Which of these laptops should I buy?

August 24, 2021 5:00 PM

After many months of dithering (see previous Ask) I'm close to finally buying myself a badly-needed new laptop. I'll use it for video editing, game making, comics creation and other graphics-intensive tasks, along with lots of writing. I'll be buying this on Amazon because I've saved up nearly $1000 in Amazon gift cards. I'm hoping to find something for under $1500. I've narrowed down my choices to three computers and I could use some advice about which would be best, or if there's a better choice I'm missing.

Acer Nitro 5 AN517-54-77KG. This seems like it's probably the best choice to me, with the Intel Core i7-11800H and RTX 3050Ti, plus 1TB NVMe SSD. But I hear the keyboard doesn't have great contrast, especially when it's not backlit, and since I have to do a lot of writing I worry that would drive me nuts. It's also 17 inches, and the extra size will be useful for graphics stuff.


Acer Predator Helios 300 PH315-54-760S. Intel i7-11800H | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, 16GB DDR4, 512GB SSD. This would be my second choice. From my research the Nitro sounds better, but I'm not an expert and maybe there are reasons to go for the Predator.

Lenovo Legion 5 15 Gaming Laptop. 15.6", AMD Ryzen 7, 5800H Processor, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 512GB NVMe SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050Ti. My third choice. This one's the cheapest and I hear good things, but I had a refurbished Lenovo years ago and it gave me endless grief. Lots of repairs, and Lenovo's tech support sucked.

Note that while I'm open to suggestions for alternative models, I'd really prefer to buy from Amazon directly instead of vendors on Amazon.

posted by Ursula Hitler to Technology (9 answers total)

If at all possible, you might want to wait a few weeks. October/November is usually when companies refresh their laptop lines in time for Christmas, and you may have better options then..
posted by mhoye at 5:26 PM on August 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

If you haven't, you might want to watch video reviews that go into the lcd panels, and especially the different panels that might be available. Unfortunately, Amazon in particular generally makes it difficult to see which specific sku you're ordering unless you search by model number.

mobiletechreview is good, and I also liked dave2d's reviews.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:35 PM on August 24, 2021

My sons both have Nitro 5s, one a 15 inch and one a 17 inch, and they agree that the letters on the keycaps are virtually invisible without the keyboard lighting. However, you can set it so the light is on full time, and the brightness is variable via function keys (they are like me and prefer keyboard lighting to be on all the time). They both type a lot, and they both like their machines very much, at least judging by the time they spend on them, which is pretty much constant.
posted by lhauser at 5:43 PM on August 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

The Predator's advantage is its 3060 GPU, which is probably 20-30% more powerful than the 3050ti. But that only comes into play if the GPU is the bottleneck, which I suspect it will not be for most tasks at 1080p.

I'd probably go with the bigger display and larger drive.
posted by justkevin at 6:16 PM on August 24, 2021 [1 favorite]

What video editing suite are you using? Look up the list of approved (or preferred) video cards for the software.
posted by sardonyx at 6:45 PM on August 24, 2021

The Nitro seems fine and I would suggest just going with it. The 3050 ti is a bit less powerful than the 3060 but by even recent historical standards it's extremely capable. If you're mainly working from home and especially if you're writing a lot I'd suggest a second screen and an external keyboard, which makes the contrast on the built-in keyboard less of a pressing issue.
posted by implied_otter at 6:51 AM on August 25, 2021

Response by poster: What video editing suite are you using?

My current laptop is so old and janky that I've been using a circa-2010 version of Pinnacle for video editing, and my system struggles to handle that. So I'm likely to get the laptop and then figure out what editing program will work best with it, rather than the other way around.

I'm close to going for the Nitro, but I know that keyboard will bug me. Part of the problem with computer shopping like this is that it's really hard to find reviews for the specific models I'm looking for, with the specific configurations Amazon is offering. An FYI for anybody looking for laptops who finds this thread: the reviews on Notebook Check are helpful and obsessively thorough.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 1:40 PM on August 25, 2021

I don't use Premier, but I did turn to it as a reference when I was looking to buy my system since the free software I do use doesn't seem to publish a recommended chip list. In my case, instead of getting the slightly better video card (but way more expensive video card) I got the much bigger hard drive. My justification was that I don't do a ton of video editing, although I do some, but I've filled the hard drive on more than one laptop, so in the end, more storage was a better cost-benefit for me.

Just a note: after talking to tech support for unrelated reasons, they told me that video cards in laptops don't normally engage unless you've got a secondary monitor plugged in or unless you've instructed the machine (via the BIOS) to use the card to handle graphics processing. Apparently, my fancy NVIDIA card mostly just sits there doing nothing, while letting the Intel chip's onboard graphics handling component deal with my video editing and playing. It's some kind of "load balancing" (that's not correct term, but I can't remember what they actually said) setting that determines how the laptop directs the graphics-processing traffic. The way to see if that is happening is to run the performance monitor tool while you're doing video editing and see which resources are being put to use.
posted by sardonyx at 9:27 AM on August 26, 2021

It's some kind of "load balancing" (that's not correct term, but I can't remember what they actually said) setting that determines how the laptop directs the graphics-processing traffic.

Power management. Modern GPUs are really, really hungry.
posted by mhoye at 3:27 PM on August 27, 2021