Finding the right budget laptop for You can be more challenging than you think. The budget category is full of hundreds of laptops that are more or less very similar to each other. To differentiate between them, you need to know exactly what you need. In this Acer Aspire 5 A515-55-56VK review, we take a look at this new Acer laptop that comes with a budget price tag.
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If you are familiar with the Acer Aspire series, then you should know that they make amazing budget laptops. This new Acer Aspire 5 A515-55-56VK laptop here is a successor to one of the most popular devices this series has ever produced. The laptop comes as a good fit for light users and even some mid-range users. The main selling point of this laptop is the price but there is also some amazing hardware inside. Can we wholeheartedly recommend this laptop? Read our full review to know what we think.
Design
The Acer Aspire series has stuck to a very similar design language all these years. For the first time, they are experimenting with the design and this laptop embraces the new design language. The first change you can see is the presence of a two-tone color scheme. The light of the laptop comes in a grey shade whereas the rest of the laptop has a silver finish.
The difference in color is because both these components have different materials. The light of the laptop is made up of aluminum whereas the rest of the laptop is made up of plastic. The presence of aluminum gives the lid a study of look and feel. The plastic body is not cheap by any means and can handle a certain level of physical damage.
Though the laptop comes with a 15.6” screen, it weighs just around 3.97lbs. The portability of this laptop was never a question, thanks to the clever mix of plastic and aluminum. If you are a student, you can easily take this laptop with you all day long without feeling anything extra in your backpack.
The keyboard on this laptop is a pretty standard one in the Acer Aspire series. The keys have a pretty good layout and are well-spaced between each other. The laptop comes with a dedicated number pad on the far right which comes in handy for people who work with a lot of spreadsheets. The typing experience on this keyboard as pleasant as it gives you enough travel and doesn’t affect your speed or accuracy in any way.
Another advantage we have in this keyboard is that it is backlit. It is very rare to find laptops that are priced under $600 to have a backlit keyboard. This is just one of the areas where this Acer Aspire 5 A515-55-56VK laptop adds a lot of value to the user. Thanks to the backlit keyboard, you now have the freedom to work anywhere you want irrespective of the lighting conditions.
The touchpad we have here is a pretty standard one and comes in as a single glass piece. You do not find any buttons here which kind of makes for a refreshing experience. The touchpad comes with excellent support for Windows operating system gestures and which is handy.
Another surprise for us is the inclusion of a fingerprint reader. The fingerprint reader can be found on the top left corner of the touchpad. You can register your fingerprints and use them to log into your user profile without typing in the password every time. This fingerprint sensor can also come in handy when you have to encrypt confidential data on your laptop. This can be done with the help of third-party applications.
Read more: Best Chromebook For Coding and Developers In 2022
Display
The display on this Acer Aspire 5 A515-55-56VK laptop is a 15.6” LED-backlit display. The resolution of this display is 1920 x 1080 pixels and the pixel density of the display is also pretty good giving you crisp images and sharp texts. Another nice thing about this display is that it comes with an IPS panel. Getting an IPS panel on a laptop in this price range is huge.
Thanks to the IPS panel, you get an excellent contrast ratio on this laptop. As a result, the colors are vivid and you can spot as many colors as possible with the naked eye. The viewing angles of the display are also fantastic that means you can see the same colors both from the front as well as from any corner of your room. This makes this laptop a great fit for streaming your favorite online content on streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu.
You can find an HD WebCam on the top bezel of the display. This WebCam is great for making video calls and works as advertised. The quality of the WebCam might differ based on the lighting conditions. On a bright day, your video call quality is splendid but it falls short when there is not enough light.
The sound coming out of this laptop is not spectacular by any means. And the laptop can get quite loud but at high volumes, you can notice a bit of distortion which is not desirable. The laptop can easily fill a small room with enough sound. If you are an audiophile, then getting a pair of dedicated speakers is much recommended.
Performance
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The Acer Aspire 5 A515-55-56VK laptop is powered by an Intel Core i5 1035G1 processor. This is a mid-range processor from Intel that comes with four physical cores and eight threads. The processor does well when it comes to benchmark test and get a score of 7989 which confirms its mid-range classification.
The processor does well in real-life performance as well. It typically clocks with a base clock speed of 1.0 GHz but with the help of turbo boost come on the processor can clock up to a maximum of 3.6 GHz which is a lot of power for the average user. You also get an Intel Smart cache memory of 6 MB which should come in handy.
The laptop does a fantastic job when it comes to taking care of your everyday applications. Be it browsers or office suites, this laptop can run all of them without breaking a sweat. If you want to do some heavy lifting like photo editing or running virtual machines, this processor can still handle it without any issues.
The Acer Aspire 5 A515-55-56VK laptop comes with 8GB of DDR4 type RAM in the memory department. This memory should be more than enough for most light users and even some mid-range uses. You can multitask to your heart’s content and will not face any lag whatsoever. The laptop allows you to upgrade to up to 32GB of RAM which will come in handy in the future.
The storage in this laptop is made up of 256 GB solid-state drive. It is fast and gets everything done quickly. If you are coming from a mechanical hard drive, this is a huge improvement. You cannot find a dedicated graphics card in this laptop as it is a budget one. The laptop supports light gaming and anything other than that might be a hard task.
Battery Life And Connectivity
The Acer Aspire 5 A515-55-56VK laptop comes with an average battery life of around eight hours. This battery life is pretty good because this is an entry-level laptop. This number is consistent when the usages light. When you do some heavy lifting, expect this number to go down and around five hours should be normal.
The laptop comes with a lot of connectivity options. You get a USB Type-C port, a couple of USB 3.1 Type-A ports, an HDMI port, and also an audio jack. In addition to the sports, the laptop also comes with Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 that are amazing when it comes to wireless connectivity.
Acer Aspire 5 A515-55-56VK Review – Wrap Up
If you are on the search for a reliable mid-range laptop that won’t break your bank, then the Acer Aspire 5 A515-55-56VK laptop is a fantastic choice. It comes with a 10th generation Intel processor that is coupled with 8 GB of RAM and takes advantage of a fast solid-state drive. The overall performance of the laptop is amazing for the price and getting the same value elsewhere is an uphill challenge.