Acer Aspire 5 (A517-51G-8433) - Review 2022

Here'due south something you don't see every solar day: a 17.three-inch laptop that's not a gaming rig or a mobile workstation. Instead, the Acer Aspire 5 model A517-51G-8433 (starts at $499.99; $999.99 every bit tested) is a desktop-replacement aimed at home users who want a large screen for general applications and multimedia, whether that's surfing the web, watching movies on DVD (it has something else rarely seen these days, an optical drive), or coincidental gaming thanks to its entry-level detached graphics. Tin can you notice a more powerful, game-worthy laptop for a thou bucks? Sure, but information technology'll have a smaller screen. Can y'all find a more than powerful, game-worthy 17.3-inch laptop? Sure, but it'll cost at to the lowest degree $300 more. Seen in that low-cal, this large Acer fills an intriguing niche.

Relatively Svelte

At 6.61 pounds, the Aspire is downright light for a 17.3-inch system—compare the Razer Blade Pro at 7.7 pounds, the HP Omen 17 at eight.23, or the Alienware 17 R4 at 9.77 pounds. The laptop measures 1.xi by 16.7 past 11.4 inches, landing between the Razer (0.9 past sixteen.vii by 11 inches) and the Omen (1.3 by 16.7 by 12 inches) in the "reasonable" rather than "whopper" size class. If the 17.iii-inch screen is besides large for you lot, note that there is as well a xv.6-inch version. Every bit a matter of fact, as of the fourth dimension of this writing there were 34 configurations available betwixt the two screen sizes.

The lid is textured blackness plastic with a centered chrome Acer logo. Another logo appears below the wide-bezeled display and the Aspire name is etched into the screen hinge, which opens a full 180 degrees. There's a brushed aluminum keyboard deck and wrist balance and sparse chrome strips effectually the touchpad and front and side edges. The overall event is bonny if not luxurious.

On the laptop'due south left side, you'll notice an SD card slot, an HDMI port, a USB 3.0 Type-A port with device charging, a USB-C port, an Ethernet port, and a Kensington lock slot. The right edge is more retro, with the DVD-RW bulldoze and two USB 2.0 ports every bit well as an audio jack and the connector for the Acer's AC adapter. A screwdriver lets you lot remove two panels on the bottom to access the system's RAM and difficult drive for user upgrades.

The Aspire'south total Hd (1,920-past-1,080) in-plane switching (IPS) panel looks smashing, with vivid colors and contrast, enough of effulgence, and broad viewing angles. We wish we could say the aforementioned for shots from the webcam, which delivers typically dim and grainy generic-laptop-class stills and video. Would-be Windows Hello users will find neither face recognition nor a fingerprint reader.

The keyboard is not backlit and has the Apple tree- or HP-mode row of cursor arrows, with half-sized up and down arrows sandwiched between full-sized left and right, that nosotros e'er complain most as inferior to an inverted T. The Delete cardinal, likewise, is tiny and near hidden between the Pause/Break and Dwelling keys on the pinnacle row; we sometimes hit Domicile when we wanted Delete. The keyboard permits fast typing only has an oddly hollow feel. The touchpad is satisfactory.

Bottom-mounted speakers produce pleasing sound up to 75 pct or lxxx percent book, above which things get rough and raucous. Instrumentals and vocals are accurate, though bass gets shortchanged. Acer preloads apps and sites ranging from the useful (Dashlane, Firefox) to the commercial (Priceline) and backs the Aspire 5 with a ane-year warranty.

Leaving Watts on the Tabular array

While most big-screen laptops use Intel's 45-watt mobile processors, for this model Acer chose one of the fifteen-watt U-series chips normally found in smaller systems—the Core i7-8550U, a 1.8GHz (4.0GHz turbo) quad-cadre—and teamed it with 12GB of RAM and Nvidia'south GeForce MX150 graphics, which we plant in our review of the Asus ZenBook Flip 14 UX461UN hands outperforms almost integrated graphics but come nowhere near Nvidia'due south GeForce GTX 1000 series. Storage comes in the class of a 256GB solid-state drive plus a 1TB difficult bulldoze.

Our configuration of the 17-inch Aspire 1 is the most powerful, and nearly expensive. An entry-level model is half the toll with a Core i3 CPU with integrated graphics and no SSD (amongst other concessions), and diverse configurations are available in between.

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In the absence of directly competitive systems, we matched the Acer against a comparably priced xv.6-inch gamer (the Lenovo Legion Y520) and more expensive 17.three-inch rig (the PowerSpec 1710); the ZenBook Flip 14, which has the same CPU and GPU; and our examination system'due south budget desktop-replacement cousin, the Acer Aspire E 15. The big Acer posted an excellent score of 3,321 in our PCMark viii Work part productivity benchmark, but underwhelmed in our Cinebench CPU measurement and Handbrake video-editing practise, fifty-fifty compared with the Asus with the same processor.

The Aspire 5 and the ZenBook Flip went toe-to-toe in our graphics tests, with the former winning the demanding 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme contest. The GeForce GTX-equipped Legion and especially the PowerSpec were in another league, still, as (in a bad way) was the humble integrated-graphics Aspire Due east xv. The Aspire 5 rewarded Acer'due south power-thrifty CPU pick with a solid ix-and-a-half-hour time in our battery-rundown test.

Easy on the Eyes

We confess that after reviewing a slew of 13.3-inch and 12.5-inch ultraportables, information technology's pleasant and relaxing to sit down back and savour a 17.3-inch view; the Aspire five's combination of screen size and 1080p resolution lets you see fine details without squinting. If you lot collect movies on DVD rather than Blu-ray or streaming and are looking for a combination home PC and DVD viewer, this Acer is worth a look, though its performance trails that of big-screen gaming laptops and more potent desktop-replacements such as the absolutely far more expensive Editors' Choice Microsoft Surface Book 2. If you're just looking for a media-consumption device, at that place are besides many other configurations of the Aspire 5 available at lower cost points.