Tucked neatly into a bite-sized box, this small form factor Acer Nitro PC seems to have a bit of a Napoleon complex. An angry red LED eyebrow on the front of the machine sits next to the largest power button you've ever seen, as if to say, "Press this and I'll kill you." The mid-range CPU/GPU combo can handle itself in a host of 1440p games.

In theory, this combo should also be good for productivity-oriented tasks, but storage ruins that.

Augmenting a tiny 238GB PCIe SSD boot drive with an HDD (even 1TB) is frankly a mistake. Just choose a larger standalone boot SSD, which means you can't play the majority of today's games with the speedy load times that M.2 solid state drives offer. For example, the FFXIV Shadowbringers benchmark stuck at 32.9 seconds when loading from the hard drive.

Even if you manage to fit something on the SSD, load times are still around 12.7 seconds, which is still a bit short compared to other PCs in the same price range and even lower.

In the 3DMark storage benchmark, the SSD only managed a passing score of 1,381, while the HDD was a dismal 155. Basically, one would expect to spend a lot of time on read/write tasks. This is likely the main reason why the Nitro stumbled to a score of 5,757 in the PCMark 10 Express benchmark.

On the plus side, you can't buy these exact specs. Acer, in their infinite wisdom, decided to send us a machine that you can't buy for review. The system you can buy comes with a much more reasonable 512GB PCIe SSD for $1,300; the 1TB hard drive, while still slow on data transfer speeds, removes many of the Nitro 50's immediate problems.

PCMark scores are unlikely to change, indicating that general productivity is not its strong suit. However, the Aida64 Extreme benchmark score of 41,015 indicates that the dual-channel 16GB DDR4-3200 RAM can handle the stress of multitasking quite well.

This RAM will also give it a better chance with regard to gaming; if you spend most of the day installing games on your HDD (silly), the Nitro 50 can pack a punch with regard to gaming as well. This is thanks to a solid combination of entry-level core components: an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 (open in new tab) and an Intel Core i5 12400F (open in new tab).

System Benchmarks

Even for a previous generation CPU, the Core i5 offers a lot of performance, with a single-core Cinebench R23 score of 1,697 and a multi-core score of 11,595; testing with X264 v5.0.1 yielded an average of 34.5 fps. A composite performance of 14 fps was obtained. This all indicates the i5 12400F's excellent gaming potential. In terms of multi-core performance, the iBuyPower Core i7 12700f, which costs $200 more, is no match for the iBuyPower Core i7 12700f, but you might consider paying $200 more for a little more rendering time.

However, it struggled a bit in the 4K 3DMark Time Spy Extreme benchmark, with a CPU score of 4,068, not enough compared to the other machines we tested, but this is likely due to the RTX 3060's contribution.

In the actual gaming benchmark, the CPU averaged 82 fps in Hitman 3 Dartmoor. Compared to an average of 43 fps in "Metro Exodus Enhanced," this is not a terrible score. Performance on F1 22 with ray tracing turned on was a whopping 29 fps, but this test was done on a rainy Belgian track with anisotropic filtering set to x16 and graphics set to Ultra High. However, it never fell below 26 fps, so it is still playable. With a little tweaking of the settings, the machine's general philosophy of a smoother frame rate is definitely achievable.

The remaining gaming benchmarks were all run at 1440p on Ultra settings, and all were more than playable thanks to the core components, but an additional $99 for the NZXT Streaming PC would allow for an additional 20fps on Far Cry 6, 18fps on Hitman Dartmoor at 18 fps and Metro at 17 fps. Doesn't sound like much, but considering the excellent thermal efficiency and the more impressive (and larger) NVMe SSD, there is little to complain about.

Gaming Benchmarks

The main problem with high-powered components, however, comes in the form of heat dissipation; Nitro's small form factor case has minimal vents, which doesn't help in this regard; maximum CPU and GPU temperatures were in the low 80s, which is not the worst we have seen, and components do not melt, but it could be better.

In short, the Nitro is a great machine for gaming, but it has let us down storage-wise. The configuration we were hoping for in the lab was the $1,300 Nitro 50 with a larger SSD (opens in new tab), but Acer still feels the need to stuff a hard drive in there. Frankly, this machine performs about as well as the one in front of it, and with a larger boot drive, it would have scored much higher as well.

Of course, we would have been much happier with even one fast 1TB SSD than with the nonsense of adding spinning platters, but a 512GB drive is the bare minimum for a modern gaming PC. It would be easy to upgrade the storage later or add it to one of the two spare M.2 slots, but these storage shenanigans make the Nitro really hard to recommend.