Acer paints it black

A sleek laptop with a gorgeous black aluminium body, the Acer Aspire V 15 Nitro Black Edition is especially designed for gamers.

The black cover boasts Acer’s “soft-touch Nil” panel imprint technology that turns it into a visual and tactile feast. The inside is also black and goes well with the It is also black inside that goes well with the red glow of the backlit keyboard.

Perhaps more importantly, the Aspire V 15 Nitro packs a powerful punch for the game player with the power coming from the Intel Core i5-4210H 2.9 GHz. It is equipped with 16 gigabytes of working memory or RAM to ensure smooth game playing and multitasking. The one-terabyte hard drive can store plenty of installed games.

To ensure smooth graphics rendering, Aspire V 15 Nitro uses a gaming-grade graphics adapter – the new-generation Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M graphics with 2 GB dedicated graphics memory that can enrich visuals and boost gaming performance for full-throttle entertainment.

The GTX 860M renders graphics beautifully for Aspire V 15 Nitro’s display with Full HD resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels and fast and vibrant IPS technology with wide viewing angles. The Full HD display is good for watching Full HD movies and viewing photos. 

The sound system is solid too with four built-in speakers and Dolby Digital Plus Home Theatre surround sound that puts you inside games and movies.

The laptop is also certified by Skype and certainly its high-quality hardware and software is terrific for smooth voice and video Skype calls.

Aspire V 15 Nitro runs on Windows 8.1 64-bit edition. It uses a MIMO (multiple-input and multiple-output) Wi-Fi adapter that can double the speed of wireless network connection. It also comes with a Gigabit Ethernet port and three USB 3.0 ports plus one SD card reader and a large lithium ion battery of 4,450 mAh.

I was impressed by the power of the Aspire V 15 Nitro during the test. The laptop took about nine seconds to start up to the log-on screen. When I ordered it to shut down, it took about just one second to shut off the screen and 11 more to turn off the entire machine, including the backlit keyboard.

The laptop played HD video files smoothly. Graphics games also ran fast and smooth. I tested it with several games and it was impressively fast in all of them.

For example, in Asphalt Overdrive, the racing cars were rendered beautifully and the cars ran in smooth and fluid graphics without any performance hiccups.

In Dungeon Hunter 4, the characters were rendered beautifully and their movements were fluid while the animations used to tell the story were equally fluid.

The laptop is equipped with Acer DustDefender that prevents dust build-up and with Acer CoolBoost technology that puts a pop-up user interface on your screen, from where you can easily control airflow and improve system cooling.

Aspire V 15 Nitro also provides a suite of apps called Acer BYOC (Build Your Own Cloud) or abApps for accessing Acer’s cloud storage service free of charge. You need to register for an Acer ID to use the apps. The apps are abDocs, abFiles, abMedia, and abPhoto for synching your files on Switch 11 to your Acer’s cloud storage. You can later add more of your devices, such as smartphones or tablets to the Acer ID and install abApps on the device to access the files that are stored on Acer cloud.

Acer Aspire V 15 Nitro Black Edition has a suggested retail price of Bt39,900.

 

Key specs:

 

OS: Window 8.1 64-bit

CPU: Intel Core i5 4210H 2.90 GHz

Memory: 16GB DDR3 RAM

Storage: HDD 1 TB

Display: 15.6-inch IPS panel with 1920 x 1080 pixels

Graphics adapter: GeForce GTX 860M 2GB DDRS

Webcam: Acer Crystal Eye HD

Ports: 3 USB 3.0, 1 SDcard reader, 1 HDMI

Network: Wireless LAN 802.11 a/b/g/n; Gigabit Ethernet

Battery: Lithium Ion (Li-Ion) 3-cell, 4605 mAh capacity

Dimension: 389.6 x 257.5 x 23.9 mm

Weight: 2.4 kgs

Warranty: 2 years (one year international warranty)