by Well packaged in a bite-sized box, this small form factor Acer Nitro PC feels like there’s a bit of a Napoleon complex going on. The angry, red LED brow on the front of the machine sits next to possibly the biggest power button I’ve ever seen, as if to say, “Press it and I’ll terminate you.” While that attitude isn’t entirely unfounded, the mid-range CPU/GPU combo can handle itself in a good number of games at 1440p.
In theory, that combination should also be great for productivity-style tasks, but the storage really lets it down.
Boosting a fairly miniscule 238 GB PCIe SSD boot drive with an HDD (even a 1 TB) is frankly a mistake. Just pick a bigger solo-boot SSD, folks. Here it means I can’t play most of today’s games with the fast loading times an M.2 SSD drive would have provided. Example: The FFXIV Shadowbringers benchmark faltered after 32.9 seconds when loading from the hard drive; in this day and age that is quite unacceptable.
If you manage to fit anything onto the SSD, you’re looking at a load time of around 12.7 seconds, and even that is a bit lacking compared to other PCs in the same, and even lower, price brackets.
Nitro 50 spec
PROCESSOR: Intel Core i5 12400F
GPU: Acer Predator GeForce RTX 3060
RAM: Kingston 16GB DDR4-3200
Motherboard: Acer’s own Intel B660
Storage: Kingston OM8PDP3256B-AA1 238.5GB SSD
Front I/O: 1x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, 1x USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 Type-C, microphone input, headphones
Rear I/O: 4x USB 2.0 Type-A, 2x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A
Connectivity: Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.0
PSU: 500W
Case: Acer Nitro50
Operating system: Windows 11 Home
Guarantee: 1 year standard
Price: $1,300 (opens in new tab)
The 3DMark Storage Benchmark adds to my concerns there, with only a passable index score of 1,381 for the SSD and only a terrible 155 points for the HDD. Basically, expect to spend a lot of time on read/write tasks. This is probably the main reason why the Nitro also stumbled in the PCMark 10 Express benchmark, with a score of 5,757.
On the plus side, you can’t buy this exact spec. Acer, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to send us a machine for review that you can’t buy. The system u can buy comes with a much more reasonable 512 GB PCIe SSD for $1,300. It’s still attached to a 1TB hard drive, so the data side is still sluggish, but that takes away a lot of our immediate issues with the Nitro 50.
This is unlikely to change the PCMark score, which would indicate that general productivity is not its forte. But the Aida64 Extreme benchmark score of 41,015 shows that the dual channel 16 GB DDR4-3200 RAM can handle the stress of multitasking quite well.
That RAM also gives you a better chance when it comes to gaming, and once you’ve spent most of your day installing your games to the hard drive (ridiculous), the Nitro 50 manages to pack a punch. to pack a punch when it comes to gaming . That’s thanks to the solid combination of entry-level core components: an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 (opens in new tab) and Intel Core i5 12400F (opens in new tab).
System Benchmarks
Even as a last-generation CPU, the Core i5 has a lot going for it with single-core Cinebench R23 scores of 1,697 and multi-core scores of 11,595. That gives it an edge in rendering and an average synthetic performance of 34.14 fps when tested with X264 v5.0.1. That’s all a good indication of the i5 12400F’s great gaming potential, and while it’s no match for the $200 more expensive iBuyPower’s Core i7 12700f in terms of multicore performance, you might think of it as paying yourself $200 to spend a little longer waiting for display.
However, the 4K 3DMark Time Spy Extreme benchmark gave it some problems. A CPU score of 4,068 is lacking compared to other machines we’ve tested, thanks to the contribution of the RTX 3060; this really isn’t the card for 4K.
In actual gaming benchmarks, the CPU saw averages of 82fps in Hitman 3 Dartmoor – that’s on ultra graphics settings at 1440p, with sim quality set to best. Not a terrible score, especially when you put it next to 43 fps averages in Metro Exodus Enhanced. The F1 22 performance with ray tracing enabled was disappointing at 29fps, although the test was conducted on the rainy Belgian circuit with anisotropic filtering at x16 and the graphics at ultra-high. However, it never got below 26fps, so it still remained playable. You can certainly achieve smoother frame rates with a bit of tinkering with the settings, which is the general ethos of this machine.
The rest of the gaming benchmarks were all done at 1440p on ultra settings, and all were more than playable thanks to the core components, although for an extra $99 you could have the NZXT Streaming PC which manages another 20fps in Far Cry 6, 18 fps in Hitman Dartmoor and 17 fps in Metro. It doesn’t sound like much, but given the great thermals and the more impressive (and larger) NVMe SSD, it’s almost a no-brainer.
Gaming Benchmarks
The Nitro is a nifty machine for gaming, it’s really let down on the storage side.
However, the main problem with high-performance components comes in the form of heat dissipation. The Nitro’s small form factor case with minimal vents doesn’t help in that regard; we’re talking maximum CPU and GPU temperatures in the low 80s. It’s not the worst we’ve seen and your components won’t melt, but it certainly could be better.
The bottom line is that while the Nitro is a nifty machine for gaming, it’s really let down on the storage side. The configuration we expected in the lab is this Nitro 50 (opens in new tab) for $1,300 with a larger SSD, though Acer still felt the need to put a hard drive in it. Honestly, that machine would have performed at about the same level as the one before us here, and with that larger boot disk it would have gotten a much higher score too.
Sure, I’d have been much happier with even a single, speedy 1TB SSD, rather than some extra spinning platter nonsense, but a 512GB drive is the bare minimum for a modern gaming PC. you can easily upgrade the storage later or add some more to one of the two spare M.2 slots, but these storage shenanigans really make the Nitro hard to recommend.
