A review of the 15-inch Acer Aspire 5 A515-46-R14K slim laptop with the quad-core AMD Ryzen 3 3350U mobile processor.
Do you want to have an entry-level laptop for home office or homeschooling? Additionally, if you just want to watch movies, streaming music, playing really basic games, and do all of those daily computing tasks consider this one. Why? Because this laptop is capable to do all of the computing tasks we have just mentioned at a very affordable price.
Why spending hundreds of dollars more if you can get something with the same capability for a better price, right? People even use their mobile phones and tablet devices to do that basic computing and even gaming. And here you get a device with a bigger screen and more capabilities.
Does it have no faults? No, of course not, a perfect laptop does not exist, even if they are expensive! This laptop comes with only 128GB of SSD storage, which is enough if you don’t store a lot of files on your computer. Imagine you are having a mobile phone with 128GB storage? That would be more than enough to surf, play basic games, stream, and watching movies. Same with this laptop, if you don’t plan to save your games in it, you will be fine. Furthermore, you can use external storage and have an option to upgrade the memory and storage down the road if you need more.
What is important about the storage, it is an SSD, so it is more reliable and significantly faster than the traditional hard drive. This means this laptop is generally fast, we will also talk about its performance later on this page.
What I like
I have used many laptops from different brands and they all are 15.6 inches notebooks. If you need a laptop to carry around, using them on your lap often, I think the 17-inch variants are a bit bulky, so the 15.6-inch lines are just right in my opinion. This Acer Aspire with its AMD Ryzen 3 3350U CPU has this right size. The Aspire 5 Ryzen 5 3500U model is something you can consider if you want to have a similar device with a slightly older processor chip.
What I like about this 15-inch notebook is its design. The laptop comes in at 0.71-inch thick, so it’s very sleek and thin a real compact laptop.
A Charming Top Cover!
That’s right. This Acer Aspire 5 A515-46-R14K slim laptop comes with an Aluminum top cover, which is impressive considering its price. Additionally, this notebook is aesthetically pleasing with the silver-ish color design and a brushed aluminum finish chassis.
I think the coating on the unibody helps to resist excessive fingerprints and smudges to some extent, which is great because you don’t need to constantly wipe your device. In short, appearance-wise, this laptop feels premium and it may remind you of a MacBook.
Pleasing IPS Display
Acer Aspire 5 A515-46-R14K slim laptop comes with a 15.6-inch 1920 x 1080p Full-HD IPS display with Acer’s ComfyView technology. What is this ComfyView anyway? It does not matter how long you are using your laptop, this ComfyView technology helps reducing eye strain and reflection due to its anti-glare matte finish.
Furthermore, this laptop’s screen has also BlueLightShield technology.
Display Lowers High-energy Blue Light which can provide beautiful colors, yet will also protect your retina from unhealthy blue light that can cause digital eye strain. Learn more here.
Overall, the screen looks nice, and the 1080p FHD resolution makes the color and graphics pop out on the screen. Additionally, being an IPS display, this screen has good viewing angles, which is very useful if you want to share your screen with your friend or colleague. You will be able to view your screen at any angle.
Efficient Fingerprint reader
To be honest, I have not seen any laptop “at this price” that has a Fingerprint reader. So it is good to see this feature on this laptop. With Windows Hello you can easily secure your laptop with this sensor. Windows Hello is a built-in feature in the Windows 10 Operating System so you won’t need to install a separate app to use it.
This feature allows you to sign in to your computer by scanning your finger rather than typing your password. But it is optional, so to have this feature is a good bonus.
Awesome Backlit Keyboard!
One of the good aspects that I like about this laptop is the backlit keyboard. The keys have LED lighting which is very handy when you often type at night or in a dark environment. If you want to buy it for your kid, they will love the backlit keyboard.
Moreover, they added a number pad on the right-hand side of the keyboard. If you work a lot with numbers, this number pad will help.
The trackpad on this Acer Aspire 5 is responsive and large. Acer thoughtfully places the trackpad in a nice position for both right and left-handed users. The trackpad works with Windows precision, which means it will accept multi-gestures like your mobile phones. Furthermore, it also has left and right clicks as well. In a nutshell, the trackpad and the backlit keyboard are both functional.
Acer Aspire 5 A515-46-R14K Specs
| Product: | Acer Aspire 5 A515-46-R14K Slim Laptop | 15.6" Full HD IPS | AMD Ryzen 3 3350U Quad-Core Mobile Processor | 4GB DDR4 | 128GB NVMe SSD | WiFi 6 | Backlit KB | Amazon Alexa | Windows 10 Home (S Mode) |
| Preview |
|
| Operating System | Windows 10 S Mode (or easily change it to Win 10 regular mode with no cost with these simple steps) |
| Processor | Quad-Core AMD Ryzen 3 3350U (2.10GHz – 3.5GHz) [View the specs] |
| Screen | A 15.6″ Full-HD ComfyView IPS 1920 x 1080 |
| Graphics | AMD Radeon Vega 6 |
| RAM | 4GB DDR4 SDRAM (Upgradable) |
| Storage | 128GB PCIe SSD (Upgradable) |
| Connectivity | 1x HDMI, 1x USB 2.0, 2x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, 1x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C, 1x RJ-45 Gigabit Ethernet port |
| Other features | Webcam, 2x Stereo speakers, built-in Microphone, Backlit keyboard, Wi-Fi 6, Fingerprint reader, BlueTooth 5.1, Alexa |
| Strength & Weakness | VIEW |
How does A515-46-R14K perform?
This Acer Aspire 5 model comes with an efficient and lightweight AMD Ryzen 3 3350U processor. This AMD’s processor was designed to power up the mid-range portable notebooks and is an updated version from the Ryzen 3 3200U CPU. For the Intel variant, visit this page.
This 2020 best-seller laptop has the previous generation of this processor. Compared to its predecessor, the CPU chip of this A515-46-R14K laptop brought over ± 16% speed improvement. For processor speed, this is a significant number!
In short, in terms of processor speed, you will get the updated processor from Amazon’s bestseller laptop in the middle range laptops category, but at a lower price tag. Yes, Amazon’s pricing can really be odd sometimes.
Furthermore, this CPU is a quad-core chip while the predecessor is still dual-core, so although it is not a horsepower chip, it is snappy enough to work with Windows apps. This laptop is not intended to be a super-fast machine.
What is more, this AMD’s CPU comes with Radeon™ Vega 6 Graphics which was built with the more advanced 14nm process when compared to its older generation. Although it is not a dedicated Graphics, it is still quite capable to run a lot of games at 30 FPS 1080 p with lower settings. If you want to have a notebook that is specifically built for gaming, this is not the one. Opt for a dedicated gaming laptop like this one instead.
But for daily computer work and very basic gaming like Roblox, Minecraft, etc, this Graphics is quite powerful. Its performance is not far away from the dedicated GeForce MX series (MX230 and MX150).
A515-46-R14K Review Summary
We are impressed with this notebook. Acer has made good inexpensive laptops on their Acer Aspire 5 lineups. The aluminum top cover, IPS Full-HD panel, and a Windows precision trackpad at this price are awesome features.
Moreover, you will also miss the backlit keyboard and the Fingerprint sensor on other laptops at this price tag. And the option to be able to upgrade is a great addition.
Overall, this Acer Aspire 5 A515-46-R14K is a capable thin laptop with many extra features.
