Acer Aspire 5 A515-54-30BQ Review

In this Acer Aspire 5 A515-54-30BQ review, we are going to dissect this new entry-level laptop that comes with decent specs and targets home users and students who don’t need a lot of power. With a price tag of under $350, this laptop falls right in the middle of the budget category

What problem does the Acer Aspire 5 A515-54-30BQ solve and why is it necessary? Finding a reliable laptop in the budget range has been a hit and miss. This Acer laptop here plans to dominate the category by delivering excellent performance for students and other light users. Have they succeeded in doing that? Let’s find out.

Design

The laptop comes in a nice shade of gray and makes a pretty good first impression. It doesn’t look like a cheap laptop which is a win in our books. The construction of the laptop is also not that cheap. Though we find plastic in most areas, Acer has gone with the good quality ones wherever possible.

The keyboard is a full one with a dedicated number pad. If you work with numbers a lot, then you should find this useful. One nice touch here is that you get backlighting for the keyboard. We don’t get this in most low-priced machines and here we have a nice, refreshing change. The key travel is serviceable and makes this keyboard a good one for taking notes and other stuff.

The touchpad is decent and does what it’s supposed to. It tracks the touches and movements responsively and supports all the gestures in the Windows ecosystem.

Under 4 pounds, this is one of the lightest laptops in this category. You can easily take this with you and work on the go with as it hardly adds anything in terms of weight. Portability is a great advantage and you get that here with the Acer Aspire 5 A515-54-30BQ model.

Acer Aspire 5 A515-54-30BQ Specs

When you get your hands on a low-budget laptop, you’ll find that the multimedia performance is not that great. You might get an average screen, mediocre sound and so on. But in the Acer Aspire 5 A515-54-30BQ laptop, multimedia performance is very good.

We get a 15.6″ screen that comes with a full HD resolution. The panel here is an IPS panel which is hard to find in a laptop this cheap. Thanks to the IPS panel, the colors and the image quality is more than satisfactory. You get excellent viewing angles which means you can enjoy a movie night with your friends without worrying about having a bad screen on your laptop.

The display is perfect for watching movies and playing games. Being a widescreen, you can also work efficiently on this machine by keeping two windows side by side.

The audio performance is also more than decent. The laptop comes with Acer’s TrueHarmony sound and has better bass than most low-priced laptops. The volume can also get quite high but it certainly distorted at full volume. If you’re planning to enjoy a movie on a saturday night alone in a small to medium-seized room, then these speakers will be more than enough.

Raw Performance

The Acer Aspire 5 A515-54-30BQ is powered by an Intel Core i3 processor with two cores. The 8145U chip is an eighth-generation processor that comes with a base clock frequency of 2.1GHz but can go up to 3.9GHz with the assistance of turbo boost. The peak clock speed is pretty powerful and can handle a lot of loads.

The laptop gets a CPUMark benchmark score of 5511 which puts the processor in the entry-level category. The real-life performance of this laptop is much better than the benchmarks suggest. The laptop is great for your everyday activities. But it can also handle complex applications if needed. You can throw pretty much anything at this laptop, and it will handle it without any issues.

When it comes to memory, the laptop only has 4 gigs of DDR4 type memory. While this might look like a meager amount of memory, you can still do a lot with it. This memory is certainly sufficient for most students and light users.

Gaming and Storage

The Acer Aspire 5 A515-54-30BQ laptop is an entry-level laptop, and with that, you don’t get a discrete graphics card. The graphics card here is an integrated one in the name of the Intel UHD graphics 620. This is a much better GPU when compared with its predecessors. But it still is not as good as a dedicated GPU. You can enjoy some light gaming on this device, but anything more than that might give you a frustrating experience.

For storage, we have a 128GB NVMe SSD. This is both the good and bad for this laptop. For the good side, we have an NVMe SSD which is proven for performance. It keeps your laptop on its feet and makes sure there is no lag during your everyday activities. The bad part is that 128 gigs are simply not enough to even light users. However, increasing the SSD capacity might end up increasing the price of the laptop as well. So if you need more space, you can invest in external hard drives that are pretty cheap these days.

Battery Life and Connectivity

Battery life is one of the best aspects of this laptop. With light usage, the laptop lasts for about 9 hours which is great for a budget laptop. We mentioned how portable the laptop is, but with this battery life, you can truly work on the go. Even with some heavy usage, the battery still manages to stay alive for 4 to 5 hours which is darn impressive.

You get a good selection of ports in the Acer Aspire 5 A515-54-30BQ laptop. There is a USB 3.1 type C port which comes with multiple uses. There is a couple of USB 3.1 gen A ports and USB 2.0 port. The HDMI port can be pretty handy for high-end connectivity while the Ethernet port will provide you access to high-speed internet. Also, you get a headphone jack which is quite essential in a laptop. In addition to these ports, the laptop supports both WiFi and Bluetooth connectivities.

Bottomline

The Acer Aspire 5 A515-54-30BQ is a budget laptop that delivers solid performance with such a small price tag. The hardware might look underwhelming at first, but they work well together and give you all the power you need. The laptop is a perfect companion for students and home users. It can also serve as a secondary device to mid-range and heavy users as well. Highly recommended.