Acer Nitro 14 (2024) Review

Introduction

The Acer Nitro 14 (2024) represents the brand’s latest addition to its long-running and popular series of compact Nitro gaming laptops.

This particular model packs in a solid combo for Full HD gaming, with an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS and an RTX 4050 laptop GPU, as well as a 14.5-inch 1920×1200 120Hz IPS screen, a 512GB SSD and 16GB of RAM. In this base configuration, the Nitro 14 (2024) is going to run you £1199/$1299.

That price tag puts it up against the likes of the Lenovo LOQ 15i and even Acer’s Nitro 5 (2023), which has represented a great value option in the past. I’ve been testing this newer 2024 model to see how well it compares.

Design and Keyboard

• Solid build quality
• Excellent port selection
• Keyboard and trackpad feel a tad spongey

Where a lot of gaming laptops can be a bit wacky with their overall looks, the Nitro 14 (2024) opts for a more restrained profile. It’s a mostly black frame, with a shiny Nitro logo on the lid and translucent orange cooling vents for a welcome bit of flair.

This laptop is mostly plastic on the bottom casing, with a metal lid and internal surround by the keyboard and trackpad. This means there isn’t any real creaking or flex in the chassis. In addition, the 2kg weight puts this on the lighter end of gaming laptops, and it makes the Nitro 14 (2024) reasonably portable.

The port selection here is solid too, although unlike a lot of other gaming laptops, they’re spread across both the left and right sides as opposed to being on the rear.

On the left side, the Nitro 14 (2024) has a barrel jack for connecting to the mains, a headphone jack, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type A and a USB4 capable Type C port with Power Delivery and DP Alt mode. The right side houses another USB-C port, although this one is a USB 3.2 Gen 2 option, while there is another USB-A port, a Micro SD reader and a full-size HDMI 2.1 option. That’s pretty good.

Open the lid up, and you’ll find a compact keyboard layout, complete with function row, arrow keys and a single column of function keys. There is some especially bright RGB lighting that stays on incessantly if you want a splash of colours while gaming or working.

The keyboard itself offers decent travel and reasonable tactility, even if it can feel a tad spongey at times.

The trackpad is a decent size too, although lacks a positive actuation with its clicks. There’s a dampened feel to it, which can impact overall accuracy.

Display and Sound

• Solid resolution and smooth refresh rate
• Slightly dimmer display
• Speakers can sound thin

It’s usually on the display front where laptops tend to cut a couple of corners, although the Nitro 14 (2024) opts to go for a solid 14-inch 1920×1200 IPS option with a smoother 120Hz refresh rate for decent responsiveness.

This panel hits our targets with an okay peak brightness figure of 308.3 nits, although its 1230:1 contrast ratio means this panel lacks a little bit of dynamic range against the competition. A 0.20 black level is perfectly fine for an IPS panel, and the Nitro 14 (2024) displays reasonably deep blacks, while its 6300K colour temperature is excellent.

The panel is solid in terms of colour accuracy, with 99% coverage of the mainstream sRGB colour space meaning colours needed for productivity and gaming workloads are displayed pretty much perfectly. The 78% DCI-P3 and 77% Adobe RGB results are decent too, although prove this isn’t the best screen for more specialist, colour-sensitive workloads.

The speakers here aren’t much to write home about, though. There’s enough volume for general media consumption, although it’s mostly mid-range with little in the way of low-end impact.

Performance

• Decent overall gaming results
• RTX 4050 offers solid power
• Speedy SSD in a decent capacity

Inside, the Nitro 14 (2024) offers a reasonable combo of an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS and RTX 4050 to power it to some decent gaming results at 1080p and its native 1920×1200 resolution.

The Ryzen 7 8845HS is a capable eight-core and 16-thread processor that served up some decent results in the likes of Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23, especially in multi-core results that better options such as the Lenovo LOQ 15i with its Intel Core i5-13500H, and a previous gen Acer Nitro 16 with an Intel Core i7-13700H inside.

In moving over to some games, the likes of the 64fps in Returnal at Full HD and 58.16fps in Cyberpunk 2077 are on par and slightly behind those candidates that use the same RTX 4050 laptop GPU. More eSports-focused titles such as Rainbow Six Extraction will also fare rather well too, with a 124fps result at Full HD sat right in the middle of the competition.

The fun of DLSS 3.0 boosts Cyberpunk 2077 to 65.09fps, although ray-traced performance on the game’s RT: Ultra preset means results take a hit down to 22.38fps. You’re better off turning ray-tracing off if you don’t want to use DLSS, though.

The Nitro 14 (2024) comes with a respectable 16GB of RAM and a solid 512GB SSD, giving you decent capacity for both multi-tasking workloads and for storing a reasonable amount of files and apps. The SSD here is also quick, with some recorded read speeds of 7164.47MB/s and writes of 5019.12MB/s.

Software

• Reasonably clean Windows 11 install
• Acer NitroSense is a useful system app
• ExpressVPN & McAfee pre-installed

The Nitro 14 (2024) comes running Windows 11, and as it comes with one of AMD’s Ryzen 8000 series of laptop chips, there is AI functionality baked in. Hence the inclusion of Microsoft’s Copilot key on the bottom row of the keyboard, which acts as a shortcut key for Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant.

There is a range of Acer-specific software pre-installed, such as Acer JumpStart which is essentially a hyperlink to the Acer website, while NitroSense allows you to check on your system’s vitals, fiddle with fan speeds and set different profiles depending on what kind of tasks you’re working on, be it office or gaming workloads.

Apart from this, there’s ExpressVPN and McAfee anti-virus installed as additional programs, should you want or need them.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 4 hours 12 minutes minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for half a working day

As much as the Nitro 14 (2024) is a gaming laptop, the components inside aren’t, on the surface, all too power hungry. With this in mind, the 4 hours 12 minute result in the PC Mark 10 battery test at the requisite 150 nits of brightness still isn’t too impressive.

It means that you’ll have to spend a lot of your time with the Nitro 14 (2024) plugged in to mains power, as you perhaps should with a gaming laptop anyway, as using them on battery reduces their overall performance.

Nonetheless, the 230W barrel jack charger was reasonably brisk to recharge the 76Whr cell, taking 48 minutes to go from zero to 50% , and 98 minutes for a full charge from empty.

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