. First, we run 3Dmark Time Spy, a graphical benchmark that focuses on GPU performance. With a score of 9,484, the Acer Nitro 14 again delivered excellent performance even compared to other RTX 4060-powered laptops. It was exceeded only by a laptop with a more expensive RTX 4070 GPU.

After that, we run the benchmarks built into a few games. First, we use the built-in benchmark in Shadow of the Tomb Raider to test all the gaming laptops we review. It’s an older game, but it’s a great way to compare graphical performance across different PCs.

With an average of 118 frames per second in the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark, the Acer Nitro 14 again delivered excellent performance – especially for a laptop with RTX 4060 graphics.

Finally, we run the built-in benchmark in Metro Exodus. This is a more demanding game, and we set the benchmark to 1080p resolution at the Extreme detail setting.

The Acer Nitro 14 delivered an excellent score of 37 frames per second in the benchmark. Again, that’s on the high end compared to other RTX 4060-powered laptops.

Overall, the Acer Nitro 14 delivers excellent performance in games – especially for the price. The CPU performs well, and this laptop gets a lot of performance from its RTX 4060. With a little extra thickness, this machine likely has the thermal room to push the hardware harder. Naturally, you will see better performance on laptops with higher-end GPUs like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 and 4080, but those will cost you extra.

Acer Nitro 14: Battery life

The Acer Nitro 14 includes a 76 Watt-hour battery. You can find gaming laptops with larger batteries, but they’ll add some weight — and cost.

To benchmark the battery life, we play a 4K copy of Tears of Steel on repeat in the Movies & TV app on Windows 11 with airplane mode enabled until the laptop suspends itself. We set the screen to 250 nits of brightness for our battery benchmarks. This is a best-case scenario for any laptop since local video playback is so efficient, and real battery life in day-to-day use is always going to be less than this.

The Acer Nitro 14 lasted an average of 531 minutes in our standard battery life benchmark. That’s nearly nine hours. It’s more runtime than the other laptops we’re comparing it against: AMD CPUs tend to get better battery life than similar Intel CPUs, in my experience. Perhaps that will change with Intel’s Lunar Lake hardware.

Bear in mind that you’ll get substantially less than our benchmarked nine hours of battery life in the real world. You can use this laptop away from an outlet for a few hours, but you won’t get all-workday battery life.

It’s also worth noting that gaming laptops don’t deliver their serious gaming performance unless they’re plugged in, anyway. You’ll want to plug in any gaming laptop when playing anything but the lightest games.

Acer Nitro 14: Conclusion

The Acer Nitro 14 offers great performance for the price. It’s a solid deal compared to other 14-inch gaming laptops with RTX 4060 hardware, like the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 and HP Omen Transcend 14. The Acer Nitro 14 costs hundreds of dollars less than those machines.

I love seeing high-performing budget gaming laptops around the $1,000 mark. You don’t need the fanciest, most expensive laptop to have a great gaming experience, and this machine proves it.

You do have to make some compromises, and you’ll find features like OLED screens, all-metal construction, snappier keyboards, and higher-resolution webcams on more expensive machines. But if your main priorities are speedy gaming performance at a low price, this machine is a good value.