Gadgetory

hey guys this is Austin is a 500 gaming laptop actually any good so this is the Acer Aspire II 15 so crack open the box and inside will find the laptop itself unboxing actually looks really straightforward it's literally just the power adapter so this is a 15 inch laptop which is actually not crazy when you consider that it actually has some pretty reasonable specs it doesn't feel super premium it looks interesting even though it's definitely plastic it doesn't feel super premium or anything I think it looks nice and especially when you open it up and you realise that it's got a nice little contrast with the white so looking on the laptop it's a little old-school and we get like a VGA port here but I think the funnier thing is there's a spot for an optical drive which this is not come with however that actually can be a cool thing because that might mean that we could say put an extra hard drive in or probably in this case put an SSD inside what really makes the aspire a 15 special though or the specs it's rocking a core i5 6200 u alongside an Nvidia GT 940m graphics card the rest of the hardware is pretty solid as well you've got a 15.6 inch 1080p display which while still a fairly cheap panel with ok contrast and viewing angles it's a step up over what you'll usually find at this price point the speakers get reasonably loud but they sound teddy you'll probably want to invest in speakers or headphones for gaming you're getting solid AC Wi-Fi with Bluetooth 4.0 though which is awesome there's just no excuse for low end Wi-Fi these days the rest of the chassis is shared with a ton of other Acer models with different specs reaching back to the 300 dollar range the keyboard is a bit on the mushy side but it's totally usable same goes for the trackpad it's a decent size and sports gestures but the tracking feels a bit less accurate than I'd like the webcam is completely average at 720p and wants a little soft it's totally fine for something like a video chat while it comes with Windows 10 you'll find bloatware the second you turn it on there's just tons of pre-installed software like Norton it's definitely worth spending a few minutes when you get the laptop to clean everything up one unsurprising cost-cutting measure is the one terabyte hard drive well it's a decent amount of space it is seriously slow if you want to upgrade though it's not too difficult there are quite a few screws around back but with a little careful prying it's easy enough to get into you've got access to the second M slot if you'd like to upgrade to 16 gigs of ram and you can also see the fairly small battery along with the heat pipe that leads to the surprisingly quiet single fan the both the CPU and GPU from here you can swap out the hard drive or even get an adapter for the optical Bay and put a drive there while a skylight base Core i5 is definitely appreciated it's a dual core 15 watt part which is typically found and thin and light ultrabooks it's paired with the GT 940m which nvidia is pretty vague about beyond the four gigabytes of ddr3 memory but in game this ends up being a good combo lighter titles like Minecraft are totally playable at 1080p which should be no surprise as is dota 2 which has no problem playing on Macs at 1080p at around 30 fps you're getting solid performance in csgo to bump the settings down to medium at 1080 you're getting a pretty smooth 50 to 60 frames where rocket League also works when you play on quality settings for more demanding games like GTA 5 you'll need to notch the resolution down to 900 P on normal but it's still totally playable with only a single fan though I was curious about thermals even under sustained load there really isn't any throttling in temps top out around 70 degrees Celsius the keyboard does get a bit warm especially near the exhaust but for what started life as a budget laptop it handles the heat well one thing that doesn't hold up quite so well though is the battery under a full gaming load with max screen brightness it only lasted about 53 minutes which is pretty disappointing that small battery doesn't help in normal use either you're probably going to want to stay close to an outlet the Aspire a 15 might not be able to touch data k caming desktop but at this price having dedicated graphics is a big deal upgrade it with an SSD and you've got a surprisingly solid gaming laptop so what do you guys think about the aspire let me know in the comments below and be sure to subscribe to catch more videos like this the Acer blue light shield