Intel's tech helps the Aspire 5 keep up, but a poor display and battery life hold it back in the end.

Low price; Intel Optane speeds up the large-capacity hard drive; Good performance for a budget machine; Sturdy build quality

The screen is really bad; even for the price; Battery life is underwhelming; The keyboard isn't backlit

Looking at the whole package, the Acer Aspire 5 could have been a solid multimedia laptop if the display had not spoiled the evaluation. We would have gotten over the small weaknesses such as having only a single USB Type-A 3.0 connection or the mediocre WLAN data transfer rates.

metal base top; low throttling; dedicated GeForce MX130; case handles cooling well; two maintenance hatches; Ethernet port

poor display in almost all respects (brightness; colors; contrast; mediocre keyboard; relatively thick and large case; weight; WLAN performance

With high-end laptops, you're getting an ever slimmer and lighter footprint, backed by a heavy pocket, while budget laptops are wired for performance over looks at rock-bottom prices. Then you…

Decent performance; Good build quality; Very reasonable price

Not as light as it competitors; Not the most vibrant screen

While this has somewhat changed recently, Acer laptops have been historically known for their affordable price tags and overall solid value for the money, albeit with a few cut corners here and there, perfectly normal for budget devices.

This is one of a range recently launched at Thorpe Park on what in some parts of the country was the hottest day of the year. While it was an event I was unable to make I have been kept up to date by the excellent Acer PR Company, here the first offering sent to me.

I bought this laptop for college, I have very few programs installed on this laptop but it has started to get slower each day. It now runs worse than my parents 6 year old laptop that has about 8 functioning keys. Firefox, Microsoft word, and even Task Manager constantly crash.

Cheap; worked for a few months

Extremely slow; programs do not respond

So, upon purchase it worked like a dream. Epic render distance and low everything else worked at 60 fps on Fortnite. Took 5 minutes to set up. But one thing was wrong. We noticed that the backlit keyboard was missing. After searching we found out that it no longer comes with a backlit keyboard.

Works well for office or general use but there are a couple of issues: -It doesn't sleep properly. Often it was on after sleep was selected -There isn't really any way to fix screen bleed -It doesn't explain when the graphics card kicks in (or if it is on all the time it is a battery waste)

Beautiful bright antiglare matte screen, awesome keyboard backlight & feel. Super powerful and boots fast(15-20 secs). In CinemaBench, I got a 75.08 on openGL and on Cpu stress test I got a score of 526. The build quality is very sturdy. a bit of a fingerprint magnet inside but feels super premium.

With high-end laptops getting ever slimmer, lighter and more expensive, while budget laptops continue to show that they can still be perfectly capable options despite their rock-bottom prices, it can be easy to overlook mid-range machines such as the Acer Aspire 5.

Good battery life; Up-to-date components; Good build quality; Decent performance; Well priced

Cheap-feeling touchpad; Screen isn't the most vibrant; Not as light and thin as other laptops