During the holiday downtime with the family I was browsing online and came across the Acer Aspire E 15 E5-575G-57D4 15.6-inch laptop. At first glance I wasn’t expecting much as Acer’s E-class of laptops are aimed at more value oriented devices. The price of around 550 dollars seems to match this. After looking further I started noticing more and more cool stuff about it. So let’s see what this Acer Aspire E15 has to offer.
The Exterior
As expected of a value class laptop the Acer Aspire E 15 E5-575G-57D4 15.6-inch laptop doesn’t feature much in regards to special design. The entire body is plastic finished in typical matte black with some basic texture.
The top cover features many fine horizontal and vertical lines trying to give it a more professinal feel. The silve Acer logo is located in its typical location on the middle of the left side of the cover.
On the inside si where we start to get to the good bits. The Acer Aspire E 15 E5-575G-57D4 features an above average 15.6-inch FullHD 1080p LED screen. This gives you a much sharper image than would be expected in this price range.The display bezel also features the built-in webcam on the top and a silver Acer logo on the bottom. Nonstandard to this laptop is the built in microphone. It isn’t built into the display cover. It has been moved next tot the large touchpad. It’s a small pinnhole you can barely notice.
The palmrest receives a brushed aluminum finush and gets a full sizen keybord with numerical pad. It also gets a large offcenter touchpad. The power button is hidden inside the keyboard as one of the keys. This is a small design que you would normaly only find on much more expensive laptops. Beyond these minor details there is nothing more on the palmrest keeping it very clean looking.
The status LEDs and the built in card reader are relegated to the front edge of the laptop.
Overall the design of the Acer Aspire E 15 E5-575G-57D4 shows that this is a basic laptop with basic design. I guess this is to be expected for a device priced so low. Having owned something similar in the past from Lenovo I can say that these things tend to outlast most other laptops.
The Connectivity
The connectivity on the Acer Aspire E 15 is standard for this price range. The left side of the body features the Kensington-Lock-port, 1 USB3.1 Type-C port, Ethernet LAN out, HDMI-out, and 2 USB 3.0 Ports.
The other side of the body features the power connector, built-in DVD-Drive, one USB 2.0-port and the headphones-mic combo jack. The card reader and status LEDs are located on the front edge of the laptop.
On the inside it features the latest WiFi 802.11 b/g/n/ac wireless technology and Bluetooth 4.1. Thanks to the latest AC standard for WiFi adapters you can expect wireless transfer speeds much grater than standard wired connections.
The performance
The main thing that caught my eye to the Acer Aspire E 15 E5-575G-57D4 15.6-inch laptop was the fact that it does come with a dedicated graphics card. It has a nVidia GeForce GT940MX graphics card with 2 GB dedicated VRAM. While the card itself isn’t the best you can get, it has that “good enough” factor. It can run most recent popular games on medium to low settings very well. Here it is in action running GTA 5:
Now that that’s cleared up, let’s get to the other goodies that come with this Acer. It gets the latest 7th generation Intel Core i5-7200U running at 2.5 GHz (at first I thought this was a typo on the spec sheet, but it checks out with Intel’s own specs. Anyone remember when low voltage U-processors ran below 2GHz?). This is a low voltage model that can draw as low as 7.5w of energy. Very good for working on the go and ensuring a good battery life. When plugged-in this processor can turbo up to 3.1GHz for that added performance when needed.
While we’re on the subject of battery life, the Acer Aspire E 15 E5-575G-57D4 features another rare feature in recent years, a 6-cell Li-Ion battery, good for up to 12 hours (according to Acer). While manufacturer claims tend to be very optimistic when it comes to battery life, I would expect it in use to be more in the 6 to 8 hour range. Most laptops in the recent past came with 3 or 4-cell batteries and could get about 4 hours of battery life. Double that value seems reasonable.
I find the 256Gb SSD rather small nowadays. I expect you will have to have an external HDD for all your data. I’m sure the SSD is very fast but considering that installing one game today needs around 40 to 50 Gb of storage space you can quickly run out. Windows 10 will inevitably take up another 50Gb of storage. If you’re only going to use this laptop as an access point to the internet it should be enough.
The final technical point is the 8GB of RAM. This is enough for about anything you can throw at it today. Only if you do a lot of numerical calculations, read FEM-simulations (which I wouldn’t recommend on this laptop), will you have problems with the amount of installed RAM. Having multiple office applications a few browser tabs and an email reader won’t even make it break a sweat.
Very good review but your main concern with storage is very easily remedied by installing another hard drive in the available slot located in the bottom access compartment. Here you can also install up to 32gb of memory without removing the back of computer.
Well yes, of course you can upgrade the laptop, but I am reviewing this laptop as is here. I have stopped advising upgrade paths in the past because most buyers are afraid of doing them. I had to check if that processor allows more than 16GB of RAM and it supports up to 32GB with an asterisk attached to it.
Thank you for the feedback.