Gadgetory

hey guys the Austin a few months ago we took a look at this the $350 Acer Aspire a 15 which just so happens to be the best-selling laptop on Amazon but for 350 bucks what are you actually getting but first glance it doesn't look all that special so 350 dollars you're getting plastic on plastic with a side of plastic nowhere is this more obvious than the screen which flexes well a lot with just a little bit of pressure however if you can look past a few of these smaller nitpicks you'll find that this is actually a surprisingly solid laptop what really makes this guy stand out is the level of specs and features that you're getting for the price so inside you're getting a seventh generation Intel Core i3 7100 you processor four gigabytes of RAM as well as a one terabyte hard drive definitely the slowest part is going to be the hard drive it's 2018 and you know SSDs are a thing however what really helps to save this laptop is the core i3 this is going to be a lot more powerful than pretty much any other laptop in this price point luckily it's really easy to upgrade this guy so remove three screws on the bottom of the laptop you get access to now your hard drive but also to your memory as well as to install a full m2 SSD and it just so happens that I have an m2 SSD right here so for like forty five dollars you can get this eight eight a hundred twenty eight gig drive which once you install into this is going to make a huge difference if you've never installed an m2 drive before it's about as easy as it gets so remove this single screw from the bottom and then all these do is line it up with the slot make sure it's fully inserted and then we take that same screw and use it to hold it into place now well 128 gig drive might not sound too impressive the idea here is that this is going to be enough to install Windows as well as a few games and apps but you still have your full one terabyte hard drive which means that you're gonna have over a terabyte of capacity inside the laptop and if you want to get even crazier you can remove the optical drive to install yet another Drive inside I said the word drive a lot but hopefully you get the idea something else I was able to pick up for just over $40.00 is another four gigabytes of RAM now this is okay as is but especially if you want to get into anything like gaming or just want more than four gigs of ram for like you know six or seven chrome tabs this is gonna be really helpful and again super simple to upgrade you can literally do all this stuff in like 10 minutes and so with that we have eight gigabytes of RAM a 120 gig SSD and an upgraded 440 dollar laptop but is it actually any good with these upgrades we're ready for a bit of gaming and starting out we have csgo now with integrated intel graphics you should expect a ton I should really turn my volume down so running on low settings at 900 P we're actually getting solid frame rates so we're anywhere between 50 to 80 frames per seconds now it's not going to be a perfect csgo experience but this is not a bad little gaming laptop next up we have fortnight now this is the game that actually scales pretty well to lower end hardware here at 720p on low settings we are getting between 30 to 40 frames per second so don't get me wrong this is not a gaming PC go over especially with that core i3 in that dual channel memory it's not going to be too bad as long as you keep your expectations in check some lighter titles are definitely going to be playable I've actually got to say I don't really ever play Fortnight but this does really scale nicely I mean yeah we're getting 35 40 frames per second here but on such a low-end laptop it's not bad at all next up we have rocket League another game that traditionally runs pretty well on low-end hardware and here at 900p on performance settings we're getting anywhere between 40 to 50 frames per second it's not bad which I know I keep saying but when you consider just how cheap this laptop is even with the upgrades I'm impressed it how much it doesn't suck this laptop is definitely useful for more than just gaming though so it's rocking a 15.6 inch 1080p panel now it is going to be TN so you're going to be sacrificing some color and especially some viewing angles but when you consider that this guy cost $350 stock the screen is much much better than you usually get I can't tell you how many laptops that looked at that cost much more than this with much much worse screens something you don't exactly see on laptops very often these days is an optical drive but this does have it in addition to a USB 2.0 port but more importantly on this side we're going to be getting two more USB threes HDMI weirdly enough there's a VGA port but then you get Ethernet as well as a USB type-c the keyboard is classic Acer so that's a good thing for the most part you're getting a pretty standard layout with a couple of odd additions but you do get the number Rho and 4-3 and $50 it's pretty impressive that actually does have a backlight it's not a super bright backlight but again that's not something you usually find at a budget laptop you're also going to be getting a Windows Trackpad it's pretty solid you're getting full support for the multi-touch gestures and thankfully like all of these precision track pads it does actually track much much more accurately than a lot of the third-party options it's almost like there's a lot of things on this laptop they're shared with much more expensive options I sense a trend here battery life is going to be pretty solid so especially thanks to that core i3 inside you should expect somewhere in the neighborhood of about eight hours of light use on a charge if you upgrade with an SSD and install windows on it that's probably going to make things even better so for three and fifty dollars is the Acer Aspire 815 worth it I've got to say it totally is I see why everyone on Amazon is buying these now I will say though that if you do pick one up I think it is well worth it to spend a little bit of extra money to upgrade with an SSD and more memory but regardless if you're wanting to pick up a cheap laptop this is a solid option and as always links to this as well as the upgrades I used for it will be in the description anyway guys thank you so much for watching and I will catch you in the next one