Design and Blueprint As soon as you open the plane black packaging of the Acer Nitro 5 Spin and remove the covers, the gaming notebook screams for attention. It demands you to fall in love with it and to do that it is ready to woo you at every stage. We for one, took it slow, but to tell you the truth it did grow on us quite quickly. Acer Nitro 5 Spin is not like the usual gaming laptops you get in the Indian market, instead it is much lighter than other machines of the same configuration. More on that a few paras down. From factor is where this portable gaming rig gets full marks. Acer has designed it perfectly in most aspects. The touch screen is placed well in between a black bezel, the keyboard is large and is backlit, the sides have maroon lining which can also be seen on the hinges and around the keyboard. Then there is a nicely placed keypad and to top it off a 360 degree rotating touch display. Well, those things do get us racing, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. The sides also sport couple of USB 3.0 ports, a mini USB type C port, an HDMI jack, card reader and a 3.5mm audio port. In case you want to use it like a large tablet acer has provided a nice power button with volume rocker keys on the right side, these can be accessed easily. All this in under 2.2 Kg. Performance Let’s start with the configuration. The Acer Nitro 5 Spin comes in a few specs starting with Intel Core i5 8th gen, however the one we are reviewing is the top of the line with Intel Core i7 8th gen CPU with clock speed of 1.8 GHz and turbo boost. It has 8 GB of RAM and comes with dual storage drives. One SSD with 256 GB capacity (primary boot drive) and a secondary 1 TB 2.5 HDD, so together they make sure you get best performance and have lot of space at the same time. The IPS display is 15.6-inches wide and supports full HD 1080p graphics. Talking about which, the graphics are powered by a NVIDA Geforce 1050 GTX graphic card that kicks in beautifully and makes sure all the latest games run at high, if not ultra-high settings. To test the performance further we ran PC Mark 8 home test on it and it scored a nice 3,627 points. On 3D Mark Sky Diver test it scored 6,286 points. Both, put the Acer Nitro 5 Spin in the higher order of gaming laptops in India. The battery life is exquisite and we were able to extract 6 hours of it with mixed usage of watching movies, playing a game or two and listening to music. This machine amazed us at many steps, till we saw the smudges on the top side of the panel and the screen. It is a touch screen device so these are meant to be there, but they do really show when the lights are dim and are distracting. Our suggestion is to keep a cleaning cloth handy in the carry case of backpack. Also, while playing games on it for long we found that the right side of the keyboard did get a little hot and the fan gets really loud. Oh yes, loudness reminds us that the twin speaker system is quite loud too, this time in a good way. For movie and casual gaming, it is really good, however when playing games like Counter Strike we trusted our good old headphones. Verdict and Final Thoughts The backlit keyboard is a blessing when you are gaming at night. The full length keyboard is also great for strategy games where you need to use more keys. Combine this with a great pair of headphones and a gaming mouse, you have a winning combination at LAN events or game nights with friends. At a price of Rs 91,989 the Acer Nitro 5 Spin might be out of reach of many. But, if you can afford it, we give it a thumbs up.
