If you're fixated on families of premium laptops laden with fancy features, but finding them far out of your range, meet the Acer Aspire 5: the frugal, old-school uncle of machines. It's a straightforward, general-use notebook PC at a reasonable price. This laptop starts at $569.99, while our ticked-up $699.99 tester (model A515-44-R2SA) comes with a snappy Ryzen 7 processor and a 512GB SSD, plenty of storage for a budget-friendly machine. The design is basic, but it lacks any big faults, and you get a wide array of ports around the body. The Aspire 5 doesn’t excel in any one area, but it’s a competent laptop with an inoffensive look, and its peppy performance and slate of features should suit day-to-day productivity needs. The Asus VivoBook S15 remains our Editors’ Choice, for a more exciting design and longer battery life at the same price, but this machine also delivers good value.
Rocking It Old-School
The design of the Aspire 5 is plain and generic, but I wouldn’t take this to be a bad thing, as a general-use laptop should be able to fit in most any environment. The chassis is silver all around, with a contrasting black keyboard and a shiny silver Acer logo on the lid.
The chassis is made entirely of plastic on the lid, bottom, and keyboard deck, which is unsurprising at this price point. It doesn’t feel overtly cheap, though, even if it’s not quite as nice as the Asus VivoBook S15 in either feel or styling. On the whole, it's an unremarkable, but also inoffensive and serviceable, build. You'll feel a little flex on the lid, and if you push around the keyboard edges, but it's not something that should bother anyone in normal use.
If you’re looking to make the Aspire 5 your daily driver, you’ll be wondering about the portability. It measures 0.71 by 14.3 by 9.9 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.19 pounds. This is reasonably mobile for a laptop with a 15.6-inch screen, short of featherweight ultraportables that weigh between two and three pounds, but practical for throwing in a bag or backpack for a commute or school. Those more-mobile options are better if portability is your primary concern, but for a laptop with a 15.6-inch screen that’s easier to work on, this is a good size. The VivoBook S15 does come in a bit lighter and thinner (0.63 by 14.1 by 9.2 inches and 3.97 pounds), but the margins aren’t drastic.
Similar Products
Asus VivoBook S15 (S533)
Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 14
Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 (15-Inch)
Dell Inspiron 13 5000 (5391)
The display on this laptop is very straightforward. It’s an IPS panel with a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) native resolution. The panel lacks touch input, and in this price tier, no other fancy features are included. The picture quality is decent, but I wouldn’t say a strong suit—it’s not quite as sharp or as bright as other mainstream-laptop screens I’ve tested, but serviceable. The bezels are reasonably thin on the sides (not as slim as those on more premium machines), with a thicker border up top.
The keyboard is comfortable, with responsive keys that have more travel than you may expect, and a bit of feedback. There’s no audible click or full mechanical response, but you can feel them actuate, which is much better than a shallow or mushy keyboard. They’re lit with simple white backlighting, which you can toggle on or off, with no adjustable brightness levels.
The touchpad, too, is very simple, a one-piece plastic patch with no dedicated click buttons. It pans smoothly and responds well to touch and clicks, with no signs of looseness or flimsiness. It’s not the largest touchpad you’ll ever see on a 15-inch laptop, but it does the trick.
Rounding out the physical build are the ports, of which there are plenty. On the left, you'll spot twin USB 3.0 Type-A ports, a USB Type-C port, an HDMI output, and a "jaw"-style Ethernet jack...
The right side has one more USB 3.0 port, as well as the headphone jack. I’d say this array is above average, particularly the Ethernet jack. I’m also glad that when I looked at the ports, I was looking for the USB-C port, rather wondering if there would be a USB-C port. It has taken a while for these to become ubiquitous, but it’s gotten to the point where I do expect them to be on even entry-level laptops.
As noted up top, our tester model of the Aspire 5 (sold on Amazon) is the A515-44-R2SA, which comes with an AMD Ryzen 7 4700U, 8GB of memory, and a 512GB SSD. Acer’s MSRP is $699.99, though Amazon was offering it for $729.99 at the time of writing. There’s a lesser configuration available on Amazon as well, the A515-44-R41B, which comes with a Ryzen 5 4500U processor, 8GB of memory, and a 256GB SSD for $569.99.
Testing the Aspire 5: Ryzen Revs Up
We put the Aspire 5 through its paces with our usual suite of benchmark tests, and compared the results to those of relevant competing laptops. You’ll find their names and specs in the chart below to see what it’s up against.
The Asus VivoBook S15 I've mentioned throughout this review is not only our Editors’ Choice but the most similarly priced system, also $699. After that, there are some price gaps here. The biggest one is the leap to the 15-inch version of the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3, which is a worthwhile inclusion because it’s a good and popular laptop, but the particular unit we reviewed was a pricey $1,699, way more than double the Aspire's price. Its metal build is superior, but you may be surprised at the processor performance results to come. The Surface Laptop 3 doesn’t have to be that expensive, though: You can get a configuration that is closer in price to the Aspire 5.
Outside of that, these laptops fall within the same price range, demonstrating a variety of prices and sizes. The Dell Inspiron 13 5000 (5391) is a smaller machine, but since the model we tested is priced right in line with the Aspire 5 machine, at $685, it's useful to see what else you can get for the same amount of money. Finally, the highly rated Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 14 gives us a look at a very solid convertible alternative, a 14-inch Ryzen-based hybrid at a lower $600 price point.
Productivity, Storage, and Media Tests
PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the system's boot drive. Both tests yield proprietary numeric scores; higher numbers are better. (See more about how we test laptops.)
This Ryzen 7 processor ends up being the best of the bunch here. The small margin over the Lenovo won’t make any difference, but versus the other three laptops, the difference is enough that you could notice it on day-to-day tasks. You’ll see this trend continue on the more intensive media tests.
Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that's highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video (the open-source Blender demo movie Tears of Steel) to a 1080p MP4 file. It's a timed test, and lower results are better.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and add up the total. As with Handbrake, lower times are better here.
As you can see, the Aspire 5 and its Ryzen 7 are the winners across the multimedia tests. It didn’t blow away the competition in every case (Photoshop was largely close), so it’s hardly in a class of its own, but was the fastest across the three tests on average when you can engage all of the Ryzen 7's cores. None of these laptops is exactly equipped to be a professional editing machine, to be sure, but the Aspire 5 will be faster at odd jobs or impromptu edits you need to make. Professionals or students with very taxing media workloads should look at a more powerful machine, but this is one of the more efficient options for everyday users who need occasional CPU muscle.
Graphics Tests
3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks. Sky Diver is more suited to midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff. The results are proprietary scores.
Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this case, it's rendered in the eponymous Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario for a second opinion on each laptop's graphical prowess.
While the Aspire 5 wasn’t bad on these tests, it did not stand out like it did on the CPU benchmarks. The integrated Radeon graphics are right in the middle of the pack, with the IdeaPad Flex 5 14 and the Surface Laptop 3 a moderate step above the rest. (The Flex 5 14 and Surface machines likely outpaced the Aspire 5 thanks to their generous 16GB of RAM helping matters along.)
None of them should be relied on for professional 3D work or enthusiastic AAA gaming, though. You’ll want a dedicated GPU for those tasks, which adds at least several hundred dollars to the cost. If you are interested in a gaming laptop that won’t break the bank, check out our list of the best cheap gaming laptops. They start at a little above the price of our $699 Aspire 5 test model.
Battery Rundown Test
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop in airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the same Tears of Steel short we use in our Handbrake test—with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system quits.
The battery life on the Aspire 5 didn’t break any records, but it is perfectly usable. It’s technically the shortest among this group, but 10 or 15 minutes of runtime is normal variance between runs, essentially a tie. Nearly 11 hours of battery life is great for using off the charger at home without worrying about plugging in, or for taking with you on a trip. If the Aspire 5 will be your go-to machine for commutes, a day of classes, or travel, it will last a good while, even if it’s not the most compact laptop in the world.
A Straightforward, Affordable Daily Driver
The Acer Aspire 5 doesn’t have any big flaws, delivering on more or less exactly what it claims to. The price is reasonable, the processor is zippy compared to the competition, and you get plenty of ports. Not compromising your way into a big hole is half the battle with lower-cost laptops, and the Aspire 5 negotiates the course successfully.
That said, it doesn’t do anything especially noteworthy, either. The Ryzen 7 processor is one potential exception to that, but even that doesn’t go far enough to put this laptop into a class of its own. The keyboard and the port selection are the other biggest positives, but it’s otherwise unremarkable in build and feature set. That’s not to say the Aspire 5 is a bad laptop, by any means, but merely a comment on the strength of the competition. The Asus VivoBook S15 offers a more exciting style, a slimmer build, and longer battery life. It remains our Editors' Choice in this price range. But if you prefer the Aspire 5’s look, or if you feel strongly about having AMD silicon powering your day-to-day and delivering a slight CPU-grunt advantage, it’s a very reasonable alternative to Asus' colorful winner.
The Acer Aspire 5 is a no-fuss, general-use laptop with a simple design, a generous port selection, and Ryzen 7 pep. It lacks any standout aspect or feature, but it does the job well at a reasonable price.
Like What You're Reading?
Sign up for Lab Report to get the latest reviews and top product advice delivered right to your inbox.
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.
Thanks for signing up!
Your subscription has been confirmed. Keep an eye on your inbox!
Sign up for other newsletters
