Every budget gaming laptop worth its RGB stripes aims to deliver a satisfactory gaming experience while hiding its compromises. While the Acer Nitro V 16 AI (starts at $899, as tested) looks like a familiar formula, it's an uncommon budget rig with compelling qualities at its rock-bottom price. (We saw it as low as $750 at the time of publishing.) Yes, its Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 graphics chip and AMD Ryzen 5 240 CPU are bare-minimum silicon, but they deliver an excellent 1,920-by-1,200-pixel (1200p) play experience for the cost. Also, this Nitro lasts longer on a charge than most gaming laptops: up to half a day of video playback. Acer backs that with a fast 16-inch screen and a comfortable keyboard. The limited color palette of the display, a middling touchpad, and a small solid-state drive (SSD) keep the Nitro V 16 AI from threatening the Editors' Choice-award-winning MSI Katana 15HX, but it's still a top budget-gaming value.

Configurations: The Base Model Is the One to Get

For its price, the Nitro V 16 AI is a good fit if you're just breaking into PC gaming and looking for a low investment. It's also an excellent first gaming laptop for kids, not to mention a shoo-in for older student gamers.

At $899 as tested, the base-model Acer Nitro V 16 AI (ANV16-42-R309) comes with the aforementioned Ryzen CPU and GeForce GPU, paired with 16GB of memory, a 512GB SSD, and a 16-inch, 1200p display with a 180Hz peak refresh rate. Despite the bare-minimum resolution and poor color coverage that I'll get to later, it’s exciting to see such a high-refresh-rate panel at this price. At the time of publishing, you can grab this Nitro model from Walmart for just $749.99.

You can technically upgrade to a Ryzen 5 340 chip with an RTX 5060 for $1,299.99, but that configuration doesn't improve the RAM or SSD capacities. (You may spot another model with a Ryzen 7 chip inside, but we couldn't find it in stock.) Budget gaming laptops don’t scale well because you’re just paying more for better internal hardware in the same chassis, often unable to upgrade the display, and ultimately paying the money as if you were to move to the next tier of laptop.

One last thing: the "AI" in the laptop's name refers to the AMD chip's neural processing unit, or NPU, which operates at 31 trillion AI operations per second (TOPS). Paired with the GPU's AI hardware, the total platform TOPS meets the requirements to qualify as a Copilot+ PC, giving access to all those on-device AI tools in Windows 11.

Design: Practical Over Pretty

The Nitro looks and feels like a budget machine, and you can't get around that. It’s a black plastic box with a silver Nitro logo stamped on the lid, a basic design we've come to expect from gaming laptops under a grand. Manufacturers pride themselves on flashy premium gaming laptops, but if cheap Chromebooks can be colorful and quirky, then why can't cheap gaming laptops?

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The interior adds some color with orange, edgy font on its keys, but I’m not a fan of this particular aesthetic. It's reminiscent of the original Dead Space game’s color palette, which is exciting if you're into that, but I’m partial to a white font and standard RGB-lit keys.

One thing that powerful gaming laptops and budget rigs have in common is that they’re usually chunky and hefty. Naturally, the Nitro V 16 AI is both, measuring nearly an inch thick and weighing around 5.4 pounds. That lands in the same realm as the MSI Katana 15 HX (an inch thick, 5.29 pounds), which is notable given the Nitro's larger screen.

Display and Audio: Built for Frames, Not Finesse

The first feature deprioritized when building a budget gaming laptop is usually the display, and the Nitro follows suit. Its 16-inch 1200p screen is an IPS panel clocked at 180Hz. A display this fast can give you an edge in games like Call of Duty, putting you a few frames ahead of the enemy, which is a major plus.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

However, the panel's colors look washed out, so I can't fully enjoy, for example, the vibrant neon of Night City in Cyberpunk 2077. At least the screen is bright enough to properly show darker in-game environments. Inversely, due to the display's low contrast ratio, you'll notice a white cast to dark scenes. These are common screen trade-offs among gaming laptops at this price.

The blasts and slashes of the game look slick in motion on the Nitro's 180Hz display. However, in-game conversations sound inconsistent through this laptop's speakers. (That carries over into hollow, distant background music and sound effects.) You’ll naturally get better performance from a pair of headphones, but while the onboard speakers don't excel, the audio shortcomings are not insurmountable, especially if you tinker with the DTS:X Ultra audio software.

Keyboard, Touchpad, and Webcam: Solid Keys, Spotty Extras

With a hearty bounce and decently spaced keys, the Nitro’s keyboard feels comfortable to game on. The keys are a bit small, but since they are spaced with wide gaps between, they're easier to navigate by feel. People with larger hands might have issues with the layout, not to mention the smaller Shift button on the right side.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The Nitro's touchpad isn't quite as tolerable. Acer's touchpad surface produces too much drag, so my fingers catch too often. Navigating the web and apps with the Nitro V 16 AI is especially frustrating if you’re someone with even mildly sweaty hands. When you click it, the touchpad produces a deep, unsatisfying click as well. You'll likely want to use a mouse, whether you're gaming on this laptop or just doing work.

While not a shocker in a budget gaming laptop, the webcam is also lacking. It's a 720p shooter that produces over-pixelated and noisy images. The color in my red sweatshirt looks muted, and even the white mattress behind me appears overexposed in my test photos because the camera's contrast is poor.

Ports: Connections on Three Sides

You'll find a broad selection of ports all around the laptop. On the right, the laptop features a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports for connecting your trusty legacy peripherals, like a mouse and keyboard. On the other side, the laptop has an additional USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port, a headphone jack, an Ethernet jack for optimal internet performance, and a microSD card slot for transferring files from your camera or phone.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

You’ll find the power jack on the rear, alongside an HDMI 2.1 port for an external display and a USB4 slot for modern devices or an expansion hub. For connectivity, the Nitro features Wi-Fi 6 for wireless internet and Bluetooth 5.3 for peripherals.

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(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Performance Testing: An Economy-Class Upgrade

The Nitro V 16 AI sits at the very bottom of the gaming-laptop ladder, built for first-time or budget-conscious gamers. It’s affordable, yes, but don’t confuse "entry-level" with "underwhelming." For its price, it delivers surprisingly solid gaming performance.

We put the Nitro V in the ring with the MSI Katana 15 HX ($999.99 as tested), which has the same RTX 5050 GPU. The 2025 Lenovo LOQ 15, with an RTX 5060, marks a small jump. Then, two proper midrange gaming laptops, the Lenovo Legion Pro 5 Gen 10 ($1,659.99 as tested) and a $1,649.99 Alienware 16X Aurora configuration, pair an RTX 5060 GPU with a sharper 1600p display.

Productivity and Content Creation Tests

Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput. 

Three more tests we rely on are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.

Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image-editing prowess through a variety of automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25.

The Nitro and its Ryzen 5 surprised us by outpacing the competition on the PCMark 10 productivity benchmark, but it showed more predictable performance for its RAM and CPU class in the rest of our testing regimen.

In real-world performance, the Nitro V 16 AI operates fine under standard productivity loads. You'll encounter some slowdown when managing multiple intensive tasks, however, which shouldn't surprise you. It also takes a bit for larger games to load, which tracks with how it performed on the PCMark 10 Storage test. Unless you’re playing a CPU-intensive game or trying to push out big content-creation projects, you should be fine with this entry-level CPU for a while.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

We challenge all systems’ graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. The first two, Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K), use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. The next pair, Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests, focuses on APIs more commonly used for game development to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. Last up, we turn to 3DMark Solar Bay to measure ray tracing performance.

Our real-world gaming testing is based on the in-game benchmarks for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 2024. These three games—all benchmarked at the system’s full HD (1080p or 1200p native) resolution—represent competitive shooters, open-world games, and simulation games, respectively. If the screen supports a higher resolution, we rerun the tests at the QHD equivalent of 1440p or 1600p. Each game is tested with two sets of graphics settings at each resolution, for up to four runs per game. (The MSI Katana could not complete the Call of Duty benchmark, so it's missing from that chart below.)

We run the Call of Duty benchmark at the Minimum graphics preset—aimed at maximizing frame rates—and again at the Extreme preset. Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings aim to push PCs to the limit, so we run it on the Ultra graphics preset and again on the all-out Ray Tracing Overdrive preset without DLSS or FSR. Finally, F1 represents our DLSS effectiveness (or FSR on AMD Radeon systems) test, demonstrating a GPU’s capacity for frame-boosting upscaling technologies. The frame-rate boosts change with the version of frame generation tech available. (For example, DLSS 2 and 3 stitch in one AI-generated frame for every originally rendered frame, while the latest version, DLSS 4, inserts up to three additional frames.)

It’s not all doom and gloom for the Nitro, despite it generally placing anywhere between third and last place in our gaming and graphics benchmarks. (Remember, all of the competitors that beat the Nitro also cost more.) The Nitro managed to run AAA games, like Cyberpunk 2077, at a solid frame rate on Ultra settings. You can also take advantage of the high-refresh-rate screen in competitive games like Call of Duty, where the laptop's frame rate approached the 180Hz mark at the Minimum preset. Even less complex competitive games should leverage that refresh rate.

However, if you use the GPU's DLSS 4 frame generation to get you across the finish line in some games, be on the lookout for rendering glitches. You may notice some flickering artifacts on the track in F1 2024, as we did during testing with DLSS. Overall, for the price, the Nitro V produces fast enough frame rates on its own to get the job done in most AAA games, even sometimes at high detail settings. The option to amp up the speed with DLSS should help the Nitro stay viable into the future as games' visual demands increase.

Battery Life and Display Tests

We test each laptop and tablet's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness set to 50% and audio volume set to 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

To gauge display performance, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

The Nitro’s 12-hour battery test result is very good for a laptop in its class. It’s likely due to a combination of the AMD chip’s efficiency and Nvidia’s Optimus technology, which shuts off the discrete GPU outside of gaming. Not to mention that, for better and worse, the laptop has a standard-resolution display. All of these factors make the Nitro easy to use as a school or work-from-home laptop, too.

What wasn't at all surprising, however, were the ho-hum display color-coverage numbers. Acer's panel was bright enough for the price, but its color gamut coverage was subpar, even with basic sRGB. If you’re not hung up on picture quality, or you have an external display ready to go, then this will be fine for you. Otherwise, you'll have to deal with this too-common compromise among sub-$1,000 gaming laptops. (The MSI Katana was only marginally better.)