Acer Nitro V14 AI (2026) Review

Design and Keyboard

• Entirely white, plastic chassis
• Great port selection
• Tactile keyboard and trackpad

The Nitro V14 AI (2026) has almost a nostalgic look to it, with the entirely white chassis lending comparisons to laptops and notebooks from 20-odd years ago, although I’m a fan of the decision not to fall into the sea of black and grey that the modern gaming laptop market has become.

The chassis here is entirely plastic, which gives it a bit of a cheaper feel against other mid-range gaming laptops I’ve tested. Nonetheless, it helps to keep the weight down to a more modest 1.74kg, meaning this is one of the more portable gaming laptops you’ll find at this price.

Ports-wise, Acer hasn’t skimped on the Nitro V14 AI (2026)’s offering, with the left side coming with a USB4-capable Type-C port alongside a USB-A, full-size HDMI port, DC jack for power and a microSD card slot. The right side has a 3.5mm headphone jack and a further USB-A. You won’t find anything on the rear side, as it’s all just ventilation.

Opening up the admittedly quite light lid reveals a 75% layout keyboard, complete with a function row, arrow keys, and a single-column nav cluster. The keyboard provides a decent amount of travel and tactility, while its blue backlight is bright, although not the most even on some legends.

As for the trackpad, the Nitro V14 AI (2026) comes with one that’s a more moderate size, but impresses with a tactile click and decently smooth tracking. It’s solid for the most part.

Display and Sound

• Solid detail and smooth refresh rate
• Okay black level and contrast, and higher peak brightness
• Surprisingly decent speakers

In terms of screen, Acer has kitted the Nitro V14 AI (2026) out with a beefier screen in some respects than I may have anticipated. It features a 2560×1600 resolution for excellent detail alongside a smooth 165Hz refresh rate.

In my testing, it’s a generally solid screen with okay blacks and contrast out of the box for its panel type, with my colorimeter measuring 0.25 black level and 810:1 contrast at 50% brightness.

At peak brightness, the black level turns a little greyer to 0.40, while the needle isn’t moved on contrast. The 7200K colour temperature is okay, while the 403.9 nits of peak SDR brightness give images some solid vibrancy.

Colour accuracy here is solid, with 100% of the mainstream sRGB colour space meaning colours for productivity and gaming loads are perfectly represented, although 78% in both the DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB spaces mean this panel isn’t quite there for more colour-sensitive tasks.

As for its speakers, the Nitro V14 AI (2026) actually provides quite decent audio with good depth and volume, which is fine for casual listening. There isn’t too much bass, though.

Performance

• Decent 1080p and 1440p performance
• DLSS is a big helping hand for RT performance
• Solid RAM config, although slower SSD than anticipated

Acer has been quite modest with the power core inside this Nitro V14 AI (2026) machine, pairing a mid-range eight-core AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 processor with a Nvidia RTX 5060 GPU that should make for a potent machine for 1080p and 1440p gaming, not least considering the detailed 14-inch screen on offer.

The processor is the same you’ll find in one of the more recent Aspire 16 AI models, the Nitro 16S AI, and the Framework Laptop 13 (2025). The scores it achieved in both Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 are solid in terms of single-core speeds against its more powerful brother, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, while it remains competitive with Intel’s Panther Lake chips in single- and multi-threaded tasks.

The addition of a modern RTX 5060 laptop GPU helps this laptop’s case for more intensive 3D workloads, be it for design or, more intently, gaming. Its benchmark results provide a decent generational uplift over the older 4060-powered Nitro V16 laptop, arguably down to a boost in power from both the processor and graphics card.

In terms of gaming performance, 1080p performance is decent, with Cyberpunk 2077 at 71.42fps and Returnal at 61fps, while Rainbow Six Extraction at 129fps nearly maxes out the 165Hz refresh rate of this laptop’s screen.

Going up to 1440p, Cyberpunk 2077 dropped down by a surprising amount to 39.58fps, while Rainbow Six Extraction’s 89fps result continues to prove lighter, eSports-oriented titles aren’t a struggle even at a higher resolution.

Adding in the new DLSS Transformer upscaler pushed Cyberpunk 2077 up to 83.62fps at 1080p and up to 57.44fps at this laptop’s native 2560×1600 resolution, helping to boost frame rates by a decent degree.

Ray-tracing is a bit of a struggle for the 5060, though, with it reaching just 29.23fps at 1080p in Cyberpunk 2077 at its RT: Ultra preset, while native res provided a 14.55fps slideshow. DLSS provided a helping hand to nearly double the 1080p result to 57.44fps, and helped make native res RT: Ultra somewhat playable at 34.72fps.

Being a 50-series laptop also means this Nitro V14 AI (2026) benefits from Nvidia’s clever multi-frame-gen tech with the 5060 that’s present. With this, it adds up to three ‘fake frames’ for every ‘real’ frame rendered to increase your FPS to play well with high-refresh-rate screens. The results are reliant upon there being a high enough base frame rate to prevent displayed images from being choppy or there being horrible latency.

Running this test on RT: Ultra at 1080p revealed a result of 147.59fps, and on the Ultra preset with the maximum 4x frame gen, Cyberpunk 2077 went all the way up to 198.95fps.

My sample of this Nitro laptop came with a solid 32GB of RAM plus a decent 1TB SSD, which is somewhat surprising at its price given the current circumstances. Weirdly, it isn’t as brisk as I’d have expected, with measured reads and writes of 4804.15 MB/s and 3900.89 MB/s, respectively.

Software

• Decently clean Windows 11 install
• Enough AI horsepower to be a Copilot+ PC
• Some Acer-specific software installed

The Nitro V14 AI (2026) comes running Windows 11 and has enough AI horsepower to be considered a Copilot+ PC. This means you can access some of Microsoft’s special AI features that have been featured on most of the other recent ultrabook releases, such as the option for AI filters and generative image work in Paint and Photos, and the nifty Windows Studio webcam effects for auto-framing and maintaining eye contact.

There is a range of Acer-specific software pre-installed too, such as Acer JumpStart, which is essentially a hyperlink to the Acer website, while NitroSense allows you to check on your system’s vitals, fiddle with fan speeds and set different profiles depending on what kind of tasks you’re working on, be it office or gaming workloads.

Apart from this, there’s Dropbox and McAfee antivirus installed as additional programs, should you want or need them.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 6 hours 30 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for one working day

Acer is admittedly quite optimistic for the Nitro V14 AI (2026)’s battery life, rating it to last for up to eleven hours on a charge from its 76Whr cell. It’s a hefty cell, although with the components inside here, I suppose it needs to be.

In running the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery test at the requisite 150 nits of brightness, this Acer laptop lasted for six hours and 30 minutes before conking out, meaning you’ll get roughly one working day out of it with some hypermiling. That isn’t too bad, all things considered, although it isn’t as long as a more conventional ultrabook.

Acer bundles a hefty 135W DC charger with the Nitro V14 AI (2026) that’s brisk in getting go-juice back into the laptop. It took just 25 minutes to get it back to 50%, while a full charge took 75 minutes.

Should you buy it?