Acer Aspire 5 (2022, A515-45-R74Z) Review

In the world of budget laptops, a $70 price difference can be a big deal. Four months ago, we favorably reviewed a version of the 15.6-inch Acer Aspire 5 that cost $599.99. The model A515-45-R74Z seen here is $529.99 MSRP, mainly because it has an AMD Ryzen 5 instead of an Intel Core i5 processor, and it contains half as much memory and solid-state storage (8GB and 256GB, respectively). We recommend Windows shoppers splurge for 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD if at all possible, but this Aspire serves its purpose as a minimal homework and surfing station. And speaking of $70 price differences, you can save about that much over Acer's official price—the A515-45 was $448 on Amazon at the time of writing.

A Mostly Bare-Bones Laptop

Clad in what Acer calls Pure Silver (the color, not the metal), the Aspire 5 combines an aluminum lid with a plastic bottom. It's of average size for a 15.6-inch laptop—i.e., a bit bulky—though half an inch deeper than its Intel-based sibling at 0.71 by 14.3 by 9.9 inches. The system edges under the 4-pound line at 3.88 pounds. Build quality is predictable for this price range, in that there's a fair amount of flex if you grasp the screen corners or mash the keyboard.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Acer's non-touch IPS screen is none too bright, but it produces full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) resolution instead of the fuzzy 1,366 by 768 of the very cheapest laptops. (Yes, that resolution still crops up in places.) The CPU is a six-core, 2.1GHz Ryzen 5 5500U with AMD Radeon integrated graphics. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi 6 (not 6E) handle wireless communications, though there's also a Gigabit Ethernet port for wired networks.

With neither a fingerprint reader nor a face recognition webcam, you're stuck typing passwords instead of using Windows Hello. A sticker on the palm rest advertises narrow screen bezels, but only the side bezels are medium-thick while the top and bottom are downright chunky. The software bundle is heavy on “lite” versions and free trials, including CyberLink's PhotoDirector image and PowerDirector video editing apps, Norton Security Ultra, ExpressVPN, Evernote, Amazon Alexa, and Forge of Empires.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

There's no flash card slot to supplement the scant storage, but otherwise the Aspire is well connected. On the laptop's left side are three 5Gbps USB 3.2 ports—two Type-A and one Type-C—along with an HDMI video output, the Ethernet jack, and the AC adapter connector. At right you'll find an audio jack and a USB 2.0 port, plus a security lock slot.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

The Aspire 5's Inputs and Display: Adequate Only

With the usual lowball 720p resolution, this laptop's webcam images aren't very bright, but they're of tolerable quality—not too blurry, with decent color and minimal noise. An Acer Purified Voice Console utility promises AI noise reduction, focusing the microphone on a single voice or everyone around a conference table.

Sound from the bottom-mounted speakers is low even at max volume, and it comes across as muted and hollow; the piano trill between verses in “The Time Warp” was almost inaudible. There's practically no bass, but you can dimly make out overlapping tracks. Realtek Audio Console software includes Acer TrueHarmony presets for music, movies, and games; I couldn't distinguish much difference except that the movie choice was a bit louder.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

As for the display, peak brightness on this Aspire looks like half brightness on most notebooks, with white backgrounds appearing dull and dingy and colors muddy and bland. The screen's contrast isn't poor, and viewing angles are reasonably wide; fine details are better than anticipated, without too much pixelation around the edges of letters. Overall, the display looks every inch an economy panel. 

Acer's keyboard evokes similar feelings. It's backlit, which is always welcome, and has a numeric keypad, although it takes a little getting used to—the numpad keys are only two-thirds the width of the primary keys. But the Escape, Delete, and Tab keys are small, and the keyboard lacks dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys apart from the keypad (7, 1, 9, and 3 respectively) with Num Lock off.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

It's possible to maintain a quick typing speed, but the keyboard has a flimsy, cardboardy typing feel. The buttonless touchpad is relatively small and has a stiff, vague click.

Testing the Aspire 5: Life in the Carpool Lane 

For our benchmark charts, we compared the 15.6-inch, AMD-powered Aspire 5 with its Intel counterpart (model A515-57-56UV; starts at $369.99; $599.99 as tested) and with a pair of comparably priced 14-inch portables: The Gateway Ultra Slim ($549 as tested) and an Editors' Choice award winner from a year ago, the Lenovo IdeaPad 3 14 (starts at $519). The last slot went to a more costly compact, the Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 2 (starts at $599.99; $799.99 as tested). You can see their basic specs in the table below.

Productivity Tests 

Our main performance benchmark is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. 

Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Finally, we run Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Acer's performance is unimpressive. The laptop clears the 4,000 points baseline in PCMark 10, so you won't be waiting on everyday apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint or the Google Workspace suite, However, it lands near the back of the pack in our CPU benchmarks, and it produces a sluggish score in Photoshop. Routine productivity tasks, email, and web surfing will be fine, but you wouldn't want to use the AMD Aspire 5 for creative apps or managing multimedia. 

Graphics Tests 

We test Windows PCs' graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark suite: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics), and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

Additionally, we run the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

All five of these laptops rely on integrated graphics rather than the discrete GPUs of gaming rigs, so you see nothing but low numbers. Unfortunately, this Aspire's Radeon graphics solution is an underperformer even by those standards. Video streaming is smooth, but gaming is out of the question. 

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptops' battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

As for measuring color and brightness, we use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

The A515-45 will get you through a full day of work or school, but it has the briefest battery life of our quintet. And its display is a real downer—the IPS screen is dimmer at peak settings than all but the Gateway's, and its color coverage is somewhere between minimal and marginal. The Surface Laptop Go 2's is the only passable screen in the group.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Verdict: Strictly for the Cash-Strapped

It's not a fool's errand to find a reasonably capable 15.6-inch Windows laptop with a street price under $500, but the AMD-based Aspire 5 brings no pleasant surprises except perhaps its wide array of ports. Its performance, keyboard, and especially its screen are all underwhelming for all but the most basic tasks, outdone by contemporaries that don't cost too much more. If your budget simply won't stretch to a better-equipped model, like the Core i5 unit we tested recently, you might want to consider a Chromebook instead.