Acer Aspire 5 Slim A515-43-R19L Laptop Product Review
When it comes to gaming on a budget, the Acer Aspire 5 Slim is certainly up there. This laptop retails at a little over $300 and its one of the most well-reviewed laptops on the market for its price range. We'll take a look at the hardware, the design and the overall feel of what makes this laptop so attractive to those in search of a budget laptop.
7
Review Of Acer Aspire 5 Slim A515-43-R19L Laptop
- Acer Aspire 5 Slim Screen
- Acer Aspire 5 Design And Feel
- Acer Aspire 5 A55-43-R19L Performance Review
- Conclusion
Acer Aspire 5 Slim Screen
The Acer Aspire provides Full HD IPS display on a brilliant 15 inch monitor. IPS is the go to screen hardware technology, which provides the best viewing angles and better colour display. Whilst it won't feel like a retina display on a Macbook Pro, for it's price, this is a pretty good display. The bezel around the edge of the screen is minimalistic, maximising your visualised area. It provides a standard 60hz refresh rate (anything more and the laptop's hardware wouldn't be able to handle it).
Of course, with most Laptops these days you get some fanciful features that they try to lure you in with; the Acer Aspire 5 Slim comes with BlueLightShield, designed to help keep your eyes free from strain from long sessions staring at the screen. It also has Acer Color Intelligence, which is the software behind the screen that helps produce this great display.
Acer Aspire 5 Design And Feel
Overall, this laptop feels like it should be worth more than it is. It has a premium "slim" feel, the type that you find with Macbook Pros. The fact that this laptop doesn't pack in high-end hardware, means the laptop can be incredibly thin and not overheat. It's also incredibly lightweight, weighing in at just under 4 pounds (That's a whole pound less than our Lenovo Ideapad laptop review).
The backlit keyboard doesn't look out of place with a Macbook Pro. It has that classic black look and is also able to squeeze in the number pad keys also. This laptop also comes with a classic trackpad and a front-facing camera eyehole so that you can video-chat (or if you're like me, stick something over it!).
Acer Aspire 5 A55-43-R19L Performance Review
When a laptop is priced around the $300 mark, you have to wonder what kind of performance you're going to get from it. It certainly won't have enough juice to play the latest games in high settings, but can it perform well as a general laptop?
The Acer Aspire 5 is equipped with a mobile processor, the AMZ Ryzen 3 3200U. This is a dual-core processor that can hit speeds of up to 3.5Ghz with a general clockspeed of around 2.6 Ghz. This processor does not have hyperthreading, so you are stuck with the two cores and any applications that benefit from hyperthreading won't get that performance boost (such as gaming and heavy intense work). The AMZ Ryzen 3 3200U is a decent CPU for this price point; you'll still be able to watch videos, stream music and all that good stuff without an issue.
There are no intergrated graphics chip on the CPU, instead you have your own mobile graphics card with the AMZ Radeon Vega 3 Mobile. It works as good as some of the Intel HD integrated graphics chips, so don't expect major gaming performance from this laptop. You can take a look at how this card performs against other cards in it's league here: https://benchmarks.ul.com/hardware/gpu/AMD+Radeon+Vega+3+Mobile+review
The great news is that this modern CPU and graphics card won't eat up the laptop's battery like other high-end hardware. You'll be able to get 7.5 hours of battery out of this laptop!
One of the areas where this laptop doesn't quite give you value for money is the 4GB of DDR4 Ram. Nowadays you really want to be operating with a minimum of 8GB. If you're not planning on using this laptop for any heavy-use applications like video editing or simple gaming, then 4GB might be fine for you. You could also upgrade the 4GB of RAM and replace it with an 8GB stick, which would give you longer-lasting performance.
The 128GB NVMe SSD means you're going to get excellent loading times. Booting up this laptop will be incredibly fast as SSDs will work much faster than standard harddrives. 128GB is on the smaller size of thing; but if you find yourself running out of space, you can always buy an external harddrive and connect to that via USB (or even buy a USB pen as you can get them in sizes over 100GB now).
It comes with Windows 10 in S Mode, which is the latest operating system from Microsoft. S Mode is a version of Windows 10 that is designed for safety and performance, but this can be disabled/switch off. In S mode, you'll only be allowed to use Apps from the Window's Store.
Funnily enough, this laptop supports both WiFi and Ethernet (wired connection) connections to the internet. Ethernet is usually useful for gaming laptops where they need a strong and reliable connection all the time; I think I would personally have preferred an extra USB port instead of the Ethernet port.
The WiFi on this laptop supports both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz on the 802.11ac standard, which allows you to get a really good, fast connection to your internet. It also has Bluetooth, so it can connect to any Bluetooth enabled devices you have around your home.
Speaking of ports, this laptop does come with 1x HDMI port, 2x USB 2.0 ports, 1 USB 3.0 port and the Ethernet port.
There are two in-built stereo speakers on this laptop, an in-built microphone and it uses Acer TrueHarmony to deliver great quality sound.
Acer Aspire 5 Slim Overall
The only downside to this laptop has to be the lack of RAM. A part from that it is a great laptop at a great price; the display on this laptop is gorgeous and definitely something worth using when watching video content. It's got decent battery life and using some of the latest processors to help maximise performance when running applications. It's nice and lightweight, incredibly thin and perfect for taking to your work office or to your local cafe to sneak away for a bit.
I prefer my keyboards to have a little more bounce in the keys compared to this one, but it still has a decent touch to it and the trackpad feels sturdy and has satisfying click response.
Overall a great laptop for it's price and the Acer Aspire 5 Slim will definitely be one of the most popular laptops in this price range.
Leave A Comment