Acer Aspire 5 (A515-51-58HD) Review - Review 2022

It'southward an eye-catching claim on the box and palm-rest sticker of the Acer Aspire 5 (A515-51-58HD): "20GB Memory." Can a $499.99 laptop really come with that much RAM? A second glance reveals the take hold of: In that location's only 4GB of system memory. The other 16GB is Intel Optane Retentivity, which serves every bit an intelligent cache to speed upwards the 1TB hard drive. (The organisation has no solid-state drive.) It works all correct; the Acer feels perkier than other PCs we've tried with v,400rpm SATA hard drives, though never equally swift as one with an SSD. Only Optane can't do anything nigh the Aspire 5'due south murky screen or other shortcomings. Our Editors' Option recommendation for a budget desktop replacement is even so that you spend $100 more for Acer's Aspire E 15 (E5-576G-5762), or $200 more for the Asus VivoBook S15 S530UA.

Pinstriped Plastic

The Aspire 5 is a 15.6-inch notebook styled in generic black plastic with chrome accents around the edges and a design of fine lines on the chapeau. It'due south slightly overweight but not an impossible burden at 4.63 pounds. (Compare that to iv pounds for the non-touch-screen Dell XPS 15, or 5.27 pounds for the Aspire Due east 15 ($649.99 at Amazon) , which has an optical drive.) And it's most as bulky equally the latter, at 0.85 by 15 by 10.4 inches (HWD).

Except for missing Thunderbolt three, which you lot shouldn't expect to find in an cheap laptop, anyway, the Aspire 5 has a skillful choice of ports. On the system's left side are a security lock, an Ethernet jack, a USB-C 3.i Gen 1 port, a USB 3.0 Blazon-A port with device charging, an HDMI video output, and an SD bill of fare slot. On the right are two USB 2.0 ports, an audio jack, and the connector for the Ac adapter.

Open the hat, and yous'll see the near-full-width silver hinge, etched with the give-and-take "Aspire" and able to open up a full 180 degrees. Medium-thick bezels surround the screen, while a chrome strip borders the touchpad. At that place'southward neither a face-recognition camera nor a fingerprint reader, so owners tin can't use Windows How-do-you-do to skip sign-ins. The webcam in a higher place the display renders done-out, slightly noisy images; I found my prototype improved considerably if I saturday further back from the laptop, only that put me out of arm'south length or typing range.

Acer touts the auto's TrueHarmony sound system, only music from the bottom-mounted speakers sounded flat to me, though it does get more than loud enough to fill a room. There's enough bass to give some boot to drums, and vocals are clear, but the overall effect felt canned.

Speaking of bottom-mounted, even so, the Aspire earns points for piece of cake-to-remove panels that give you interior access to upgrade the RAM and storage.

Hello? Hi? Is This Thing On?

Sadly, the Aspire's worst feature is its screen. Because the system'due south low price, it's definitely overnice to go a full HD (ane,920-past-1,080-pixel) native resolution instead of lowly 1,366 by 768, but in my first minutes with the Aspire I kept mashing the keys to plough upwardly the backlight, though information technology was already at its max—the screen is just plain dim, with even slightly shaded parts of images swallowed by the gloom.

Colors are muddy, and dissimilarity is weak. Details are reasonably clear thanks to the 1080p resolution, but information technology isn't an in-plane switching (IPS) panel, and so viewing angles are poor, especially along the vertical axis.

While the display isn't backlit enough, the keyboard's not backlit at all. That's endurable at this toll point, however, and the keys offering acceptable travel and a soft, plasticky typing experience. The cursor arrows are in an unfortunate HP-style row—half-size up and down arrows sandwiched between full-size left and right—instead of the proper inverted T, and the Delete central is a tiny affair above the left half of Backspace. But in that location are dedicated Home, Stop, Page Upwardly, and Folio Down keys at meridian right, and the comfy if somewhat hollow feel lets you move along at a skilful clip.

Acer backs the Aspire 5 with a one-year warranty and preinstalls a off-white amount of bloatware, from Amazon and Ebates to WildTangent games and a Dec 2022 build of Firefox.

Optimistic for Optane

As nosotros wrote in our review of the technology, Intel Optane Retentiveness (not to exist confused with the company'due south Optane SSDs) is a cut-edge kind of non-volatile retention that monitors program launches and other deejay operations to speed up your favorite tasks, giving a hard bulldoze some of the responsiveness of an SSD.

Run across How We Test Laptops

It'southward the real bargain: When I installed and loaded GIMP 2.10, exited and rebooted to make sure the app wasn't yet in system memory, and launched it over again, load time fell from 27 to 10 seconds. The same handling trimmed LibreOffice vi.1 from xvi to three seconds. In PCMark eight's deejay test, which runs each of its workloads iii times, the Adobe Photoshop fourth dimension dropped from 411 to 394 seconds.

On the other paw, 16GB can only do so much. Running the PCMark disk test in its entirety twice caused the score to go downward, not upward. (The 2d pass took 12 minutes longer than the first.) Subjectively, the Aspire rarely felt as lively every bit the many laptops I've tested with SSDs.

And its performance in our standard benchmarks was uninspiring, autonomously from a fine score of 3,277 in the PCMark Piece of work office productivity test. Hampered past its 4GB instead of 8GB of RAM, the Acer failed to keep upward with other laptops that carry the same 1.6GHz Cadre i5-8250U processor. It was downright boring in our Photoshop CS6 test, which involves loading and applying 11 filters and effects to a sample epitome.

Similar other laptops with Intel integrated graphics, it trailed the Aspire E 15 and its Nvidia GeForce MX150 discrete graphics in our visual benchmarks, landing at the back of the pack in our Sky and Valley gaming simulations. And it lasted for only six and a half hours of video playback in our battery rundown test, less than half the time of the E xv.

Hitting the $500 Ceiling

It's easy to tell laptop shoppers to concord out for 8GB of arrangement retentivity, a solid-land drive, and an IPS screen. It'due south a petty less like shooting fish in a barrel to tell them to coughing upward the money required for such a machine, so I'thou non unsympathetic to what Acer has tried to do with the A515-51-58HD, especially with the addition of Optane Retentiveness , which is a genuine booster to the hard drive. But it's not a magic bullet, and it'south no substitute for giving Windows the headroom of 8GB of RAM or giving users a brilliant display.

Acer offers numerous Aspire 5 models from $399 up. Studying the company's site will reveal some more tempting ones, worth skipping lunches and lattes for. In the meantime, our Acer and Asus Editors' Choice laptops remain worthy targets.

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Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/netbooks-products/29762/acer-aspire-5-a515-51-58hd-review

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