Acer Nitro V 16 gaming laptop is the first to be powered by Ryzen 8040 CPU

In brief: Acer just spilled the beans on its upcoming Nitro V 16 gaming laptop, which is one of the first laptops to be powered by an AMD Ryzen 8040 series processor. The company says it's the perfect device for casual gamers who are looking for a well-balanced device that can do work and play and support the latest AI-powered technologies.

AMD announced the Ryzen 8040 series "Hawk Point" CPUs earlier this week at the Advancing AI event in San Jose, California. The new processors supposedly deliver up to 1.4 times the performance in some generative AI applications when compared to the Ryzen 7040 series. Otherwise, they utilize the same Zen 4 CPU cores coupled with an RDNA 3 graphics engine, with many Ryzen 8040 processors sporting similar clock speeds to those of their predecessors.

Acer's upcoming Nitro V 16 laptop will go up to a Ryzen 7 8845HS, which is an 8-core 16-thread part with a maximum boost clock of 5.1 GHz and a cTDP of up to 54 watts. The "5" in the name means it's an upper-tier CPU in its segment, while the "4" indicates the Zen 4 architecture. It's all part of a new and somewhat confusing naming scheme AMD adopted last year that rival Intel recently compared to snake oil salesmen.

A bigger highlight of the Nitro V 16 is that you'll be able to configure it with an Nvidia RTX 4060 Laptop GPU, giving you access to technologies like DLSS 3.5. Our own Tim Schiesser was reasonably impressed with DLSS 3.5 ray reconstruction, which has almost no impact on performance in titles like Cyberpunk 2077.

RAM on the Nitro V 16 goes up to 32 gigabytes of DDR5-5600 memory, and you can have up to two terabytes of PCIe 4.0 SSD storage. The 16-inch 16:10 screen sports a 165 Hz refresh rate and a 3 ms response time, and you can choose between a 2650 by 1600 panel or a 1920 by 1200 variant which should afford you more frames in competitive games.

Related reading: The best laptops for gaming on-the-go

Connectivity options include a pair of USB 3 Type-A ports, a USB 4 Type-C port, an HDMI port, and a microSD card reader. The laptop will also support Wi-Fi 6E for wireless connectivity.

Acer says the Nitro V 16 will be available in North America starting in March 2024 at a starting price of $999 and in Europe starting in April 2024 with a base price of €1,199. To sweeten up the deal, the company is also throwing in one month of Xbox Game Pass, which will notably include Activision Blizzard titles sometime next year.

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For a 16" laptop that is much larger in the vertical dimension that most 16" laptops, the specs really aren't that impressive. I also can't believe that AMD would say that DDR5-6000 is the "optimum" speed for zen 4 chips but limit it in a laptop to 5600. Maybe the half backed specs put in this thing are to make room for all the AI the plan to put in it?

I mean, for $1000 for the base model I don't see it as bad, but I don't see a 4060 and 32GB of ram with an 8845HS in there for a grand. It'll like have 8gb of ram and an 8040 APU for $1000.

if a 4060 and 32GB of ram is really what they're going to have in the top end model I have a hard time seeing this as a "gaming" laptop. Really not much to see here...