Acer Aspire 5 is an ideal investment for many consumers, despite the ideal balance of price and performance, but leaves the mid-range machine barely noticeable. Budgeted laptops like the Acer Aspire 5 are easily overlooked. People look for budget gaming laptops under $500 to meet their computing needs and budget constraints.
This makes it an ideal investment for many consumers, despite the ideal balance of price and performance, but leaves the mid-range machine barely noticeable. This balance is what the Acer Aspire 5 has been running for a long time and offers users powerful components and solid performance while keeping the price affordable and accessible.
Updated with 8th Gen Intel Core processors, this laptop provides all the boxes you need for an everyday laptop. The Acer Aspire 5 once again proves that mid-range gaming machines are the way to go. And if your needs don’t involve a lot of video editing or design and drafting work, this laptop might be the best fit for you.
Acer Aspire 5 Review
The design of the Acer Aspire 5 is probably what you would expect from a mid-range laptop. It’s not too flashy, and it’s not as sleek as an ultrabook like the Dell XPS 13 or Asus ZenBook 3. But that doesn’t make any sense. This is a chunky and ugly laptop. Measuring 2.16 x 38.16 x 26.3 cm and weighing 2.20 kg (4.85 lbs), the Acer Aspire 5 is a pretty big laptop, but it’s not too heavy or unwieldy. However, whipping and working on a busy train can be a bit of a challenge.
It’s actually a great understated machine with a few designs thriving. The chassis is made primarily of plastic, with a textured surface on the lid and a reflective Acer logo. Opening the laptop reveals a reasonably sized screen surrounded by fairly thick bezels, which some may feel is a waste of space. At least you can use a large keyboard on the bottom of the laptop. We’ll look at it in a moment.
The large bezel also means the webcam can be centered on the top bezel, which in our opinion is the best place for a webcam to reside. Another Acer logo is on the lower bezel, and below it is ‘Aspire’ engraved on the nicely designed laptop hinge.
I think it’s a nice touch. The hinge allows the screen to be properly adjusted from various angles, but this laptop can flip the screen 360 degrees backwards to put it into a tablet-like position. Convertible laptops like Acer’s own Spin 7 series.
Ports
The Acer Aspire 5 comes with two USB 2.0 ports, one USB 3.0, USB-C, Ethernet, and SD memory card ports, giving you plenty of options for connecting peripherals. The Acer Aspire 5 comes with two USB 2.0 ports, one USB 3.0, USB-C, Ethernet, and SD memory card ports. I wish one of the USB 2.0 ports would be another USB 3.0, but the USB-C port is a welcome addition to the future.
Keyboard & touchpad
The bottom half of the laptop, with its large keyboard and touchpad, again has a plastic surface, not as luxurious as aluminium, but still has a very pleasant brushed finish. But it didn’t take too long to find the fingerprint. The keyboard itself is a good size, so you can type comfortably for long periods of time, but the flat keys and short travel mean it doesn’t feel as responsive or satisfying as the most responsive keyboards we’ve tried.
The Acer Aspire 5’s large form factor means it can accommodate a rather large touchpad slightly offset to the left of the center of the chassis. The larger size makes it easier to use multi-finger gestures, such as pinching two fingers together to zoom out, but for some people, the larger size makes it more likely that they will accidentally place their palms on top when typing.
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Cursor flying around the screen. The touchpad feels somewhat plastic and cheap when pressed, which is a shame as the rest of the Aspire 5 can avoid it.
Performance
The Aspire 5 version has a 10th generation 1GHz Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB RAM, and Intel UHD graphics card. The internal configuration is definitely mid-range, but you can get enough mileage from this machine. The Core i5 can handle Steam, Chrome, Spotify, and Firefox all running processes at the same time.
Integrated graphics cards will be limited to low-quality or outdated games over time, but that means they can handle around 40 frames per second in Elder Scrolls Online. When the game is set to high-resolution graphics, the speed drops to 10 fps in action-packed scenes. A true testament to the limitations of integrated graphics cards.
Despite anecdotal evidence suggesting otherwise, the Aspire 5 fell short in lab tests. The laptop scored 2,744 points on Geekbench 5.0. That’s a far cry from the average of 3,452 for Core i5 devices in this tier.
Conclusion-Acer Aspire 5 If you’re looking for an affordable gaming laptop that you can always dock, you’ll get the Aspire 5 a capable mid-range Core i5, and integrated graphics that can handle the tasks you need to finish.
