New Laptop came with GTX 1050ti

[lakedude]

My old laptop bit the dust so I finally had an excuse to get a new one.

The new one is an Acer Nitro 5 with a 7th gen Intel i5-7300 and a GTX 1050 ti all for about $650, I suspect the low price is because the new 8th gen CPUs are nearing availability. Best Buy had the Nitro 5 for just under $600 till they sold out.

The laptop has a full HD (1080p) IPS screen and a factory 250 GB SSD as well.

The Nitro 5 is a curious thing because some things about it are very cheap, like the lack of a power button in favor of the upper right keyboard key. The large trackpad is nice but it lacks physical buttons. You tap with 2 fingers to get a right click...

The laptop is a mixed bag overall but the thing that impresses me is the GTX 1050 ti which is so very much better than the video in the old $1300 laptop. The mobile 1050 ti is even a bit better than the HD 7850 in my desktop.

Also very cool is that the Nitro 5 is fairly light for a gaming laptop which is very nice. Sure the GTX 1070 and 1080 based laptops are "better" but they are big and heavy by comparison.

For now the laptop has the best video in the house!

I'm pleased that the new laptop cost half what the old one did, is significantly lighter and is much faster (video, not CPU). It pays to not upgrade too often.

 

[stateofmind]

That was a nice deal indeed. The 8th gen CPUs won't improve gaming performance anyway
About the touchpad - usually the buttons are integrated under the hood, at the bottom. Try it

 

[lakedude]

About the touchpad - usually the buttons are integrated under the hood, at the bottom. Try it

Under the hood? You mean like soft buttons as part of the touch part of the touchpad? I tried that. Read the instructions as well. They mostly talk about gestures and swipes. It is all good, I has mouse!

 

[lakedude]

I'm pretty happy with this new machine so far.

In the past I was likely to make many "mistakes" such has buying too soon. The jump between upgrades was often too minor to be noticeable without special tests. Buying bleeding edge was expensive and often resulted in waiting 6 months for the developers to work the bugs out. Finally the desktop replacement style laptops I tended to buy were big and heavy.

This new little gem suffers from none of those defects. It is smaller and reasonably light. It is no ultrabook but it is much more portable than previous laptops. It is much newer tech than the outgoing laptop so the improvement is immediately noticeable but at the same time it isn't the very latest and greatest. Being slightly old makes it cheaper and (hopefully) the bugs have been worked out by now.

I played the same game on the same screen on my giant power sucking desktop and then again on the Nitro 5 and to my delight the little laptop had no trouble at all gaming at 1080p (which is good enough for me). It was butter smooth. I'm so glad I didn't blow extra money on the i7 version. Also glad I didn't get one of those huge GTX 1070 or 1080 laptops like I would have in the past. This little thing is just right!

 

[JeffMD]

You are seeing the nitro at a close out price. The Nitro 5 is a $900 laptop and at that pricepoint it was NOT that great of a choice. The parallel heatpipe layout is mindboggling stupid as you are pulling all cpu heat past your gpu. The laptop throttles after a while in games when a typical split 2 fan layout should have no problems keeping their respective cpu and gpu cool. It is def what I would consider as a chunky laptop (Average gaming laptop is what I would call it. The next size laptops are 17inch models and models that contain beefier cooling systems for 1070 and 1080 builds). Not anywhere what I would consider the thin gaming platform but that is a whole other price zone.

It WOULD be nice if they could consistently make laptops like these at $600 but alas once that dGPU is in they want to price it close to $1000. I have high expectations of ryzen laptops but so far what I have seen is more disappointing pricing as their prices are more in the $800 range and up.

 

[lakedude]

Thanks for the info Jeff. I can see that a big clunky laptop would be better for cooling and my little unit is a compromise. But I like the compromise. Smaller, lighter, and cheaper as a tradeoff against maximum performance. Not only can I live with it but I actually like it.

Still I'm glad you said something in to inform other readers of the limitations of the Nitro.

I gamed last night and noticed no obvious signs of throttling but I'm sure you are correct that it happens, perhaps in more strenuous games.

 

[lakedude]

Sorry to go on about this laptop. I've spent a small fortune on computer stuff since the Pentium 1 came out. I've had many computers and even more graphic cards starting back in the 3Dfx days when you had separate 2D and 3D cards. Every year or so I'd have another card.

Then I got older and became married with children. This stuff became much less of a priority. I haven't upgraded in years.

So here is the amazing thing:

The Nitro 5 laptop has better graphics than every single one of those previous video cards. I'm talking power sucking desktop cards! I'm talking thousands of dollars worth of cards over the years and this cheap little laptop beats all of them. From that prospective the Nitro is nothing short of amazing.

Now I expect things will continue to improve but it seems like technology is progressing at a slower pace. Look at Intel's delays on 10nm. At some point they are going to run into a wall because of the size of atoms. There has been incredible change in my lifetime. Hopefully it all keeps going but I suspect I've seen the biggest changes in any generation. We had tubes in electronic devices when I was a kid!

 

[lakedude]

So BioShock 2 runs flawlessly, however FarCry 2 is choppy no matter what I do. Very strange. I historically ran FC2 in DX9, perhaps because of these issues with FC2 and DX10.

The game is playable in DX10 and it runs pretty good even with settings turned all the way up but it just stutters a bit even on lower resolutions with the settings all turned down, weird. There were also some weird things going on I've never seen before like people's heads getting stuck in a loop and bouncing back and forth. Also one guy I needed to see was dead. Gonna try DX9 and see what happens.

Correction: FC2 not really playable in DX 10. Even DX 9 generates the occasional pause.

 

[lakedude]

DOOM 2016 plays perfectly on Open GL 4.5.

So I really like this Nitro. It is noticeably superior to every other previous laptop, mostly I suspect because it is the first to come with an SSD. This thing boots in 5 or 10 seconds.

Now I'm not suggesting anyone go spend full price on one of these. There is a nice Dell with a GTX 1060 Costo had in the $750 price range. I'm saying at $650 or less this thing is great.

 

[lakedude]

Regarding Bioshock 2 on the new laptop, the game would at times just drop out to Windows after playing smoothly.

Not knowing if the issue was with the game or the laptop I was worried that perhaps the laptop had some sort of issue. By searching the internet I discovered that lowering the texture quality solves the problem but the game looks much worse with the lower texture quality so I was not entirely happy with this solution. Also the exact nature of the problem was still not known. There was still a worry that perhaps the laptop could be part of the problem.

The "real" solution was to make more video memory available to the game. The default value was very low for some reason ( TextureStreamingMemoryLimit=112 ). I edited this line in Bioshock2SP from 112 to 2048. This seems to have fixed the problem and allows the use of the better textures.

The higher quality textures now look fantastic and the game plays butter smooth. I've not played enough to be 100% certain that the problem is fixed but I'm optimistic.

 

[lakedude]

Finished Bioshock 2 on the highest settings without issue after tweaking the TextureStreamingMemoryLimit to 2048.

Bioshock Infinite does not play well on the highest settings. Looks like medium is all the laptop can handle.