Powered by an AMD Ryzen 3 processor and AMD Vega 3 graphics, the Aspire 5 is a reliable work horse. It’s an ideal laptop for a student or professional looking for a reliable laptop for work and play. And best of all, you can upgrade the storage via the bottom panel, which adds even more value.
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Sure, the Acer Aspire 5 isn’t as powerful as a flagship, but for the price, it’s a hard laptop to overlook. While we haven’t reviewed this exact model, the iteration of the model we did evaluate has a lot of winning qualities. The Acer Aspire 5 is totally powered by AMD with a Ryzen 3 processor and a Vega 3 GPU. The notebook also offers 4GB of RAM, a 128GB SSD and a 15.6-inch 1920 x 1080 display. And in case you use a lot of peripherals, the Aspire 5 offers a healthy amount of ports including USB 3.1 Type-A and Type-C as well as USB 2.0. In terms of design, the aluminum-clad laptop strongly resembles a MacBook. Measuring 14.3 x 9.9 x 0.7 inches and weighing 3.7 pounds, it’s lighter than the Asus VivoBook S15 (S533F) which comes in at 4 pounds, 14.1 x 9.2 x 0.6 inches. The 15.6-inch, 1920 x 1080 is plenty bright at 258 nits with solid color reproduction of 63% of the sRGB gamut. The Aspire 5 had mixed results during our performance tests, but had no problem handling multitasking duties. Our review unit managed to outpace the mainstream laptop average (22:21) during the Handbrake video-editing test, taking 21 minutes and 55 seconds to transcode a 4K video to 1080p. And in terms of battery life, the notebook lasted 11 hours and 29 minutes on the Laptop Mag battery life test.
