Acer Unveils Nitro V 16 Gaming Laptop With Ryzen 8040 Hawk Point And RTX 40 Firepower

by · HotHardware

Acer's brand-new Nitro V 16 will be one of the first gaming laptops to offer AMD's upcoming Ryzen 8040 Hawk Point APUs. The Nitro V 16 can soon be had with up to a Ryzen 7 8845HS, which features eight Zen 4 cores, 12 RDNA 3 Compute Units, and the new Hawk Point NPU, which is the main selling point over the Ryzen 7040 Phoenix APU. Though the Nitro V 16 will boast some impressive AI performance from its Ryzen 8040 APU, it's not clear how useful that will be in a gaming laptop just yet.

Acer hasn't specified where the spec sheet for the Nitro V 16 starts, but we do know that its highest-end configuration will feature the Ryzen 7 8845HS, NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4060, 32GB of DDR5-5600 RAM, and a 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD. Its 16-inch display will have a 16:10 aspect ratio and a 165Hz refresh rate, and while Acer is quiet on the screen's resolution, we might expect there to be a 1080p and a 1440p version, as there is on the current Nitro 16.

Although the Ryzen 7 8845HS is numerically a full generation ahead of the preceding Ryzen 7 7840HS, for gaming it doesn't really offer any extra horsepower. Compared to the Ryzen 7040 APUs, codenamed "Phoenix", the "Hawk Point" chips use the same Zen 4 architecture, have up to eight cores, and even seemingly have the same frequencies.

The new NPU gives a big boost to generative AI on Hawk Point.

What the 8845HS does have is a much faster NPU, with 16 TOPS instead of the 10 on the 7840HS. However, the RTX 4060 alone has up to 60 TOPS of AI horsepower, so an extra six TOPS isn't exactly a huge boost. Still, for on-the-go AI computing, using the NPU inside of the Hawk Point APU instead of the RTX 4060 could be much more ideal.

Case in point, the Nitro V 16's webcam has Acer PurifiedView, an AI-powered filter to enhance visual quality, something that many webcams struggle with. The laptop also has a three-microphone array that includes PurifiedVoice noise reduction technology that likewise uses AI. Battery life on gaming laptops is often limited to begin with, so the boost in battery life from being able to use the APU's AI processor instead of powering up the discrete GPU might make a big difference.

The Nitro V 16 will be available in North America starting in March 2024, and the base model will cost $999. It comes to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa in April, and will start at 1,199 euros.