Search

The Acer Nitro 65 model I'm reviewing, with Ryzen 9 9900X CPU, RTX 5070 GPU, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB SSD, costs $2,304.99 regularly at Best Buy, although it seems to enjoy frequent sales that drop it closer to $2,100 or less. I'm always curious to see how that compares to building your own system, so I went ahead and put something together using the same (or as similar as possible) components. I used a $150 HYTE X50 case (because it's awesome), a $120 motherboard, and left about $200 to $300 for a 1TB SSD. That comes out to $350 to $450 on top of the $1,611 cost at PCPartPicker. Add some RGB case

Acer is definitely making money on the Nitro 65, but as I laid out above, the margin isn't as big as some might expect. So, where are the corners being cut to make up the difference? The first thing that stands out to me is the no-name PSU. It's non-modular, making it harder to upgrade, and it's tough to judge what sort of quality it is. Acer lists it as 850W 80+ Gold, which just means it's fairly energy efficient and has plenty of power for the installed hardware and for future upgrades. Its actual durability remains questionable. If I were buying this PC, I'd definitely replace the PSU with

I'm focusing less on performance here since the PC uses standard components. The RTX 5070 and the Ryzen 9 9900X perform just like they should. Here are some benchmarks so you can see how the hardware compares to other stuff we've recently tested. Note that I've included two Ryzen 9 9900X scores in one graph. The higher score comes from testing we did on an open test bench using an NZXT Kraken AiO liquid cooler. That could explain some of the multi-core performance difference. Image 1 of 4 As for the Lexar GPU, it reached 6,052MB/s read and 5,063MB/s write speeds in my testing. These aren't the

Image 1 of 2 The Nitro 65 comes packed with expanding foam around the CPU cooler and GPU, with an extra foam insert around the GPU to keep it stable; it otherwise has no additional support. There are no evident problems with assembly, and because it's packed in so tightly, I made no adjustments before booting the PC for the first time. Pulling off the back panel reveals rather tidy cable management. Zip ties are used, so you'll likely need to clip and replace those if you decide to make some internal changes, but there are a couple of Velcro strips thrown in around the main channels. Because t