Fancy a gaming laptop, with a 2-in-1 tablet mode and 10 hour battery life? You’ll want to check out the Acer Nitro 5 Spin.
With a few notable exceptions – like the Razer Blade or Gigabyte Aero series – most gaming laptops are big, beefy affairs. They have angry, gaping maws of exhausts, to get rid of all that unwanted heat, and they’re as thick as a particularly tedious textbook.
You certainly wouldn’t see anything other than a ropey AMD APU or low-powered GT 940MX graphics chip in a convertible laptop/tablet hybrid, would you?
Well, until now, that is: enter the Acer Nitro 5 Spin.
Acer’s Nitro series is something of a middle ground, between their standard consumer efforts and the angry, flared Predator gaming series. You could argue it’s more of a multimedia or productivity line than a hardcore gaming solution, but there will always be different strokes for different folks.
The Acer Nitro 5 Spin is no exception, by the way – it only contains a 2GB GTX 1050 – so don’t expect to be playing The Witcher 3 or 2016’s Hitman on it at Ultra settings with a frame rate better than a hand-drawn flip book. It’ll work a treat for graphically undemanding games like Overwatch or League of Legends, though, and you’ll probably be able to play most things if you bump the resolution or the detail level down far enough.
It’s certainly a compromise worth making for a (relatively) thin and light gaming laptop, that you can also use in a multimode tablet/stand configuration, with a battery life that could stretch as far as 10 hours, depending on usage.
Also, it’s easy on the eye. I’m not the only one who hates the aggressive, Fast and the Furious look of most gaming laptops, so I’d happily sacrifice a little grunt for a stylish, understated option, like Acer’s Nitro series, or the lovely Dell XPS 15.
The Acer Nitro 5 Spin also comes fitted with the latest 8th generation Kaby Lake core processors, which means hyper-threading enabled, multi-core performance from chips running at 15W or lower. There will also be a 15.6″ full HD IPS panel, and a choice of RAM and storage configurations, up to a 512GB PCIe SSD.
Expect to see the Nitro 5 Spin start at $999 US (around €1199) when it launches worldwide in October 2017.
