Acer Aspire 5 Review – Smooth hardware for your money

Cons

• Weak screen construction
• Two USB 2.0 connections
• Useless ‘hard drive space’

A few years ago it was as if every Acer laptop carried the type name ‘Aspire’. Saying you had an Aspire laptop meant about as much as answering “a red” when asked what kind of car you have. Fortunately, Acer decided to introduce the names Swift, Spin and Switch to bring some clarity to the naming. The Aspire name did not disappear, but has remained for the ‘normal’ laptops and is followed by the number 1, 3, 5 or 7, which indicates in which price range the laptop falls.

In this review we look at an Aspire 5, which is one step below the top model, the Aspire 7. The Aspire 5 is available in different versions, the cheapest of which costs about six hundred euros. The version we discuss in this review costs seven hundred euros and for that money you get a pretty well-equipped model, which is equipped with a Core i5-8250U processor, 8GB of memory, a 256GB SSD and an MX130 video card.

Housing and connections

Acer has put that hardware in a ‘regular’ 15″ housing. The Aspire 5 therefore does not have any special thin screen edges or a thin housing and with a weight of two kilograms, it is a laptop that you will not easily take with you. The exterior of the the laptop is largely made of plastic, a saving compared to the more expensive Aspire 7. The use of the cheaper plastic immediately takes its toll on the sturdiness of the screen, which feels quite weak and is easy to twist and press. you normally don’t put your laptop on, but can happen unintentionally in a tight bag or when opening the screen.

At first glance, the connections are as you would expect them to be on a 15″ laptop. There are HDMI, Ethernet, an SD card reader and a lot of USB ports, but closer inspection yields some disappointment. The two right USB connections support up to USB 2.0 speeds, the USB-C connection does not support alternate modes and cannot be used for charging, and the HDMI connection supports the 1.4 version of the protocol, but not 2.0. We often use laptops with Intel GPU, but USB 2.0 connections are now really old-fashioned.In addition, you may wonder what the point of a USB-C connection is if it adds nothing to the regular USB-A except for the connector -connection.

Hardware and Benchmarks

At the time of writing, there are 22 versions of the Aspire 5 with model number A515-51(G) in the Pricewatch. It goes a bit far to quote all the configurations in this review, but the bottom line is that the differences between the models can be found in the processor, the working memory, the GPU and the storage. The simplest models have a Core i3-6006U processor, while there are also versions with i5 and i7 processors, and of course variants with quad cores, in the form of the i5-8250U and i7-8550U. The video card is an Intel-igp, Geforce MX130 or MX150, while the working memory is 4 to 8GB. All versions are equipped with an SSD, with the storage being supplemented in some cases with a hard disk. In all cases, the screen has a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels and this model uses an IPS panel,

Some versions of the Acer Aspire A515

The version we tested is equipped with an MX130 GPU, a rebrand of the 940MX, which, unlike the faster MX150, does not use a Pascal GPU, but has to make do with an outdated Maxwell GPU. The version with MX150 GPU is slightly more than five tens more expensive than the tested version and, depending on the benchmark, is fifteen to fifty percent faster than the MX130. The fact that many other versions of the A515 have a hard disk in addition to the SSD made us suspect that the 55SC model could easily be fitted with an extra hard disk, but that turned out to be disappointing.

There’s even a hatch under the laptop’s housing under which the hard drive would fit, but there’s no SATA connection, which makes that upgrade impossible, unless you can somehow get hold of the right cable. Whether the sata connector is also missing in other Aspire 5 models is not clear. In two different versions of the Aspire 7, colleagues from Hardware.info encountered the connector in one and not in the other. So it seems to differ per version.

In addition to a hatch for the ‘hard disk’, there is also a hatch in the bottom to upgrade the working memory. Below that on our model is a 4GB module, meaning the other 4GB is soldered to the motherboard. It also means that you can only replace one module and therefore expand to 12 or 20GB in total.

Next to the working memory slot is the m2 SSD, an SK Hynix SC308, which is a fairly standard ahci SSD. In terms of speed, it cannot match an NVMe SSD, such as the Samsung PM961, but it is of course much faster than a conventional hard disk, so that the laptop still feels smooth. The wireless network card, positioned between the battery and fan, is also not a special one. The Qualcomm QCA9377 supports WiFi-ac and mu-mimo, but is limited in speed and range due to its single antenna.

The Aspire 5 performs as expected in the benchmarks. In Cinebench, the Vivobook S15 with the same processor is a lot faster, but that doesn’t say everything, as we found out when we put different laptops with the same processor next to each other . The Aspire 5 therefore performs as expected in Lightroom and Photoshop. The score of the SSD in the PCMark Storage test is not impressive, but we did not expect that from the SC308 SSD either.

Image quality and battery life

All of Acer’s A515 models feature a full-HD matte display and use an IPS panel, which is how we like it. The resolution produces a nice sharp image for a 15.6″ laptop and the IPS screen provides good viewing angles, while the matte finish prevents reflections. If we then use our SpectraCal C6 colorimeter and CalMAN 5 software to measuring the screen, the maximum brightness turns out to be disappointing, which can therefore fall short in a lot of ambient light.The contrast comes out at a very nice 1337:1.