Gadgetory

hey how's it going Dave 2d here so this is the Acer Aspire 5 now this is a laptop that is surprisingly not marketed as a gaming laptop but it's very capable at playing most triple-a titles in 2017 now this thing goes for $600 that's the retail price I think occasionally it might hit 550 on Amazon I'll drop a link below for just the most accurate pricing but this thing has the new NVIDIA GeForce MX 150 so this is their graphics cards that kind of replaces the 940 MX it's kind of like a mobile version of the GT 1030 and pretty good build quality on this thing is not bad it's mostly plastic grooved finish up top the keyboard deck is aluminum with a bit of flex if you're putting a lot of pressure on it but nothing abnormal it's got a good hinge design kind of one hand open abaut if you go slowly enough it's relatively thin and light for a 15-inch laptop and the overall build quality was better than I thought it would be for the price the port selection is good it has a standard array of USB 3 the standards to me are the u s-- pc port doesn't support thunderbolt 3 but that's expected and there's also an Ethernet port which isn't common at all for laptops in this price range accessing the internals is pretty easy for the two and a half inch drive and the memory you can use these hatches the configuration I'm running comes with a total of 8 gigs of RAM if you've removed the whole bottom panel you can change the Wi-Fi card and the SSD the included SSD uses a SATA interface I don't think this laptop can handle PCIe drives I tried a couple and they didn't seem to work the battery down here is a 48 watt hour battery and I'm getting a little bit over five hours of battery life now I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that this is running new processors these are just more energy efficient than a lot of the quad-core CPUs that we see in 15-inch laptops but yeah battery life on this thing pretty good the screen is OK it's not amazing it's an IPS panel with mediocre color gamut brightness is not bad I mean it could be better but for indoor use it's not an issue viewing angles are pretty good and there's no significant backlight bleed obviously this isn't the best screen out there but for the money it's pretty good the speakers are located on the bottom and well I got to be honest they sound below average for a 15-inch laptop despite this true harmony branding on the sticker get reasonably loud but the audio quality isn't great the keyboard is actually really nice for a $600 laptop screen fault all the way flat good to know if you've never used a keyboard with a number-pad the positioning is a little bit weird the keys are responsive and the layout is comfortable but it doesn't have backlighting now part of me is glad that I didn't stick red LEDs into this to make it into some gaming thing but for some people no backlighting will be a deal-breaker not a big deal for me and if you're using it for school or for most works unless you work like it's in the Batcave or something then it should be okay it has a Windows precision trackpad which I like tracking as great gestures are responsive the button clicks feel a little shallow and the surface is a smooth simple plastic it's not textured it's not glass but the overall trackpad experience is good and it's really nice to see inexpensive laptops like this using good trackpad software now if there's one gripe I have about this whole system it's the amount of bloatware they have installed it's only a 5 minute jobs nuke at all but every time is he Norton pre-installed on a computer I die a little bit on the inside alright let's talk about performance the MX 150 is a 25 wide TDP chip that's similar in power consumption to the 940 MX from the previous generation but this time the performance is significantly better on some benchmarks we're looking at pretty much double the performance you realize how crazy that is in one year this category of GPU has doubled in performance at the same wattage like that's super impressive 10 series GPUs thumbs up it's not some crazy GPU pushing out 4k games but this is the first $600 laptop that I could comfortably play games on now the drivers are still relatively new but here are some frame rates from games you're looking at performance that is better than the 950 m and really close to the 960 m from last year now this laptop uses a 2 core CPU so some games might feel a little choked if they're more CPU dependent and same with video editing even 1080p video edits won't do great on this just because of the CPU but in general I think it's a very good pairing between the i-5 and the MX 150 there's no heavy throttling when I was running stress tests and thermal management is also good the internal and external temperatures are comfortable fan noise is also quieter than normal these you processors are pretty easy to cool ok so here's the deal the aspire 5 starts at $400 but I'm running comes in at $600 for the money you're getting a laptop with a plastic chassis and mostly plastic paneling but with a very respectable build quality you get a Tandy piece screen that has reasonable brightness but mediocre color gamut and color accuracy the keyboard is comfortable types well and it's got an aluminum deck but sadly has no backlighting the trackpad works nicely there's nothing I really dislike about it inside the CPU and GPU are well matched with each other the combo is great for school or work and it delivers good performance for light to moderately demanding games the RAM and storage are easily replaced and lastly we have a 48 watt hour battery that can squeeze about five hours of battery life so I think Easter did a really good job in the inspire I think for $600 this is a surprisingly good laptop but the question some people might have is do you purchase this for 600 or do you get one of the $800 gaming laptops and those have a gtx 1050 obviously there's a relatively big difference in price but this thing is also a lot thinner and lighter than those so if weight is a consideration for you if you need to travel frequently with your gaming laptop take a look at this line I think this is really good for the month