Acer Nitro 16S AI Review

Design and Keyboard

• Slim, minimalistic chassis
• Excellent port selection
• Decent keyboard and trackpad

The Nitro 16S Ai doesn’t move the needle too much from its predecessor in design, sticking with a minimalistic finish and solid build quality that gets the job done. The chassis is a blend of plastic and aluminium for a more premium finish in places, although it can attract fingerprints in places.

A weight of 2.18kg isn’t wholly unreasonable for a larger gaming laptop, while a sub-20mm thickness keeps it surprisingly thin and slender, helping its portability. It seems Nvidia is pushing for thinner gaming laptops with discrete GPUs inside in a general sense, and this Acer choice goes some way to helping that idea.

In spite of a thinner chassis for a gaming laptop, the Nitro 16S AI doesn’t skimp on its port selection. The left side has wired Ethernet, plus a USB-A, microSD reader and headphone jack, while on the right you’ll find a further pair of USB-A ports. The rear is home to a DC port for power, plus two USB-C ports and an HDMI port.

Opening the lid of this laptop up reveals a decent full-size keyboard, complete with arrow and navigation keys, plus a number pad and function row. It’s fully RGB-backlit with bright lighting, plus it feels tactile under the finger with a quieter and responsive keypress.

The trackpad here is generally slick and is quite large in size, too, providing my fingers enough real estate for gestures and general navigation. 

Display and Sound

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

In keeping with its more affordable vibe, the Nitro 16S AI features a mid-range IPS panel with a 2560×1600 resolution for solid detail and a 180Hz refresh rate for decently smooth motion.

In my testing, it’s a generally solid screen with deeper blacks and reasonable contrast out of the box for its panel type, with my colourimeter measuring 0.11 black level and 1100:1 contrast. At peak brightness, the black level turns a little greyer, while the needle isn’t moved on contrast. The 6800K colour temperature is okay, while the 47.2.4 nits of peak SDR brightness give images some real vibrancy.

Colour accuracy here is decent, with 99% of the mainstream sRGB colour space, meaning colours for productivity and gaming loads are virtually 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 16S AI delivers quite decent audio, with good depth and volume, which is fine for casual listening. There isn’t too much bass, though.

Performance

• Surprisingly brisk 1080p and 1440p performance
• DLSS is a big helping hand for RT performance
• Decent RAM and speedy SSD config

Acer has been quite modest with the power core inside this Nitro 16S AI machine, pairing a mid-range eight-core AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 processor with an Nvidia RTX 5060 GPU that should make for a potent machine for 1080p and 1440p gaming.

The processor is the same you’ll find in both the Acer Aspire 16 AI and the Framework Laptop 13 (2025), and is one I’ve been impressed with in a general sense. 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, in dearer large ultrabooks such as the Asus Zenbook S 16 (2024). It’s also faster than the Core Ultra 7 258V chip in single-core scores that you’ll find in smaller ultrabooks.

The multi-core performance is good too, sitting somewhere between the M3 and M4 MacBook Airs, meaning this laptop is reasonably up to snuff for more intensive tasks on the CPU side.

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.

1080p performance is strong, with Cyberpunk 2077 at 85.27fps and Returnal at 88fps, while the 167fps result achieved in Rainbow Six Extraction proves this laptop can power through more competitive titles without really breaking a sweat.

Going up to 1440p, both Cyberpunk 2077 and Returnal remained especially playable with 52.49fps and 63fps at their top, non-ray-traced presets. Rainbow Six Extraction was still especially strong at 112fps.

Adding in the new DLSS Transformer upscaler pushed Cyberpunk 2077 up to 96.37fps at 1080p and up to 68.47fps at this laptop’s native 2560×1600 resolution, helping to boost frame rates a decent degree.

Ray-tracing is a bit of a struggle for the 5060, though, with it reaching just 31.57fps at 1080p in Cyberpunk 2077 at its RT: Ultra preset, while native res provided a sub-10fps slideshow. DLSS provided a helping hand to nearly double the 1080p result to 54.30fps, and helped make native res RT: Ultra somewhat playable at 31.57fps.

Being a 50-series laptop also means this Nitro 16S AI can benefit from Nvidia’s clever multi-frame-gen tech with the 5060that’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.

For whatever reason, running this test on RT: Ultra didn’t yield any real return, but on the Ultra preset used otherwise and the maximum 4x frame gen, Cyberpunk 2077 went all the way up to 172.68fps.

My sample of this Nitro laptop came with a solid 32GB of RAM plus a decent 1TB SSD at this mid-range price. It’s also a generally brisk SSD in my testing, with reads and writes of 7001.01 MB/s and 6103.83 MB/s, respectively.

Software

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

The Nitro 16S AI comes running Windows 11, and given the -AI suffix, it probably comes as no surprise that this laptop 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, Dropbox and McAfee antivirus are installed as additional programs, should you want or need them.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 9 hours in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for one working day

With the Nitro 16S AI, Acer quotes around six hours of use from its 76Whr cell, which is needed to power the beefier components inside. That’d work out to just shy of one working day of use, and would be reasonable for a gaming laptop of this kind.

In dialling the brightness down to the requisite 150 nits and letting the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery test run, I was pleasantly surprised to find this Acer laptop lasted for nine hours exactly. That’s 50% longer than Acer’s own quoted figure, and nearly meets our general ten-hour target for more productivity-oriented laptops.

As a gaming laptop, the Nitro 16S AI comes with a hefty 230W DC power brick that hampers its portability somewhat, and it isn’t as fast to charge the laptop back up as you may expect. It took an hour to get it back to 50 percent, while a full charge took 126 minutes.

Should you buy it?