When you look at Acer’s website, you might think that the Acer Aspire 5 is a high-end, expensive laptop with a 12th generation i7 processor and a powerful GeForce graphics card. But, as we’ve found with Acer in the past, the company’s website tends to focus on its top-of-the-line models and leaves you to find out about other options that might be available.
The Acer weighs 3.9 pounds and is 0.7 inches by 14.3 inches by 9.4 inches. It’s not a featherweight, but it’s not too big to put in a laptop bag or backpack. The dimensions of the Asus VivoBook 15 are 0.78 by 14.1 by 9.1 inches, and it weighs 3.75 pounds.
The Aspire is made of both metal and plastic, and the finish is so smooth that it’s hard to tell where one starts and the other ends. The top is made of aluminium, but the rest of the chassis is made of plastic that is pretty strong. The laptop is big enough to fit a full-size keyboard and a numeric keypad, but the keys on the numeric keypad are only half as wide.
The backlit keyboard makes it easy to see in dark rooms, and the tiled keys aren’t too bad to type on. The keypad’s narrower keys aren’t as comfortable, but if you enter a lot of data into spreadsheets, any number pad is better than none. The touchpad is extra-wide, so you have a lot of room to use gesture controls and do basic things like click and scroll.
The Aspire 5 has a lot of ports, so you won’t need to bring a hub or adapter with you. On the left side of the laptop are an HDMI video output, three USB 3.2 ports (one Type-C and two Type-A), and a compact Ethernet jack.
The Acer Aspire 5 has a PCIe solid state drive and an Intel Core i5-1135G7 processor. If graphics performance is important to you, you should know that the Core i5-1135G7 has Intel’s Iris Xe graphics with 80 execution units and a maximum clock speed of 1.3GHz.
This isn’t Intel’s fastest option for integrated graphics, but it’s a big step up from the Intel UHD graphics found in most 10th-generation Intel Core hardware. Acer sells the hardware at prices that can’t be beat. Acer is a good choice for shoppers on a budget, but does that still hold up when you look at it closely?
Real-world tests show that the 15.6-inch laptop can run for 7 hours and 51 minutes. Due to its large battery capacity, it clearly beats most of its competitors when it comes to battery life (53 Wh). Only the Lenovo V15 G2 is the same, even though its battery only has a 38 Wh capacity. The powerful Ryzen 5 5500U APU in the V15 is felt here.