The Acer Aspire 5

Summary: The Acer Aspire 5 is one of the best budget full-size laptops you can find in stores today. It checks most of the right boxes: well built, slim and fairly light, gets a decent keyboard, an IPS screen and modern hardware, performs well, runs cool and quiet and lasts for a long while on a charge. It's not without a couple of flaws, but none are real deal-breakers or surprises for a under $500 device, that's why this notebook gets a good rating and our recommendation. Read on for the whole story.

THE GOOD

• well made, thin and light
• decent keyboard and excellent trackpad
• gets an IPS screen that leans back to 180 degrees
• runs cool and mostly quiet
• pretty good speakers
• affordable price tag

THE BAD

• rather dim and color deficient panel
• non-backlit keyboard
• sharp edges can get uncomfortable
• keep an eye on performance, had some issues with our sample
• slow wi-fi, especially at range

While this has somewhat changed recently, Acer laptops have been historically known for their affordable price tags and overall solid value for the money, albeit with a few cut corners here and there, perfectly normal for budget devices.

This article is about one such device, the Aspire 5 A515-51 series that Acer released around mid-2017 and from what I can tell, is an update of their popular Aspire E15-575 series. That means the Aspire 5 is a 15-inch laptop that sells for between $400 and $600, runs on Intel Core U hardware platforms and offers good-enough screens, keyboards, IO and battery life. As for those cut corners aforementioned, I can list the lack of a backlit keyboard, a mostly plastic construction and a rather slow Wi-fi connection, but none are actually deal-breakers in this price class if you ask me.

We got to test the higher end model of the Aspire 5 A515-51 in the last few weeks, with a Core i7 CPU, matte IPS screen and hybrid storage, and we’ll tell you all about it in the article below.