Lots of gaming laptops use 16:9 1080p screens because they're cheap to buy and usually boast a high refresh rate. However, they're not great for doing office work or any productivity tasks, unless the panel is really big. But when they are, the low resolution just looks yuck.
Enter stage left this Acer Nitro 16 gaming laptop. Here you're getting a 16-inch IPS panel that has a resolution of 2560 x 1600, resulting in a 16:10 screen ratio. That means you get a little more vertical height to work with and once you've used such a panel, it's hard to go back to something smaller. This one's fast, too, with a refresh rate of 165Hz so it'll be very easy on the eyes.
The rest of the hardware is just as good, although there are a couple of things that spoil the party a touch. Kicking things off is the CPU: a Ryzen 7 7735HS. It has eight full cores, 16 threads, and a boost clock of 4.75GHz. It doesn't have as much cache as the desktop Ryzen CPUs but it's still a great laptop processor.
It's paired with a GeForce RTX 4070 GPU and not one of the low-end versions. This one has a power limit of up to 140W and we tested one of these in our Razer Blade 14 review. It's better suited to 1080p gaming but it still handles 1600p well enough, and you'll always have DLSS Super Resolution and Frame Generation to turn to, if you need higher frame rates.
We've had a look at the Acer specs sheet for the Nitro 16 and I'm a little worried that it doesn't explicitly state that the 16GB of DDR5 memory installed in the machine is in a dual-channel configuration. It seems likely that it is, given that we've seen specs for entry-level and higher-end versions both using dual-channel DDR5, but if it turns out to be just a single 16GB stick of memory that Ryzen is going to be an unhappy little chip.
The worst part of this laptop is the amount of storage. Sure, it's an NVMe PCIe 4.0 drive so it should be plenty fast enough but 512GB these days just isn't enough. You can always replace it with a larger SSD and they're still very cheap at the moment, but you will have the hassle of reinstalling the operating system. Though there is a second M.2 slot inside if you want to add some easy additional storage to the system.
There are two 10Gbps USB Type-C ports so you also use an external SSD for storing large files and documents, leaving the internal drive just for games. You just won't be able to have many of them installed, if you like the latest AAA games.
But that's it for the downsides. Everything else is really good and if you're looking for a gaming laptop that you can do school work or light content creation on, you're going to be hard pushed to find a better deal than this one. You know this just might make a great Christmas gift for someone!
