Let's talk about Acer Aspire 5. So most YouTubers who review laptops tend to focus on fancy brands
like MacBooks, Dell XPS and various gaming laptops. Hardly anyone talks about Acer Aspire 5,
which in my opinion is a very under-rated laptop. While it may not be the most
stylish or premium looking laptop, Aspire 5 is a great choice for most folks. So in this video,
I will give my top 5 reasons for picking Acer Aspire 5 over the competition.
Reason number 1 why you should pick Acer Aspire 5 is the excellent value for money this laptop
offers. For $340 you can get a full-fledged windows 11 laptop sporting a quad-core Ryzen 3 CPU
and 15.6” Full HD IPS display display. I think it's an excellent value for money even beating
the most popular Chromebook. The IPS display panel that Acer puts in these laptops is
actually quite good. It comes with an anti-glare matte coating that greatly reduces reflections
from ambient lighting. For indoor use, this is a pretty good screen delivering bright images,
punchy colors and sharp text. You are also getting a full size back-lit enabled keyboard
that delivers good tactile feedback while typing. Some models even come with a fingerprint sensor
for passwordless logins. Although Aspire 5 is made from polycarbonate, it feels
reasonably solid in hands thanks to reinforced aluminum top lid. For basic internet surfing,
zoom calls and social media browsing, the base model of Acer Aspire 5 will suffice for most
folks. But if you want more horsepower, there are plenty of other configurations to choose from.
And that brings me to the reason number 2: Performance. For $750 you can get an 8 core
16 thread AMD Ryzen 7 5700U configuration of Acer Aspire 5. This is a monster processor
that will smoke every other Laptop CPU in it's price range. Here is a chart comparing this CPU
with Intel’s offering. In multi-core workloads, Ryzen absolutely demolishes Intel with a whopping
57.4% performance lead. This configuration of Acer Aspire 5 delivers amazing performance at
a very reasonable price. Whether it's internet surfing, casual gaming, productivity work like
word processing, spreadsheet or running intense applications like video editing & photoshop,
Ryzen 7 5700U model of Acer Aspire 5 just breezes through these tasks. Now you don't get a discrete
GPU with this configuration, but the integrated Radeon RX Vega 8 GPU is pretty good. It can handle
4K video playback without hiccups, which means you can easily stream 4K HDR content from Netflix,
YouTube and Disney Plus without issues. I was able to run GPU intensive applications like Davinci
Resolve video editing software and Auto-CAD without any hiccups even though these applications
typically prefer discrete GPUs. Gaming performance on Acer Aspire 5 was also pretty good and I had no
trouble playing Fortnite at default settings. I got an average frame rate ranging from
45 to 60 fps which is pretty good for a smooth gaming session. Now, to extract
best gaming performance from Acer Aspire 5, I would recommend upgrading the RAM.
And that brings me to the third reason why you should pick Acer Aspire 5.
Unlike most modern laptops, it's very easy to upgrade this laptop. Pry open the back cover by
removing standard Philips screws and you have direct access to RAM and SSD slots. Based on
the model, you will have access to either 1 or 2 DIMM slots. Ryzen 7 5700u configuration comes with
8 GB DDR4 RAM in a single channel mode. But by adding another 8GB stick in the user accessible
memory DIMM slots, you can enable dual channel memory configuration. In this configuration
gaming performance gets a 20% boost, because Ryzen architecture loves dual channel memory. I also
love the fact that Acer not only lets you upgrade the existing M.2. SSD but provides an additional
port for adding SATA 3 SSD. They even include the SSD harness and cables, which makes it very
easy to add either an SSD or a 2.5” hard drive. I give major kudos to Acer for going above and
beyond when it comes to hardware upgrades. No other PC company, be it Dell, HP, Lenovo or Asus
provide this kind of assistance for hardware upgrade. They all want to be like Apple, but
Acer is charting its own course. And this behavior should be applauded, appreciated and encouraged.
Moving on to the 4th reason why you should pick Acer Aspire 5 laptop. Unlike Apple and other
copycat windows laptops, Acer Aspire 5 actually cares about ports. It offers pretty much all
the ports that you will ever need. That includes USB 3.2 Type-C and Type-A ports, HDMI port with
support for 4K at 60Hz refresh rate, and even an ethernet port. Also included is the Intel Wireless
chipset that supports the latest Wi-Fi 6 dual-band 2.4 and 5 GHz. The only thing that I don't like
is the quality of the onboard webcam. It's a mediocre 720p camera, which looks very dated.
I wish Acer starts including 1080p webcam on all their laptops moving forward. These days everyone
is working from home and a high quality 1080p webcam would be perfect for zoom conference calls
And last but not the least, the 5th reason why you should pick Acer Aspire 5 is the plethora
of CPU choices. You have the option of going with either Intel and AMD configurations. At the $350
price range, Acer offers AMD Ryzen 3 and Intel Core-i3 while at the higher end you
can pick from Ryzen 7 or Core-i7. Acer also offers models with discrete Nvidia GPUs,
which are great for gaming and content creation. At the time of making this video,
my pick of choice would be the Ryzen 7 5700u configuration for top performance. But the model
that I am looking forward to the most is the one with 12th generation Intel Alderlake CPU.
This CPU will finally introduce a hybrid architecture very similar to Apple's M1
chip. There will be multiple performance and efficiency cores delivering kickass
performance and battery life. From everything that I have read about these Alderlake chips,
expect an Acer Aspire 5 laptop with over 12 hours of battery life in real-world use, and an amazing
performance. As soon as these models are released, expect a detailed Techno Panda style review of
these laptops here on this channel. So if you are not subscribed to this channel, please do so.
Now if you are interested in a 2-in-1 convertible laptop that supports active
stylus pens and can be folded 360 degrees into a tablet mode, checkout this video over here.
In this video I share my favorite top-5 2-in-1 laptops. These laptops are great for students
and digital artists who take hand-written notes, draw sketches and diagrams. So go ahead and
click on that video, and I will see you guys over there. Bye!