New Acer Aspire V Nitro series

That's bugging me, too.But you can solve that with a Bluetooth mouse. Plus the ports are on the right back side, which is slightly better than them being right front.

And so far that seems to be the only disadvantage. The cooling may not be great, but which thin NB does have great cooling at all? There is only the choice between bad and worse, IMHO.

 

I think you guys are a bit too critical of the cooling - there's not such thing as great cooling in a slim laptop with a 45W CPU in it.
Considering temps quoted above that were achieved with Prime and FurMark running (which is more than you'll ever get while gaming) cooling has to be described as -at the very least - adequate. There's no reason to consider it a disadvantage even if you fail to compare it to MSI or even Y50.

Personally I'm a bit annoyed by the port placement and I'm not sure about the battery life - no one has quoted max battery life so far (with dim screen and power-saving mode).
When I need to squeeze as much as I can from the battery I don't mind a dim screen or slightly limited performance but when I do need those 6 hours - I really do. It's not the matter or 4 is enough, unfortunately.

 

I am considering 15" version and comparable msi gs60. Can I expect same gaming performance by these two? I saw some 3Dmark 11 where acer scored 1500 points less than msi (I guess that was because of higher resolution). Which one has better cooling?
Thank you!

 

well, what model of the GS60 do you mean exactly? if we are talking about the variant with GTX860M: choose the Acer without hesitation. the MSI uses the older Kepler-chip, which is roughly 10% slower than the Maxwell of the VN7-591G. plus the GS60 has a very bad reputation for its poor cooling and high temperatures (need a cooking plate?).

the GS60 with GTX870M is surely faster, but this thing gets REALLY hot:
MSI GS60 Ghost Pro 3K Edition (2PEWi716SR21) Notebook Review - NotebookCheck.net Reviews

either wait until the end of this week, when the new Maxwell-high-end-crads of NV will be revealed and see, what the NB-manufactuerers will say about new models. or go plain for the Acer.

@downloads: well, maybe my post sounded a bit too harsh. I meant it similar like you. keeping in mind the dimension of the Acer, they did a okay good on cooling, IMHO. not great, though I don't know, if copper heatsinks like in the Y50 would have improved the cooling so much, but still reasonable well.
for me, battery is not a great thing, but the port placement is subpar. well, I will have to see.

 

This MSI has a "pointless" cooler. Why two-way exhaust? It decrease the airflow on the cooling grills and produce more noise. Simple one-way blowers would do the job better. IMO. Big guys never uses two way exhausts for a reason.

Acer still have better cooling in theory, but it can't maintain turbo on the CPU after an hour. I've seen this behaviour on other Acer notebooks as well. I remember the Throttling king blue TimelineX series...

 

were did you get the info on the throtteling of the Acer from? haven't read anything like that so far. so sources would be nice.

 

Hi Folks,
I am awfully tempted to replace my wonderful, but aging, 3820TG with this little guy, but I am worried about one possible major flaw (for the use I want to make of it). I tried to search in few places but nowhere can I find the answer.
I am doing a lot of video editing, and will upgrade to 4k videos very soon. I do not ask for a 4k panel on this machine, but at least I would like being able to connect it to a 4k panel/TV at 50HZ or above. I don't see any display port output, so please tell me that the HdMI is 2.0. Please tell me they did not release a gamer machine that cannot handle 4k movies because they forgot to add the right output connectors

 

Answer for Q1: A got this notebook for a customer and he let me play with it for a weekend. CPU Turbo was active for about 50 minutes then it goes to base clock. After 2 hours it was hitting 95-97°C on the CPU, then it throttled down to 1.2GHz so temp went down to around 90°C. After that base clock again, and every 5 minutes it drops to 1.2GHz by the high temp. Tested with real life gaming scenario, not prime and furmark stuff.

Answer for Q2: There's no external 4K support on this machine. No DisplayPort and no HDMI 2.0.

 

Unboxing vid here: Acer Aspire V Nitro Black Edition unboxing kicso…: http://youtu.be/agZ4nMZNvE8

 

And had this been posted? Kinda think ive seen it before:

https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&s...bSPHTx5xpsGZX5vfQ&sig2=NQIomPv2lF3y68r2Hv-TgA

Edit: sorry just standard, not black edition...

 

Sorry, I'm a bit unfamiliar with laptops. For your answer to question one, is that a good thing or a bad thing, and is it normal?

As for question two, can I use an external monitor at all with this machine, and if so how many? I only plan on using 1080p.

 

@Kirrr
Can you please share 3Dmark score and how many fps did you got in the games you played? Would you recomend this laptop?

 

uh! that doesn't sound good. think of it as a feature: Acer wants you to take brake every hour ... X-D

but now seriously: pretty bad. and it shouldn't be that hot in your region anymore, I guess. in summer, okay. but now in fall? if that stays true, it's a quite hefty flaw. did you had your hands on other NBs as well? Y50 and the like?

 

One person is getting completely different results from another - great. 265 posts and all we have is confusion
Hopefully notebookcheck will test this notebook soon - they use the same test procedure every time so at least that will be comparable to other tests they made.

At this point we're at either "OK" or "complete crap" depending on whose story is true

 

i'm getting mine tomorrow! i hope they dont mess something up when installing ssd and ram and that acer didnt disable virtualization.
i dont think that cooling will be a problem, i cant think of anything that can use 100% CPU for 1-2-3 hours that i do. virtual machines that i run and casual gaming shouldnt use more than 50-70% continuously. silence when browsing is more important to me, and as i heard it doesnt make any noise doing light stuff, unlike MSI GS60.
I got 8GB RAM + 1TB HDD with 8GB SSD configuration and changed that to 16GB Kingston HyperX Impact and Samsung EVO 1TB SSD.
i can run some tests if you want, just me tell which ones.

 

I'm getting mine in a few days, but the high temperature + throttling after a couple of hours of gaming seems troubling.

If possible, could you run Open Hardware Monitor with graph plotting enabled for CPU load, CPU temperature, and CPU clock - while playing a game that stresses the system for a couple of hours?

I'd like to see what kind of temperature it hits and whether it throttles under normal gaming circumstances.

EDIT: Open Hardware Monitor: http://openhardwaremonitor.org/

 

the reason why msi had two way exhaust is to have extra heat sinks on the fan, which are the actual part that dissipate heat out of the machine.
the "big guys" you are talking about have much thicker chassis, therefore allowing a much larger heat sink, so they don't need a two way exhaust.

and in theory gs60 has better cooling than this, you are comparing 2 heat pipes vs 4 and 2 medium heat sinks vs 2 medium + 2 small. the only place gs60 cuts short is smaller fans.

gs60 with the 870m is ridiculous, but with 860m it wasn't much of a problem

 

but the Maxwell chip will help the GS60 very much, I think.

 

I agree with this completely. I still need to spend more time with it but I'm pretty satisfied with the GS60 cooling so far. The only gripe is the 870M could have used a bigger fan, but they ran out of space. I'm not sure how else they could have done it though - there's a lot of stuff crammed in there. Even with the 870M, my max GPU temp so far is 93°C and the heat is isolated to the back left corner. That's where the passive vents on the top and bottom help things out.

Yes it will. If I didn't get the open box deal that I did, I would have waited for the refresh with the 970M.

 

I don't have the machine anymore, its sitting on its owners desk 300+ km away from me. I played Watch Dogs, Battlefield 3 on it. Throttling under WD but not under BF3. However it never throttled the GPU! Only the cpu as a usual Acer.
The owner enjoys it, thats all. I wouldn't bought that thing...

Interesting that the guyz from Razer could solve the cooling in a thinner case much more better. And please don't come with the price...

 

For Germans,
Test Acer Aspire VN7-791G-759Q (Black Edition) - Das leistungsstarke Gaming-Notebook mit Nitro im Blut

Maybe someone wants to translate some parts of it, would be so great. Google translate is not my friend....

Will leave it, but realised it is for the 17", stupid me.

 

we already had this and I did a short summary.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/acer/759420-new-acer-aspire-v-nitro-series-22.html#post9771348

 

This sounds very good, thanks for the information. I'm not too familiar with laptops - is throttling on battery a big deal for non-gaming purposes? I will only be gaming when plugged in, but I want it to function well on battery for non-gaming tasks. Thanks!

 

It depends... I like how silent the Nitro is. During the load it is hadly noticeable in an environment with other people. On the other side I had a GS60 and it was like a starting jet plane when I played games.

The CPU can go up to 97°C in relatively short time but outer surface is not hot. For gaming I've created a new power profile without TurboBoost (speed up to 2,5GHz) and then CPU doesn't go beyond 75°C event in games.

Btw in Cinebench R11.5. I have 7,03 pts (multi-threaded) with max performance and 5,6 pts without TurboBoost so It's still faster than dual-core processors.

I chose Nitro instead of GS60 because of far better touchpad (very fast and responsive), better keyboard layout (no Home/End only with Fn), better loudspeakers and silent fans (which are off during the office load). The only thing that is better on GS60 (for me) is the PLS Samsung display instead of IPS LG...

 

How do u create such a profile? My CPU utilization is the most time <50%

 

One method that should work is to go into Power Options, choose the plan you want to change, go to advanced power settings for the plan, find "processor power management" and set "maximum processor state" for "plugged in" to 99% instead of 100%.

 

Now I'am on a corporate laptop, but here in advanced settings just decrease the maximum processor state to (for example) 95%. Anything else than 100% will disable TurboBoost.

 

Ok, thanks. Actually the temps dont bother me, but a cooler CPU dont hurt

Has someone REALLY bad wlan, too?

 

Didn't you fix that?

Now you have had the pc for a while. Do you have any updates on fans, battery and build quality?

And if you could tell the worst and best things with it that we be much appreciated!

 

Got my 15" yesterday, and first impressions are really good. It's a gorgeous machine; light, thin, and powerful. Temperatures seem a bit high under load - 90+ celcius in Watch_Dogs - but I experienced no throttling after playing for about an hour. The CPU seemed to stay at the turbo frequency.

First impression of the screen, though, is not very good. Like Locke mentioned earlier, it has some weird brightness fluctuations near the edges that change when you move your head or the screen. It's like a sort of constant vignette effect that moves when you move. The screen is also a bit matte and dull - like the brightness isn't turned fully up, even though it's at max. I don't know how much of this is down to screen quality, and how much it's just about me having to get used to a new kind of screen.

This could be a big deal breaker for some, though.

 

Like on any new Acer you have to disable the dynamic contrast feature: RMB on desktop -> something like "Graphics preferences" -> Power -> On battery (right-upper corner) -> set Display Power Saving Technology to "off".

Unfortunately Acer has the utility Acer ePower Manager which you have to uninstall (don't worry, it's the only thing it do). Otherwise it will enable the feature every time you plug/unplug the power.

 

I disabled all power saving in the Intel control panel, and uninstalled the Acer power manager and rebooted. No change.

 

First post in here

I received the 17" yesterday. I was looking for a thin 17" laptop with gaming specs but business looks. The most important thing for me is that the PC was light enough to carry around and silent plus good battery life when at school. All these requirements the Acer Nitro is living up to. No fan noise even when it sits in the lap. The battery lasts about 4 hours with light tasks. But that was also with medium brightness and uninstalling(Acer bloatware). The PC is not light but its no way near real gaming laptops like MSI GT/GE or Asus ROG.
I'm also really satisfied with the design of the laptop.

The only cons i see right now is:
Dat touchpad. Holy mother! It's almost unusable. But i use a mouse all the time anyways.
The brightness of the screen is very low. Looking at my friends macbook pro retina almost makes me cry.

And one final notation. I got the idea that there were no usb ports on the left side of the laptop. That is not true. There is two usb 3.0 ports on the left side, so the cables won't be in the way of the mouse.

Well i was just trying to answer some of the questions i was asking myself before i bought the laptop. All in all im very happy with the laptop and it suits my needs perfectly although there are some cons.

Pls let me know if you have any questions

 

KasperA: Try to find and disable the "adaptive brightness" in advanced settings in windows power profiles. It can help on many laptops. I'm not sure if I had to do the same also on my V15 Nitro.

Btw according to what you wrote it looks like you have LG IPS screen as well. It's definitely not as good as PLS one from Samsung which you can find on ASUS N/G 56Jr/550Jk or MSI GE/GS/GT 60. On the other side I perceive it still as a much better one than TN screens on the market.

 

Adaptive Brightness is turned off in the windows power profile, and I can't see any other setting that could be the cause of it.

Yes, it's the LG IPS screen (LGD0443). My previous laptop was an ASUS N53 with a Samsung screen - but not an IPS, I think (it's a couple of years old, so I doubt it). It simply could be a matter of me getting used to the screen. But as Tobias mentioned, the brightness just seems "off" somehow - like it's only turned up to 2/3.

 

Hi, i am considering buying the 15", would you guys suggest this, or should i steer away from it?
Ty in advance.

 

Alright, I just did some casual benchmarking while playing Bioshock Infinite. It seems like the CPU is throttling for a few minutes when the temperature gets above 90 degrees celcius and stays there for a while. See the attached graphs below.

It seems to just shut off the turbo frequency (3.5 ghz) and goes down to the base clock (2.5 ghz) - but I also saw a spike where it went below 2 ghz for a few seconds.

I didn't actually notice any of this while I was busy playing the game, though - even with a frame rate counter turned on. But bottom line is that this machine gets pretty hot under load.

 

Is the 3.5 GHz even necessary? I'd be tempted to just turn turbo off and leave it at 2.5 GHz to avoid the cooling issues. Most games are more heavily GPU intensive than CPU intensive anyway.

 

This looks quite good.

ShadowXOR: The performance is still good for gaming even when turbo is off. I tried Crysis3 and didn't see any difference between turbo on and off. Most games are limited by GPU performance.

 

So my seemingly only concern at this point is price/release date which we don't know - and the screen. It's an IPS but people seem to be describing TN-like issues with the screen looking different from a variety of angles and appearing as if it 'moves' when you move. That sounds unpleasant as I would likely be using the built-in screen the majority of the time.

 

Frepzy: I tried many multimedia/gaming laptops and finally here I’m satisfied. I tried these:

1) MSI GE60: Bad keyboard layout (Home/End only with Fn), horrible touchpad, chassis gets hot during gaming, very loud fans
2) MSI GS60: like the GE60, but in addition to it: bad keyboard mechanics (especially spacebar), extremely loud fans, terrible loud-speakers
3) ASUS N550Jk: shortest battery life, fan almost all the time on, very slow touchpad (response), not so good loud-speakers (four tiny ones all together on one place).
4) ASUS G56Jr: lowest performance and slow touchpad but very good audio and silent fan under load – this was the one I thought it will be my next multimedia laptop…

… but this Nitro fits better my needs. It has far better touchpad, good keyboard, it’s very thin and light with silent fans. It doesn’t look much like a gaming laptop which is good for me. For me it’s more like a universal high-performance machine for DAW tasks, mathematical/statistical analysis on the road which can be sometimes used to play games.
It’s definitely not a laptop without cons. They are here (for example all other laptops mentioned above have a better Samsung screen) but when I see the low price I’m happy with it.

 

Thanks man! Then i'll order it before this week is over

 

ShadowXOR: It's not like a TN screen. I tried to make a simple video with my phone:

Acer Aspire V15 Nitro - IPS screen - YouTube

 

Thanks, overall seems pretty good! So despite the other screen on certain laptops being 'better', are there any obvious issues with this one in day-to-day use?

 

NBC German review of the 17" model is online
Test Acer Aspire V 17 Nitro (VN7-791G-759Q) Notebook - Notebookcheck.com Tests
i7-4710HQ, 8GB Ram, 128GB SSD + 1TB HDD

 

short summary: they are very pleased with the NB. biggest downsides: nonchangable battery, very poor service possibilities (changing RAM and the like enforces LOTS of work).

they statet NO throtteling, but achieved temps of 96°C (CPU) and 85°C (GPU) but that was under full load (prime+furmark).

but they said, the NB stayed exceptionell calm, even under load. 38dB on average load is 6 dB better than most other competitors (namely the Gigabyte P27G). all in all they liked the NB very much.

ah: the screen is - as expected - roughly on par wih the Chi Mei-TN-panel used in Clevos and the like. contrast 600:1 ist "okay", color gamut of 59% AobeRGB and 80% sRGB is only mediocre for an IPS. but viewing angles were good - well, it's an IPS, at last.

 

My last laptop was a retina mac so perhaps I am biased/spoiled but here goes

1. I find the screen to besomewhat disapointing. If I look at it at a straight angle its bright and nice allthough its seems abit grainy, not sure why. If I look at the screen from any other angle the brightness drops.
2. The WLAN works excelent if I place the laptop about 1 meeter from the router. If I move the laptop to another room (like 10 meeters away) it struggles to find wlan and drops out frequently. I have to reconnect a lot and it goes from full signal to zero signal. There is a lot of signal interferrance in my building that might add to the problem. All other appartments have similar routers. I have never had this problem on any other device though and I have lived in my current appartment for 3 years.
3. The trackpad apears sluggish and at times unresponsive. Noticing this especially when scrolling with two fingers. I drag my fingers down and it takes a second before it starts to work.

The screen I can live with but the wlan and trackpad problems is sort of a gamebreaker for me. I am considering returning the laptop and pay for a new motherboard for my broken retina mac.
As far as gaming I have only tried Skyrim and it worked great. Also for musicprogramming it seems like a nice maschine as there is no noticable DPC latency.

 

Hi,
is it possible to replace the optical drive with an ssd?

 

why should you do that? you have a normal 2,5''-slot, with holds a HDD normally (500GB or 1TB). and then you have the M.2-slot, which can hold a SSD.

plus: optical drives only for VN7-571G and VN7-791G. the VN7-591G doesn't have an optical drive (they needed the place for the better cooling because of the standard voltage CPU and the GTX860M).

 

Notebookcheck reviewed 17" Nitro: Test Acer Aspire V 17 Nitro (VN7-791G-759Q) Notebook - Notebookcheck.com Tests