Acer Aspire 5 Laptop Full In-Depth Review

by CT | Last Updated: April 9, 2021

If you are in need of a good laptop that can meet all your daily needs without any problems, this Acer Aspire E-15 might be the best option for you.

Whether you work in an office, are a student, or someone who needs a home PC, the Acer Aspire E15 can fit into almost any budget, while providing power, a great battery life, and decent quality. It’s the right price to get something that will last you for a few years without needing to upgrade.

A Solid Budget-Friendly Laptop

After checking out and reviewing dozens of laptops under $600 we were not surprised to have found the Acer Aspire 5 which has been maintaining its status for quite a while as a best- selling laptop on Amazon.

Specs

• Intel Core i3-8130U
• 15.6″ Full HD Widescreen
• 6GB DDR4 Memory, 1TB 5400RPM HDD
• Windows 10 Home
• Battery Life of up to 13.5 Hours

Acer, has always been at the forefront of the “budget-friendly” consumer laptop market. They have built a reputation for maintaining a high quality that’s usually well above the price.

This laptop is no different – and continues this focus on pushing what is possible on a budget product. So why let big tech companies fool you into thinking that you have to pay upwards of $1,000 to get a top-notch laptop, when you can get a high quality and efficient notebook for just under $600?

While Shopping for budget laptops is all about finding the perfect balance of the most useful features and components at the lowest price. The Acer Aspire E15 E5-576-392H is packed with the power of modern hardware and a decent computing experience without completely draining your wallet.

Acer launched the Aspire E Series laptops with the aim to attract people who want lots of appealing options with an attractive design for a low budget. Powered by a Core i3 processor of the seventh generation, the Acer Aspire E 15 (E15 E5-576-392H) delivers high performance for its price of about $450. Together with a 15.6-inch Full HD display and great battery life of over 13 hours, the computer is more than adequate for everyday tasks and multimedia consumption.

Given just how much Acer’s crammed into this incredibly affordable laptop, we were curious to see how it would perform during use. So we decided to fire one up in our lab. So, let’s have a detailed look at its specifications and how we found it during work.

1. Design

Firstly let us shed a few glimpses over its overall design. The 1.2 by 15 by 10.2 inches (HWD) Acer Aspire E15 E5-576-392H has been carefully crafted giving an overall finely finished look without unnecessary lines.

It is made of sturdy black plastic with a dark grey, the matte-finished lid that has a subtle crosshatch pattern and texture, along with a deck that looks like faux brushed aluminum. When the lid is closed, the smart undercut design on the front and rear edge gives it a slim look and makes it easy to open with just one hand. The fashionable cross-hairline IMR finish on notebook’s top cover gives a visual effect like metal with a soft tactile feel that makes it comfortable to hold.

The next important thing to consider in a laptop is its weight and portability so talking about its weight, it weighs around 5.27 pounds and with a width of 1.2 inches, making it very slim and portable. Despite its bulk, the Acer Aspire E15 manages to cut a dapper look.

The shell itself feels tough, and the only flimsy component we noticed was the DVD tray, which in 2020 is not something that’s likely to be used daily.

Overall, it has solid build quality, because it didn’t creak or buckle during our use and much fancy it very much fits the budget of under $500.

2. Display

The 15 Inch Aspire E15 E5-576-392H boasts a resolution of 1920x 1080p with a 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio along with vibrant tones which are not usually the case with budget laptops, but it does not use IPS technology.

Moreover, the Aspire E15 E5-576-392H is also capable of producing a lot of vibrant colors. According to a colorimeter, Acer Aspire E 15 is capable of reproducing an impressive 159% of the sRGB color gamut which is much better than the 94% mainstream laptop average. Plus, the Acer ColorBlast technology provides a 94% NTSC (more than twice as many colors as the average laptop) for superb colors that are extremely close to that of the source image. With the Acer ExaColor, the Aspire E series makes every day more lively and vibrant providing exotically rich colors.

Additionally, this laptop comes with an Acer Blue light Shield feature so if you are someone who uses your laptop for several hours, you can turn on this feature which prevents blue-light emissions from the screen, reducing eye strain and preventing fatigue. 

One of the disadvantages of this laptop is that it allows you to have less accurate, a limited number of viewing angles as it begins to dim beyond 20 degrees or so because just like other laptops it over-saturates the colors. This means you’ll see dark images from the left and right side of a laptop at 45 degrees. For most consumers, this might not be an issue.

We also found that when its raised to maximum brightness, it registers only at 216.5 nits, or candelas on our light meter well below the average of 276-nit category which is quite common for budget laptops. We typically like an output of 250 nits, so this one might be hard to use outdoors as you may have trouble seeing what’s on the screen.

While an IPS display, better viewing angles, and increased color depth would have been nice, this is standard for the price range.

3. Hardware

The next thing to consider is the hardware on the Acer Aspire E15.

First of all, the main hardware element is the Keyboard. The island-style keyboard of Acer Aspire E15 E5-576-392H is wide and comfortable with 1.5mm of vertical travel and requires 64 grams of force to actuate, hence the key travel is good but it would be ideal if the pressure would have been around 40’s or 50’s.

The keyboard also has a backlit feature to help you see in darker situations, which is often rare to find in budget laptops. The keys of this laptop are somewhat smaller and give a quite smooth and soft touch which often makes it mushy. But after using it for a few hours it was easy to get used to.

Another fascinating feature of this laptop is its dedicated numeric keypad which allows you to use a calculator and data entry into spreadsheets easier. With a dedicated numeric keypad, dedicated functions keys, and even dedicated Home, Page Up, Page Down, and End keys, the Acer Aspire E 15 surely set the mark when it comes to the sheer number of keys on its backlit keyboard. Overall The Acer Aspire E15 E5-576-392H’s keyboard offers a good typing experience that’s free from any of the shallowness or flex we find on many budget laptops.

This machine has a 4.2 x 3-inch buttonless touchpad that provides reasonably accurate navigation around the desktop and was perfectly adequate for navigating menus in Google Chrome, as well as pinpointing spreadsheet cells, but its overall surface seemed a little slippery.

While some budget laptops have very poor trackpad performance, this one is slightly better than average. Though it is not highly responsive and can be at times even noisy while clicking it does manage to get the job done, and at least is consistent. It would have been very efficient if the clicking took less effort but I appreciated how the trackpad reliably ignored unintended palm swipes.

Featuring an Intel Core i3 processor. Running at 2.40 GHz, this dual-core processor is on the new highly efficient 14nm technology which makes the processor extremely battery friendly for the given processor power, using an estimated 14 watts, usually half of what would be consumed by an equivalent 6th generation processor. Apart from this it is packed with a 4GB of RAM, integrated graphics for light gaming and 1TB 5,400-rpm hard drive so you probably won’t need to expand via a card unless you’re storing a large number of files.

Furthermore, as it comes with a built-in DVD drive, The M-DISC READY Drive is capable of securing and saving documents, photos, videos and data for up to 1,000 years so you will never have a fear of losing your priceless memories or data.

4. Webcam

The Aspire E15 E5-575-33BM webcam is just above average for the laptops of under $600 category. While many built-in webcams cannot take good pictures, the 720p webcam of this laptop managed to take some good snapshots with vivid colors due to the use of a built-in lens but the image seemed to be a bit distracting and noisy at times. Hence for those who wish to make video calls at the workplace or those who are video bloggers we would recommend purchasing an external webcam as the built-in lens would not be enough to come up to its expectations. Also, we found that the pictures taken indoors with bright conditions were decent enough and the colors seemed fairly accurate. Moreover, we also found that the camera is a bit fast.

The best thing about E 15 is that it is certified for Skype for business, which means that its microphone, speakers and webcam are guaranteed to work with Microsoft’s enterprise-friendly conferencing software.

5. Ports and Slots

Thanks to the Aspire E15 E5-575-33BM’s thick frame, as it has plenty of room for ports which is a bonus point of this laptop. The left side particularly houses plenty of ports such as an Ethernet port, two USB 3.0 connectors, HDMI-out, VGA-out and a USB Type-C 3.1 port. Likewise, the right side contains the DVD drive, a third USB port, and a 3.5mm audio jack. Both the USB ports, i.e The USB 2.0 and pair of USB 3.0 connections are nicely spaced on either side reducing the clutter.

The USB 3.1 Type C at the right side of the laptop is a nice touch that is compatible with many modern-day devices entering the market and you won’t probably get it on most of the competing laptops nowadays. In addition to this, the e15 offers an SD card slot which is great if you do a lot of photo-editing and often need to transfer files from your camera to your hard drive, you can easily transfer the file without getting the need of a USB cable.

It also allows you to conveniently transferring files between machines if you don’t have a high-capacity USB external drive, or just prefer the small size of an SD card.

Apart from these, for wireless connections, it is comprised of a standard 802.11ac wireless network connectivity slot that allows you to enjoy the maximum speed on any of the routers available adding to the versatility of this laptop.

While we found that’s all the ports work efficiently, just that if the USB-C port or a mini-DisplayPort could work a bit faster it would have been nice.

6. Software

The Acer Aspire e 15 E5-575-33BM comes with Windows 10 and is bundled with Microsoft’s standard load of casual games and trialware, including, Sling TV, Candy Crush Soda, Royal Revolt II, March of Empires and War of Lords.

Furthermore, the Acer Quick Access enables the users to turn on the Blue light-reduction mode or makes your computer a hotspot device. In addition to this, the Technologies like InstantGo* let you boot up and resume quickly letting run everything fast and smooth

Also, all the Windows 10 devices now have Battery Saver to automatically conserve power so that it can use it for an even longer period of time.

Finally, the Acer Care Center checks the system health and looks for software updates timely.

7. Performance

The most important thing to check for was its performance. As previously mentioned it comes with quite a good pack of specifications so you won’t be surprised by the performance of this laptop, With its Core i3-7100U CPU, 4GB of RAM and 1TB 5,400-rpm hard drive, the Aspire E 15 E5-575-33BM is quite more than good for multitasking.

While usually, 12-14 tabs opened in a web browser and a 1080p video playing in another window a minimal hindrance or lag was experienced while shifting between the tabs. However, things got a bit slower down as I was typing in Google docs while streaming a video in one tab and downloading a large web page simultaneously. While testing the laptop for its performance it worked quite efficiently while surfing the web and almost ran all Office apps easily.

In addition to this, we found that the 1TB hard drive copied 4.97GB of mixed-media files at a rate of 36.6 megabytes per second, which is a bit slower than other budget laptops but it’s quite alright for its price.

Checking for its speed, The the Aspire E 15 E5-575-33BM which is equipped with the latest 802.11ac wireless featuring MU-MIMO technology, takes speed to a whole new level by giving up to 3x faster performance, when connected to an 802.11ac MU-MIMO based router, that makes all sorts of online gaming and streaming videos even faster and more reliable.

In addition to this, as there is no dedicated memory for the GPU and it shares the memory with the main processor, so this might not be the type of laptop for a video editor. Similarly, we would not recommend running any program that requires intensive graphics and is simultaneously processor intensive because that would be out of the range of this setup.

Moreover, as every electronic appliance emits heat, which is more and not properly channelized could be dangerous for the appliance, the Acer Aspire E 15 E5-575-33BM remained quite cool and silent during its use. According to the standard recommended comfort threshold, the temperature should be at 95 degrees, Acer Aspire E 15 E5-575-33BM went quite well as the temperature of the touchpad measured 78 degrees Fahrenheit after playing 15 minutes of video and the keyboard and bottom side of the laptop measured a temperature of 84 degrees and 85.5 degrees respectively.

Now let’s come to the benchmark ratings and scores. First of all, worth mentioning is the Geekbench scores synthetic benchmark, the Acer Aspire E 15 has managed to score 5408 points on Geekbench 4.

Next, we applied the Laptop Spreadsheet Macro Test on which the Acer Aspire E 15 took 5 minutes and 14 seconds for completing the test, where 20,000 names are being matched with their addresses. As average laptops complete the test in 4 minutes and 1 second, hence this laptop doesn’t lag behind much in the numbers.

Lastly, we applied the 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited, the Acer Aspire E 15 with an Intel HD 620 GPU managed to score 49,211 pts. The average laptops’ score is almost 86,474 so Acer Aspire E 15 couldn’t satisfy as much as it went quite short of these numbers.

On a concluding note, with its newest 7th Gen Intel Core processor, this laptop lets you work with better power, more battery life, and entertainment with a better high-quality.

8. Gaming

Well, As the specifications are already discussed above, this laptop is not for gamers. Even though the Aspire E 15 E5-575-33BM has a great processor but it lacks discrete dedicated graphics and uses Intel’s HD Graphics 620 chip which means you can’t expect any heavy 3D games to run smoothly though you can still use it for light gaming or less-demanding 2D games.

Upon testing with the gaming tests such as the Heaven and Valley gaming tests at 720p and medium-quality settings, the E 15 was only able to average 18 frames per second (fps) and 21fps, respectively, which does not encounter for smooth gaming. While in HD and Ultra-quality settings, it not even reaching 5fps, so you would have to compromise for lower resolution and graphics settings.

9. Audio

For the audio output, the Aspire E15 E5-575-33BM comprises of dual stereo speakers. The speakers are adequate at best, but okay for a $350 laptop. The speakers are loud but a bit muddy. Though you can crank the speakers all the way up without any distortion, the overall sound quality is not that satisfactory.

At times they get quite loud and tinny at full volume and there’s not much bass. The drawback of the speakers is that they are located at the bottom of the case. Hence the sound is greatly affected by what surface the laptop is put on. On a soft surface, the speakers are easily muffled and made almost unusable. On hard surfaces, it can make them sound tinny and thinner than they already do.

10. Battery Life

Battery life is a simple, yet important feature while selecting a laptop and the Aspire E15 doesn’t disappoint.

This laptop comes with the latest Kaby Lake processor and a 6-cell 2800mAh Li-Ion battery pack that holds a charge for up to 12 hours and gives a better battery life and the battery gets fully charged in about 2 hours which is also a plus point.

To test its battery life we had to run a few tests. On the Laptop Battery Test, the laptop lasted 8 hours and 16 minutes during continuous net surfing which is almost an hour and 20 minutes more than the category average which is 6 hours and 53 minutes. Moreover, it lasted for about 7.5 hours when we played 15 minutes 4K video over and over with its maximum brightness in Windows 10’s Movies & TV app until the battery would die which is quite impressive for a $500 category laptop. Furthermore, we had 10 hours of battery life on our standby tests. Hence, the battery life of this laptop is also a feature that makes it stand out in the competition for budget-laptops.

Pros:

• Latest Kabylake processor
• Massive storage
• Excellent performance
• Decent battery life

Cons:

• Underwhelming keyboard
• Feels clunky
• Low quality speakers
• Dull display

Conclusion

To sum up, all features discussed in detail, the Acer Aspire E 15 E5-575-33BM is a great deal to bargain. With its impressive sleek-looking design, a better battery life, a generous selection of ports, a comfortable backlit keyboard and the latest Kaby Lake processor it offers a great combination of solid performance, impressive battery life, and great productivity.

If you are low in your pocket and need a laptop fulfilling your daily needs with much ease, then this laptop is for you. With a few upgrades over the competition, it is clearly good value for the money.

If you’re considering the Acer Aspire 5, check out our comparison of the Acer Aspire 5 vs E15.

CT loves marketing, entrepreneurship, and learning about the latest tech. She blogs about laptops has always been a nerd at heart from the young age of 8 when she got her first computer. She now owns multiple machines and spend 10-15 hours a day on them learning about tech and working from home.