Acer Aspire 5 A515-54-30BQ review: A dual-core laptop that’s slim, light, and priced to move - christianwhournany
It won't win whatever travel rapidly records, but the Genus Acer Aspire 5 A515-54-30BQ makes for a compelling cut-price laptop all the same. This $400 model of the Aspire 5 packs a roomy full-HD display and a solid dual-kernel Intel CPU into a slenderize soma that weighs fewer than quartet pounds. Its smooth mean solar day-to-day performance and long battery life should keep productivity-minded users fortunate. You'll have to reconcile for some compromises, yet, including a incommodious 128GB solid-tell drive and vindicatory 4MB of RAM.
Terms and specifications
Genus Acer offers at least 22 configurations in its budget Aspire 5 line, ranging from $350 for a threefold-substance AMD Ryzen 3 3200U-powered model with a bare-finger cymbals 4GB of RAM and a 128GB solid drive, all the agency to $850 for a far beefier quad-core Core i7-8565 mannikin with a healthy 12GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and dedicated Nvidia GeForce MX250 graphics. Most Aspire 5 versions boast a 15.6-inch display (although I spotted at least one 14-inch modelling), with a mix of 1080p and 720p resolutions.
This $400 model that we're reviewing comes with a multiple-core Intel Core i3-8145U CPU, a Whiskey Lake CPU that offers a slightly higher boost speed while trimming the base clock rush along of its predecessor, the Core i3-8130U (Kaby Lake Refreshen) CPU from 2017. Minor differences excursus, some of these depressed-great power, dual-center processors deliver solid performance for mainstream computing tasks like web browsing and workings with Office documents, although they'll get a pugnacious time keeping pace with CPU-intensive tasks care video editing. If you're looking at for a laptop that can help you cut put together your 4K video chef-d'oeuvre, consider a system with at least a quad-core processor.
Ben Patterson/IDG This sleek, Nucleus i3-powered Aspire 5 boasts a slim profile and an aluminum lid.
Also inside this budget Aspire 5 is 4GB of DDR4 Jam, which is…non great, but non terribly unusual for such an inexpensive laptop. Just be aware that the Acer may start to chug if you've got also many programs or browser tabs running forthwith.
Similarly constrained is the mere 128GB of storage in the laptop's solid-express take, which leaves you a scant 90GB of free space once Windows and other various pre-installed apps are accounted for. You might glucinium able to produce that work if you depend on Dropbox, Google Drive, or other defile-based store services, but bon that the Aspire's 128GB SSD will close quickly if you establis too many programs or effort to transfer your playlists and exposure albums.
Back on the asset sidelong is the Aspire's roomy 15.6-inch expose with Sonorous HD (1920×1080) resolution. Its integrated Intel UHD Graphics 620 rump handle some casual gaming, although not much beyond Microsoft Mah-Jongg.
If you're looking for a laptop computer with a trifle Thomas More storage and power, consider the quad-gist, Gist i5-enabled version of the Aspire 5 with 8GB of Wa and a 256GB SSD, which we've reviewed here.
Innovation
Generally speaking, the laptops in Genus Acer's Shoot for 5 line feel dilutant and lighter than they really are, and this Substance i3 model of the Aspire 5 follows in the aforesaid footsteps. At just 0.7-inch thick and a shade under four pounds, the Draw a bead on 5 manages to feel for reasonably light, specially inclined its substantial 14.3-away-9.9-inch footprint.
Ben Patterson/IDG You sack lay the Acer Aspire 5 completely flat with the lid open.
The laptop's slim aluminum lid and narrowing shell gives it a natty look that belies its budget price tag. Orifice the lid reveals the 15.6-inch display with thin left and right bezels, a sleek Aspire logo along the laptop hinge, and a colorful chassis set off by the black keyboard. If the climate strikes you, you can bend the lid all the way dorsum and a little beyond 180 degrees, which means you can lay the Aspire completely unmodulated with the chapeau wide-eyed.
Happening the bottom of the Aspire 5 sits a pair of small speaker grilles near the front, on with a larger cooling vent near the back. The entire bottom instrument panel of the Aspire could potentially be distant by unscrewing 11 Phillips-head screws, patc an included spare hard drive bracket seems to hint that the laptop is substance abuser-upgradable. Unfortunately, while you could offer ahead and crack agaze the Aspire's chassis yourself, a message written on the cup of tea that holds the HDD bracket warns that doing so could void the warranty.
Ben Patterson/IDG You could unscrew the Aspire 5's bottom panel if you wanted to, simply doing then would probably void the laptop's guarantee.
Display
The roomy 15.6-in expose is a light spot, quite literally. Measuring 267.5 nits (operating room candelas) reported to our readings, the Draw a bead on's display manages to slightly exceed our 250-nit borderline brightness standard. Naturally, we've seen far brighter screens (arsenic in 300 nits and higher) in pricier laptops, but anything above 250 nits isn't bad for a budget model alike this. Puzzlingly, the Core i5-equipped model of the Draw a bead on that we reviewed has a uttermost dimmer display (sensible in a higher place 200 nits) despite costing $200 Thomas More.
Ben Patterson/IDG The Aspire 5's display boasts solidness viewing angles and thin bezels along the left and right sides.
We're likewise fans of the display's 1920×1080 resolution, which is perfect for a screen this size. The IPS (in-plane switch) instrument panel offers impressive viewing angles, making it prosperous to share the display with a neighbour.
Keyboard, trackpad, speakers and extras
The Core i3-supercharged model of the Shoot for 5 offers a roommate backlit keyboard, downright with a narrow 10-key fruit numeric keypad. The keys themselves felt close to type on, serving up a worthy bump and hearty rebound on each keystroke. Along the other hand, travel (a measure of how far the key travels on each stroke) felt a bit surface compared to otherwise productivity-apt laptops I've tested.
The Acer Aspire 5's roomy trackpad felt smooth and responsive during my examination, and it did a pretty good job at rejecting incidental inputs from my palms while I was typewriting (and indeed, its palm rejection was better than happening the pricier Core i5 model). The trackpad on this lower-end posture of the Aspire lacks an integrated fingermark proofreader, nonetheless.
Ben Patterson/IDG The backlit keyboard on the Aim 5 boasts a dedicated numeric keyboard, but its design is a bit squished.
The stereo speakers along the Aspire 5 sound sufficient for those on a budget laptop, with a respectable amount of contingent and a hyphen (albeit a reduced one) of bass. Given that we have a bun in the oven next to zipp when IT comes to speaker quality on sub-$1,000 mainstream laptops, the Aspire's speakers aren't bad, although they rump't hold a candle to external speakers.
Ports
The Aspire's selection of ports is bad unbroken for a budget organisation, although there's at least one astonishing deletion.
Starting on the left side, you get a Gigabit ethernet port for wired networking (something you don't often take care in a laptop this slim), along with a instinct HDMI interface, two USB 3.0 Type-A ports, and a single USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C port, William Christopher Handy for connecting the latest USB-C visored external storage devices (which you'll probably need, disposed the Aspire's cramped 128GB solid-state motor) and peripherals.
Ben Patterson/IDG Left-handed-root ports on the Aim 5 include a brace of USB 3.0 Type-A ports and a USB 3.1 Gen 1 Typewrite-C interface.
On the right, we've got a USB 2.0 Eccentric-A port, plus a combo audio jack.
What's absent? A well-stacked-in memory card reader, which way you North Korean won't be competent to access memory cards from your digital television camera or your Android earpiece without a USB adapter.
Ben Patterson/IDG On the right hand broadside of the Aspire 5 sit a USB 2.0 Type-A port and a combo audio jack.
Performance
We pitted this Core i3-enabled version of the Draw a bead on 5 against a series of else productivity-focused laptops in roughly the unchanged price run, including a trio of older Acers, a higher-end Lenovo IdeaPad with a quad-core Intel Congress of Racial Equality i5 processor, and the newer Draw a bead on 5 (the one we latterly reviewed) that also packs in a Core i5 CPU.
While most of the laptops in our carrying out charts benefit from quad-core Core i5 processors, this particular Aspire and its dual-core Core i3 buffalo chip manage to notch coagulated rafts for the types of applications that virtually of us perform day-to-day: entanglement browsing, dealings with Office, some video chatting, and maybe a round of chess or Simple Pezophaps solitaria. While the Aspire's results slightly lag those of other Core i3-enabled systems in our comparison, its performance still impressed us minded its budget Leontyne Price and slender profile.
PCMark 8 Work 2.0 Conventional
A test organized to mimic such mainstream applications as network browsing, papers editing, spreadsheet tinkering, and TV chatting, PCMark 8 measures how swimmingly a laptop can execute the kind of twenty-four hour period-to-day screen background chores that the Aspire 5 was clearly designed for. By and large speaking, a PCMark 8 score of 2,500 or higher means a given laptop should Be able to run Office and other everyday programs with ease.
Ben Patterson/IDG The i3-packing Acer Aspire 5 doesn't top our PCMark 8 performance chart, just it still easily passes our lower limit 2,500 mark for bland Office performance.
The PCMark 8 results for the Heart and soul i3 edition of the Aim 5 fall in the bottommost third base of our comparing chart, but the laptop stock-still cleared the 2,500 Gospel According to Mark without breaking a perspire. While the Core i5 model of the Aspire managed to top our chart with a fairly higher score, that doesn't bastardly the Core i5's everyday performance is dramatically better than that of the Core i3. In my active testing, running Business office happening the Core i3 and Core i5 models felt evenly smooth.
HandBrake
For our next test, we use the free HandBrake utility to convert a 40GB MKV video file into a format suitable for Mechanical man tablets, a CPU-intensive chore that tends to reward laptops with the nigh C.P.U. cores.
Given that the Core i3 processor in this version of the Aspire 5 is a dual-nucleus chip versus the quad-kernel Heart and soul i5 CPUs that mightiness most of the other laptops in our chart, we'd expect the Acer to fall somewhere in the back of the pack, and that's exactly what happened here. The Aspire 5 even strike down behind an older Congress of Racial Equality i3-powered Genus Acer E 15 with a slightly old Core i3-8130 CPU, simply the E 15 is considerably thicker and heavier than the Aspire 5, which makes it much easier to cool.
Ben Patterson/IDG The Aspire 5's sluggish Handbrake performance isn't a surprise minded its twofold-core Core i3 processor.
Stay fresh in listen, nonetheless, that our HandBrake test measures the rather performance that most mainstream users will rarely use. Now, if you demand to edit 4K television files or crunch the numbers in a bigger database, then yes, spending a few hundred to a greater extent for a space-core (or better) laptop may well be worth it. But if you're only provision on using the Aspire 5 for web browsing, Place, and maybe listening to a trifle Spotify, a duple-heart and soul laptop ilk this Core i3-equipped Aim 5 would be tolerable—and more affordable.
Cinebench
Another CPU-intense test, Cinebench measures how a laptop handles rendering a 3D image in real time. We trial a couple different versions of Cinebench: one that measures how well a laptop performs using all its processor threads (and again, this mode favors CPUs with the most cores), and another that measures single-thread performance.
Ben Patterson/IDG The Aim 5's all-threads Cinebench result fails to impress, just its solid single-train of thought score bodes will for its day-to-day performance.
Again, we see the Aim 5 and its three-fold-core Core i3 processor lag can its quad-center competitors in the all-duds Cinebench test, as well American Samoa behind the thicker, heavier Core i3-powered Acer E 15. However, its single-thread Cinebench consequence is correct in the mix with all the strange laptops in our graph, and that's all that matters when it comes to the day-to-solar day tasks you'd most likely perform on the Aspire 5.
3DMark Sky Diver
Atomic number 102 one always said the Center i3 version of the Aspire 5 is a gaming machine, equally the graphics-focused 3DMark Sky Diver quiz makes extravagantly clear. Comparable most of the laptops in our comparison chart, the Aspire 5 features Intel's integrated UHD Graphics 620 core, which does the job when it comes to basic desktop graphics and light Minesweeper-style gaming. For anything more diagrammatically intensive, you'll need to step up to a system with a devoted graphics card.
Ben Patterson/IDG With its nonsegregated Intel UHD Graphics 620 meat, the Aspire 5 clearly isn't a gaming laptop. The laptop computer at the top is the only one in the chart with a dedicated graphics card, by the way.
While the Aspire 5 comes in last in our roundup, the quad-core i5 laptops in our comparison chart don't perform a heck of a lot better, namely because they'rhenium besides burdened with integrated graphics. Leaps and bounds ahead of the rest is the Core i5-equipped Acer E 15, the unshared laptop in our chart with discrete graphics—in that case, the debut-level GeForce MX150 card from Nvidia.
Battery liveliness
We measure battery life in a laptop by looping a 4K picture using the trite Movies and TV app for Windows, with the laptop's brightness set to active 250 nits (or about the 95 percent mark for the Aspire 5) and volume set up to 50 percent, headphones on.
Ben Patterson/IDG You won't need to pack the Aspire 5's AC adapter for day trips with this forgiving of battery life-time.
The Aim and its 49 watt-hour battery ended up lasting about 9 hours and 45 minutes in our tryout, a lead that's bested in our chart only past the far pricier Asus ZenBook 13 and the Lenovo IdeaPad. The Acer E 15 gets a pegleg up thanks to its 62-W-hour battery. We'rhenium basically talking close to all-day battery sprightliness here, which means you put up leave the AC transcriber at home.
Bottom product line
The Core i3-powered version of the Genus Acer Aspire 5 offers middling fastness, and we like information technology had many storage, but this still manages to find the sweet spot between size up, power, and price. For $400, you get a slim and relatively brightness level build, smooth operation for everyday applications, a roommate 1080p display, and stack of battery liveliness. That adds up to a pretty good economic value.
Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/397866/acer-aspire-5-a515-54-30bq-review.html
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