Acer Aspire V17 Nitro - Review 2022

Pointing and clicking is so terminal decade. First there were bear upon screens on Windows PCs, and so Apple bought into the craze past adding a Bear on Bar to some MacBook Pros, and now at that place are a one-half-dozen or more methods of physically interacting with your reckoner, from drawing with a pen to calling out to Siri or Cortana. 1 of the newest and almost overlooked methods is eye tracking, which you'll find on some models of the Acer Aspire V17 Nitro (starts at $1,249; $1,699 as tested). Even if yous guild a version without the thin eye tracking bar built into the display swivel, the V17 Nitro is yet an first-class value for a 17-inch gaming laptop. If your favorite games back up heart tracking, you lot should consider it, although you'll be making a few compromises on ancillary features.

Look Over Here

Although heart tracking is perhaps its signature feature, you won't notice annihilation unusual well-nigh the Aspire V17 Nitro at first glance. Most versions of the laptop look like many other big gaming rigs that the Taiwanese tech giant has churned out over the years. In that location's no gigantic gaping exhaust grilles, illuminated red slashes, or any other features that more aggressive laptops like the Origin EON17-SLX take. This unit is fifty-fifty more understated because information technology features Black Edition styling, which includes a ribbed metal lid, a dark plastic underside, and a black etched metal surface surrounding the keyboard and touchpad. Still, there's no mistaking that this is a gaming machine, particularly not once y'all notice the big "Aspire 5 Nitro" text that's etched into the back of the display swivel.

It's the front of the brandish swivel, however, that yous'll really want to spend the most time looking at. That's where the center-tracking magic happens. Acer has cleverly integrated cameras and infrared lights from Tobii into the hinge, flanked by silverish metallic borders. It's very unobtrusive, and unless the sensors are activated, you might not notice it. To activate them, you open up the pre-installed Tobi app, where you perform calibration and play an asteroid-shooting demo game that shows off what the tracker can do.

Nearly 100 games support the applied science, from titles like Tom Clancy'due south The Segmentation to Farming Simulator 17. There are many glaring omissions, yet, including the venerable Minecraft. Still, I was able to find a Minecraft look-a-similar chosen Unturned to exam out eye tracking'southward greatest combination in gameplay: the ability to look effectually simply by moving your eyes. Information technology works well in Unturned, specially after I used the Tobii Gamehub app to increment the responsiveness of the in-game camera movement to where I was looking. Yous tin use the Gamehub to see which centre-tracking features each of your installed games support, as well as arrange the responsiveness of gaze and head tracking for each title.

Acer Aspire V17 Nitro

Eye tracking is poised to expand beyond the gaming world, too. Tobii offers some rudimentary options for interacting with Windows itself, such as the ability to look at a specific bespeak on the screen, touch and hold your finger to the touchpad, and have the cursor immediately jump to where you're looking. Microsoft has also included more extensive native eye-tracking back up in the Windows x Fall Creators update, including the ability to use your gaze for typing on the on-screen keyboard. While these features might be of use to someone with concrete disabilities, it'south pretty clear that eye tracking's main strength right at present is for simplifying in-game movements.

A Few Minor Sacrifices

Other than eye tracking, there's little to heighten eyebrows most the residue of the Aspire Nitro V17's spec list. That includes its 7.05-pound weight, which will certainly make your haversack straps uncomfortable, only isn't inappropriate given its expansive screen real estate. Other 17-inch gaming laptops tip the scales effectually the 7-pound marking, including the HP Omen 17 (6.28 pounds) and the GTX 1060 version of the New Razer Bract Pro (vi.78 pounds). At that place are much heavier rigs, of course—the Alienware R4 weighs 9.77 pounds and the Origin EON17-SLX is a whopping 12 pounds, which makes the Aspire Nitro V17 seem featherlight in comparison. You can accredit function of its reasonable weight to its reasonable dimensions. At 1.09 inches thick, it's much thinner than the Acer Predator xv (1.52 inches), although the New Razer Blade Pro is thinner still at 0.88 inches.

With a width of 16.65 inches and a depth of 11.65 inches, there'south also plenty of room for ports, and Acer isn't stingy. Yous'll observe 2 USB iii.0 ports, a USB-C connector with Thunderbolt three support, an HDMI port, and a gigabit Ethernet jack on the right side, forth with the connector for the ability adapter. The rest of the ports are on the left edge: two USB 2.0 ports, audio input and output, an SD card reader, and a locking slot to protect the laptop against theft. The only obvious omission is a DisplayPort connector, simply information technology'due south non a deal-billow since Thunderbolt 3 tin can also acquit DisplayPort signals.

Acer Aspire V17 Nitro 2

To go on the Nitro V17's price relatively low, Acer skimped on a few features that you'll find on much more than expensive gaming laptops. It'southward evocative of Razer's strategy with the GTX 1060 version of the New Razer Blade Pro: Take a popular top-of-the-line gaming powerhouse, strip out marquee features like the 4K display and the GTX 1080 GPU, and you've got a less-expensive but still a capable machine. Instead of a 4K display, the Aspire V17 comes with a full Hd (i,920 by ane,080) panel that has wide viewing angles thanks to in-plane switching (IPS) technology, merely with a matte finish that dulls colors and makes white areas like file folders or bill of fare bars await blurry. The finish is excellent at blotting out glare, withal, so if you oft play in brightly lit environments, you'll probably exist glad to trade color vivacity for not having to worry about distracting reflections.

There's an Hard disk drive webcam, which offers adequate (if occasionally grainy) video quality, though information technology doesn't support Windows face detection for logging into your user account. In that location'due south no fingerprint reader, either, so you'll either need to be content with typing in your password the old-fashioned fashion. There are four speakers on the Nitro V17, and they offering very robust, room-filling audio. At maximum volumes, I noticed some distorted dialogue, only the groundwork soundtrack on the Heaven gaming benchmark plays with a good rest of highs and lows. The pocket-sized touchpad is mostly a disappointment, with lagging, inaccurate cursor movements and a very potent clicking mechanism. The keyboard is much more than comfortable thanks to sturdy keys and decent travel, although information technology's not mechanical and the only customization selection for the backlighting is to turn it on or off.

1 thing that Acer did not skimp on, however, is build quality of the chassis. The brushed metal that surrounds the keyboard and the ribbed brandish dorsum look adept, but more importantly they feel sturdy. At that place is minimal flex in both the keyboard and the display, no small feat for a laptop of this size and weight.

The 16GB of retention on this review unit is adequate for playing games, but if you plan to connect an external monitor and multitask during your gaming sessions, you'll want to bump the memory upwards to its 32GB maximum. This Nitro V17 as well comes with a total of 1.5TB of storage, spread among a 1TB conventional spinning drive and a 512GB SSD. You'll probably want to connect an Ethernet cablevision for lag-complimentary gaming, but wireless connectivity options include 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Acer offers a one-year warranty.

Acceptable Oomph for Full Hard disk drive Gaming

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card in the Aspire V17 is the cheapest Nvidia GPU to back up virtual reality headsets similar the Oculus Rift, and information technology delivers plenty of oomph for conventional games as well. With 6GB of defended retentiveness, the GPU helped the Aspire V17 accomplish respectable frame rates on our Sky (68 frames per 2d) and Valley (72fps) gaming benchmarks, even in 1080p and at demanding quality settings. If you lot're content to play games at this laptop's native resolution, you'd exist hard-pressed to detect a game that could overwhelm it. If, on the other hand, you lot're interested in connecting a higher-resolution external brandish, yous'll likely be disappointed, since fifty-fifty the GTX 1070-powered HP Omen 17 failed to produce respectable frame rates at a 4K resolution on the Sky and Valley tests.

Acer Aspire V17 Nitro Graphics Performance Chart

The Fire Strike Extreme benchmark, another grueling test of the graphics subsystem, provided like results. With a score of five,192, the Aspire V17 performed slightly improve than the Razer Bract (iv,972), but predictably lagged behind the better-equipped HP Omen 17.

The Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor running at 2.8GHz is the go-to CPU for laptops that cost between $i,500 and $2,000 (and even a bit more), and Acer does not devious from this formula with the Nitro V17. In that location'south enough of power here for processor-intensive activities like image editing and background video encoding, as is evidenced by the quick ane minute and 2 seconds information technology took to complete our Handbrake encoding task. The Nitro V17 even outperformed all of its peers on our Photoshop image-editing exam (3:xiii) every bit well as the PCMark viii benchmark (iii,535), which measures give-and-take processing, video conferencing, web browsing, and other typical PC tasks.

Acer Aspire V17 Nitro Performance Chart

When information technology comes to bombardment life, nonetheless, the Aspire V17 volition get out you lot disappointed if you programme on using it for a full day away from an outlet. It posted 7 hours and 28 minutes on our battery rundown test, longer than the Acer Predator xv (v:sixteen) and the HP Omen 17 (3:14), but shorter than the class-leading Razer Blade (10:36).

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Can You Stretch Your Budget?

If you want to experiment with using eye tracking to control your movement in a PC game, it's like shooting fish in a barrel enough to buy a standalone heart-tracking peripheral, which tin can be had for about $150. But if y'all frequently game on the get and you're looking for a new laptop anyway, the Acer Aspire Nitro V17 is worth considering. It'south not the thinnest or lightest gaming laptop, particularly in a market influenced by svelte machines like the Razer Bract, merely it represents a skillful value for the components y'all get—certainly a much improve deal than the $2,299.99 New Razer Bract Pro—without sacrificing build quality.

However, there are some small sacrifices, including a less-capable webcam and not-customizable keyboard lights, as well as the fact that you won't exist able to play games comfortably on an external 4K monitor. If yous tin stretch your budget significantly, past $3,000, yous can eliminate those sacrifices, gain a more than powerful graphics bill of fare, and still have built-in center tracking with the Alienware 17 R4.