Acer Nitro 16S AI review: Affordable gaming and AI smarts

When the term “gaming laptop” comes to mind, an expensive price point often follows close behind—especially these days with the rising cost of memory and storage. Fortunately, there are companies like Acer that offer a range of gaming laptops to suit every budget, without sacrificing much on performance.

My Simple Take!

Our Acer Nitro 16S AI review takes a look at an affordable, capable entry-level gaming laptop with decent specifications and a touch of AI processing, all at a price that won’t break the bank.

Specifications

The Acer Nitro 16S AI (AN16S-61-R7YL) sent to us for review has the following features and specifications (configurable when ordering):

What’s in the box

• Acer Nitro 16S AI
• Power adapter

Design: Slim gaming profile

The Acer Nitro 16S AI has a fairly standard design, with slightly rounded corners to give it more of a gaming laptop look. The S, of course, indicates a slim design, and slim it is at barely an inch thick near the back. The smooth lid features an illuminated Acer Nitro logo in the middle and does look pretty sharp. It is hinged at both ends where it attaches to the laptop’s base.

- Advertisement -

Upon opening the lid, one can see the relatively thin bezels around the 16-inch display. There are two rubber strips along the top edge for when the laptop is closed. The 1920×1080 Full HD webcam is centred on the top bezel.

As far as the keyboard area is concerned, the housing angles in towards the keyboard for a sharp look. The Acer Nitro 16S AI does sport a full-sized keyboard, although the numpad keys are about three-quarters the width of standard keys, making it a bit squished. Nestled within the number pad is the NitroSense Key—more on that later. Still, it’s nice to have a full number pad on the keyboard. It’s also backlit, and the WASD keys are outlined in white for greater visibility. Being a Copilot+ laptop, a dedicated Copilot key sits to the left of the arrow keys.

The typical media control, dual display, keyboard brightness, screen brightness, and volume functions are also present on the F-key row. Above the function keys is a thicker area with a series of air intake holes, as well as a Mode Switch Key that instantly switches between Quiet, Balanced, Performance, and Turbo modes while gaming. When on battery power, the Mode Key switches between Balanced and ECO modes.

The keyboard, while functional, is a little soft — especially if you’re used to using a mechanical keyboard. That being said, it is responsive, and there were no major issues while day-to-day typing or during gaming. The trackpad sits slightly off-center, towards the left. A solid piece, the bottom corners act as left and right mouse buttons, and it is pretty decent for a trackpad. Finally, in the lower right corner of the palm rest is the Acer Nitro logo.

On the left side of the laptop, you’ll find an exhaust port, the Ethernet Port, a Type-A USB port, a MicroSD card slot, and a 3.5mm combo headphone jack. On the right side, you’ll find another exhaust port, two more USB-A ports, as well as power and charging indicator LEDs. Like many gaming laptops, the Acer Nitro 16S AI also has ports on the back: a barrel power port, an HDMI 2.1 port, and two USB-C ports.

At the bottom of the laptop are four rubber feet to elevate it while in use and keep it fairly well in place on a smooth surface. Vents are located near the back and extend up. Near the bottom front of the laptop, angled outward, are the two speaker grilles. A gaming laptop wouldn’t be a true gaming laptop without the ability to upgrade it, and the bottom panel is easily removable, allowing you to upgrade the memory and storage (or add a second M.2 SSD).

The Acer Nitro 16S AI does have a somewhat premium look to it, feels pretty sturdy and has a solid design given the internals and lower price point.

Display: Solid IPS display

The 16-inch WUXGA (1920×1200) IPS display on the Acer Nitro 16S AI boasts an 180Hz refresh rate, 3ms Overdrive response time, 400-nit brightness, and 100% sRGB coverage. It offers a decent viewing angle, and given its size, it was crisp and clear, even though it only has a 1920×1200 resolution. Colours were pretty accurate as well, and it wasn’t overly saturated.

- Advertisement -

Software: Some fluff, mostly useful

The Acer Nitro 16S AI comes with a few Acer-specific apps, along with a bunch of other apps and shortcut links to games. The Acer apps include Acer documents, Acer Jumpstart, Acer Assist on Store, Acer LiveArt, Acer Purified Voice Console, Acer QuickPanel, PLANET9, and their NitroSense Gaming Software. As for other apps and shortcuts, AMD Software, App Explorer (by Sweetlabs), Dropbox promotion, Elvenar (shortcut), ExpressVPN, Forge of Empires (shortcut), Google Play Games beta, Killer Intelligence Center, DTS Sound Unbound, and DTS:X Ultra are also pre-installed on the system. Some of these apps are useful, but many can be uninstalled.

NitroSense is pretty useful for easily viewing and adjusting power plans and fan control, monitoring GPU and CPU temperatures, and offering a few other cool features. These include:

• Acer PurifiedView: Enhances video calls with AI-powered effects.
• Acer PurifiedVoice 2.0: AI noise reduction suppresses background noise for both speakers and listeners.
• Acer LiveArt: Creates a unique sticker from your photos and enables easy 3-step sharing with friends.
• Acer QR Capture: Allows for decoding of QR codes directly from the laptop screen with just a single keystroke.
• Acer Assist: Uses a local LLM model optimized with Intel OpenVINO that provides system knowledge without the need for an internet connection.
• VisionArt: Allows you to create 4K wallpapers.
• In-game overlay: A graphic interface displayed over the top of the game screen while playing, providing quick settings and monitoring info.

As you can see, many of these are AI-powered, and for gaming, the most useful would be the in-game overlay.

Mentioned earlier, the Nitro 16S AI also comes with a dedicated Copilot key. When pressed, it provides instant access to Microsoft Copilot, allowing users to get help, unleash creativity, and boost productivity.

Performance: Solid gaming and decent AI results

What’s a laptop review without performance benchmarks? As I usually do with system reviews, I ran the Acer Nitro 16S AI gaming laptop through a number of benchmarks. With 16GB of DDR5 memory and a Micron 2500 MTFDKBA1T0QGN 1TB NVMe PCIe Gen4 M.2 SSD on board, these were the read/write test results:

• CrystalDiskMark Seq Read (Q8T1): 6983.41 MB/s
• CrystalDiskMark Seq Write (Q8T1): 6074.64 MB/s
• AS SSD Seq Read: 5250.46 MB/s
• AS SSD Seq Write: 2846.74 MB/s
• ATTO Seq Read (max): 6.53 GB/s
• ATTO Seq Write (max): 5.72 GB/s
• AJA Video System Test Read: 4656 MB/s
• AJA Video System Test Write: 4598 MB/s

As you can see, the Nitro 16S AI laptop performed more than adequately for read/write tests.

Recently, we were provided with UL Procyon benchmark test software to use in our reviews. Using the UL Procyon tests, on the AI side, this laptop generated 16 512×512-pixel images in about four seconds each using Stable Diffusion 1.5. With Stable Diffusion 1.5 Light, it dropped to just over 1.6 seconds per image generated. For text generation, here are a few of the results:

• When asked to write a long poem in 200 lines about the capitals of all countries in Europe, it took 0.24 seconds to output the result
• When given a code snippet and asked to explain the name of the algorithm and its complexity, it took just 0.23 seconds to output the result
• When asked to read a specific text passage and assign a positive, negative, or neutral label, it took 0.31 seconds to output the result
• When asked to give a detailed 500-word summary of a document, it took 0.54 seconds to output the result

While the Acer Nitro 16S AI works well enough for day-to-day tasks like web browsing and word processing, it is a gaming notebook, so we put it through its paces with a few of my favourite games.

Here are the average frame rates for the games I tested on the indicated graphics quality settings at the Nitro 16S AI’s default WUXGA (1920×1200) resolution. For these tests, I set video quality to the maximum setting and disabled VSync, leaving everything else at default settings:

• Dirt 5 (ultra high): 99 fps
• Forza Horizon 5 (extreme): 107 fps
• Gears 5 (ultra): 121 fps
• Gears Tactics (ultra): 204 fps
• Middle-Earth: Shadow of War (ultra): 134 fps
• Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition (ultimate): 276 fps
• Wolfenstein: Youngblood (Riverside – Mein Leben!): 166 fps
• Wolfenstein: Youngblood (Lab X – Mein Leben!): 146 fps

I also ran it through some 3DMark benchmarks, and it reported the following estimated game performance for a few other games:

• Battlefield V: 155+ fps
• Apex Legends: 140+ fps
• GTA V: 140+ fps
• Red Dead Redemption 2: 120+ fps
• Fortnite: 175+ fps

When it comes to cooling, the Nitro 16S AI gaming laptop has a dual-fan, quad-intake, quad-exhaust cooling system. The fans draw airflow from beneath the laptop and above the laptop keyboard and expel heated air from the back and sides.

As such, even though this is a budget-priced laptop, the RTX 5060 Laptop GPU is definitely a solid graphics card for a laptop and easily handled the games and programs I threw at it for testing. Granted, the fans do get a bit loud when pushing the limits of the graphics card and system, but that is what they are there for. Even after gaming for a couple of hours with the dual fans running at pretty much full blast, the system held up and didn’t feel overly hot.

Sound Quality: Balanced, crisp, and clear

One aspect of the Acer Nitro 16S AI that surprised me was the audio quality. With DTS:X Ultra Audio and Acer TrueHarmony, the sound is not only loud but also pretty balanced, crisp, and clear. When gaming without headphones, this definitely helps immerse you in whatever game you are playing, and Acer does a pretty decent job of this with this gaming laptop. The company achieves this with its TrueHarmony speakers, which feature paper cones framed by advanced foam. Not only does this add strength and flexibility, but it also results in more accurate sound reproduction. When coupled with equalizer tuning, the speakers output greater clarity, wider frequency range, and lower distortion.

As is usually the case with laptops, it could use a bit more bass, but overall, the sound wasn’t only acceptable on the Nitro 16S AI; it was more than acceptable.

Camera: Yay! 1080p resolution

Yay! The camera on the Acer Nitro 16S AI gaming laptop offers FHD 1080p resolution. There are still plenty of laptops these days sporting 720p HD, which is underwhelming, so it’s nice to see Acer toss in an FHD webcam here.

Battery Life: Mediocre, but expected

Battery life is the bane of gaming laptops, and that holds somewhat true with the Acer Nitro 16S AI, depending on what you are doing with it. When used for basic web browsing, video playback, and editing, the Nitro 16S AI lasted upwards of 6 hours before needing to be plugged in. When gaming, the battery drained much faster (as expected), and I was lucky to get around 3 hours out of it, depending on the game.

Price/Value: Solid value for what you get

The Acer Nitro 16S AI starts at $1,267 for the Ryzen 3/512GB storage option. Our review unit has an MSRP of $1,499.99 and is available on Amazon. Considering the prices of RAM and storage these days, the Acer Nitro 16S AI is definitely a solid entry-level gaming laptop for the price.

Should you buy it? The Verdict!

If you’re looking for decent gaming performance and not getting into 4K gaming any time soon, the Acer Nitro 16S AI is a solid choice that isn’t going to break the bank. Not only does it perform well for gaming, but it also features some useful AI and Copilot features to enhance productivity.