Acer Aspire 5 (2021) review

[ntab Configuration]
The new Aspire 5 from Acer is a mid-range laptop designed to be used as a daily driver for both, office work and media consumption. The sleek chassis offers great balance between portability and performance, housing an 11th gen processor from Intel which is perfect for everyday computing needs, but how well does it perform in the hands of a gamer? Read the full review to find out!

[ntab General overview]

At first glance, the A515-56 looks really premium. It has a clean design with a simple “Acer” logo on the back of the aluminium lid and when the laptop opens, the hinge raises the entire chassis allowing for a better airflow, while also looking really fancy. However, after a closer look, the build quality does not meet the expectations, with the plastic chassis flexing and bending with every ocasion.

The typing experience is pleasant enough. The backlit keyboard is decent for everyday use and it has nice feedback to it, but the keys felt rather cramped and the arrow keys being mashed together with the Numpad seems like a bad trend that doesn’t want to go away.

Also, we encountered some issues when installing the operating system for the first time. At the step where we had to choose where to install the OS, Windows couldn’t find any drives, and after some research, we found out that this is a common problem among the Aspire 5 users. We fixed this issue by going to intel.com and downloading the Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (Intel® RST) Driver, but disabling the VMD Controller in the BIOS menu also works.

After successfully installing the operating system, there was also an unsettling flicker of the display, which we still encountered even after installing the 1.08 BIOS update, which states in the changelog that it’s meant to completely fix this issue.

Even though this isn’t a gaming laptop, we did try and play a few games out of curiosity on the integrated graphics card, and to no surprise, we encountered even more problems. Here are just a few of them:

Since the Intel Iris Xe Graphics is still in its infancy, we can only assume that it will get better with future driver updates, and once it is matured enough, most of the problems will probably be fixed.

[ntab Display]
The A515-56 is equipped with the LGD065A/LP156WFC-SPD5 IPS panel. The display has 300 measured nits which is great, and has good viewing angles, however, it also has poor colour coverage of 58.3% sRGB, 40.7% Adobe RGB and 41.8% DCI P3, making it unfit for photo/video editing. There is also worth mentioning that our review unit suffered from severe backlight bleeding in the webcam area, which was really distracting during dark scenes in movies and videogames.

Here is a link to the calibrated display profile of the reviewed unit. Because each display is unique, this profile will not perfectly match other displays of the same model. Still, using this profile should give better overall colours.

sRGB profile and calibration

[ntab Benchmarks]

Night Raid

SCORE	10768
Graphics score	13065
Physics score	5395

Fire Strike

SCORE	2896
Graphics score	3266
Physics score	9525
Combined score	1001

Sky Diver

SCORE	10357
Graphics score	11150
Physics score	8039
Combined score	9409

Time Spy

SCORE	1115
Graphics score	999
Physics score	3283

Orange Room

SCORE	1639
Average frame rate	35.71 fps
Target frame rate	109.00 fps

Cyan room

SCORE	1222
Average frame rate	26.63 fps
Target frame rate	88.90 fps

Blue Room

SCORE	246
Average frame rate	5.36 fps
Target frame rate	109.00 fps

Nvidia DLSS Test

DLSS Off	00.00 fps
DLSS On	00.00 fps

Cinebench R20

Single Core	– pts
Multi Core	1728

Blender

CPU blend time	11m 35s
GPU blend time	–

Geekbench 4

Single-core score	Multi-core score
5854	18540

Geekbench 5

Single-core score	Multi-core score
1278	3635

PCMark 10 Web Score 8528 Apps Score 11299 Chat Score 7968 Photo Score 6952 Video Score 4854 Writing Score 7096 Spreadsheet Score 5622 Essentials 9156 Productivity 6314 Digital Content Creation 4722 SCORE 4650

Unigine Superposition benchmark
720p Low	3504
1080p Medium	1663
1080p High	1150
1080p Extreme	613
4K Optimized	671
8K Optimized	257

Crystal Disk Mark

[ntab Gaming benchmarks]

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[ntab Temperatures]

The cooling solution of the A515-56 consists of one heat pipe. And one fan. That’s it. And as mentioned before, when the laptop is opened, the hinge lifts the entire chassis up, creating some space underneath it, allowing the laptop to pull in fresh air.

All temperature measurements were performed at an ambient temperature of 26° C (78.8° F).

During the standard 30 minutes AIDA64 stress test (CPU, FPU, cache), the processor reached an average temperature of 64 °C (147.2 °F), with a maximum of 74 °C (165.2 °F). At these temperatures, the processor managed to keep an average frequency of 1.88 GHz, with occasional dips to as low as 0.98 GHz on some of its cores, whish is below the 2.4 GHz marketed base speed.

In the combined AIDA64 + Unigine Superposition stress test (which had both the processor and the Intel Iris Xe Graphics under heavy load for 30 minutes), the processor reached a maximum temperature of 72 °C (161.6 °F) and throttled until it settled at a temperature of 62 °C (143.6 °F). During this time, the processor kept an average clock speed of 1.43 GHz with occasional dips to as low as 0.39 GHz

After all the tests conducted by the Noteb review team, it is safe to conclude that the Acer’s cooling solution is not adequate, and even though the laptops temperate seem low, that’s because the processor throttles heavily.

[ntab Battery life]

Since most laptops are used on battery for mundane office activities and web browsing, the laptop was tested using a simulated continuous web browsing session over the WiFi. The browsing session involved checking emails/news, social media and accessing multimedia websites, similar to the behaviour of an average user. The level of brightness was set according to visibility and usability. At 50% brightness, the laptop provided an enjoyable viewing experience. The sound volume was also set to 50%.

With its 53 WHr battery, the laptop lasted 7 hours. The machine was tested using both Firefox and Edge and yielded similar battery life results regardless of the browser.

Charging the laptop from 5% to 100% took almost 2 hours

[ntab Conclusion]

Pros:

• clean design;
• 300 nits display;
• decent selection of ports;
• great battery life;
• backlit keyboard.

Cons:

• heavy processor throttling
• poor colour coverage display;
• keyboard deck flex;
• weird Numpad implementation;
• heavier than most laptops in its category.

So, is the Acer Aspire 5 A515-56 worth the price? Actually, yes. Even with its heavy throttling, the machine gets the job done, definitely deserving its place in an office environment or schools. The laptop is fairly light, has great battery life, sleek design and decent enough display for everyday tasks. With its Intel Iris Xe Graphics, is even capable of playing older titles at reduced resolution, overall, this machine would be perfect as a daily driver.

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