Acer Aspire 5 A515 in review: A look at a Tiger Lake laptop

The Acer Aspire 5 is wrapped in solid plastic and made with good workmanship. Only the display cover is made of aluminum, which provides the 15-inch display with good stability. The base unit is heavy enough to let you open the device with one hand. The maximum opening angle is around 140 degrees. The open display lifts the back of the base unit up slightly. 

The Acer Aspire 5 weighs around 1.9 kg, which is not heavy, although our comparison field also includes even lighter devices. The dimensions are average.

Acer decided not to take any new risks in terms of port selection and has made no changes compared to the predecessors. Even the GigabitLAN port remains available while the device still lacks an SD card reader.

Apart from the cable-based LAN connection, the Acer Aspire 5 also supports data connections via Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0. While connected to our reference router Netgear Nighthawk AX12, the office notebook reached an average speed of 1328 MBit/s when receiving and 1422 MBit/s when sending data. This result is very good and positions our test unit at the top of our comparison table.

Acer has equipped its Aspire 5 with a widely used but low-resolution 0.9 MP webcam. The image quality is accordingly meager with the picture being blurry and too light even under good lighting conditions.

The Aspire 5 comes with an AC adapter but no other accessories. However, Acer does offer a wide range of compatible notebook accessories on their website.

Acer gives buyers of the Aspire 5 a warranty period of 24 months.

Keyboard

The keyboard of the Acer notebook is suitable for regular typists. The keys might be on the small side, but they feature a very crisp pressure point and are easy to use. The keyboard also includes a physical number pad and various special function keys instead of adding them to existing keys in the form of secondary functions. The one-tier keyboard backlighting ensures that most letters can be read clearly in bad lighting conditions. However, the space bar was left out in our test model and the lighting turned off after a short period, something that we could not change.

Acer has directed its Aspire 5 A515 at office users and has equipped its notebook with the suitable hardware. While the available processors range from Tiger Lake to Ryzen CPUs, the choice of graphics units is limited to the internal GPU of the chosen processor or, in some configurations, the Nvidia GeForce MX350. 

Our test configuration of the Acer Aspire 5 is equipped with an Intel Core i5-1135G7. This processor belongs to Intel's Tiger Lake generation and offers four cores that clock at rates between 2.4 and 4.2 GHz and can work up to eight threads simultaneously. Its performance depends on the set TDP and cooling. While the former is fairly generous with up to 64 Watt short-term and up to 28 Watt in general, the benchmark results do not reflect this configuration. 

The Cinebench R15 single-core result positions our Intel Core i5-1135G7 at the front of our comparison field. The multi-core result, on the other hand, remains below our expectations. The performance is rather meager during our continuous load test as well, although at least it remains stable throughout after a small drop at the beginning.

A look at the Lenovo ThinkBook 13s with its Core i5-1135G7 shows that with the right configuration the processor is able to achieve multi-core performance that is 28 percent higher than that of our test unit and only starts approaching the performance level of the Aspire 5 as time goes by. Our temperature development and power consumption results discussed below show that the maximum power consumption of the Aspire 5's CPU is 37 Watts. The CPU heats up to a maximum of 84 °C, which indicates that a focus on low temperature development is to blame for PL2 not being reached. 

The PCMark 10 benchmark for the Aspire 5 equipped with an Intel Core i5-1135G7 also results in an average value. However, system performance is very smooth during everyday use with programes starting quickly and files being accessed without delay. 

Find out what performance levels other notebooks can reach in comparison in our CPU benchmark list.  

Acer has equipped our test configuration with a 1-TB SSD which reaches very good read and write rates in the storage benchmarks. 

Find out what performance other storage devices reach in our tests in our HDD/SSD benchmark list. 

The internal graphics unit Intel Iris Xe is responsible for displaying image content in the Aspire 5 A515. This is available in two versions; our test unit features the stronger version with 96 EUs. Our 3DMark results are slightly below average but are still better than those of an internal Radeon RX Vega 6, for example.

Find out how other graphic units compare in our GPU benchmark list. 

The internal graphics unit in our device is suitable for older games and less demanding titles. Users will also have to reduce the graphics settings and resolution to play these games smoothly.

Our GPU gaming list indicates what performance you can expect from individual titles.

The cooling fan of the Aspire 5 is hardly audible during everyday use and produces a steady sound under load that does not have high frequencies or other uncomfortable elements to it. This makes the Acer notebook suitable for calm environments, although the touchpad does make a bit of a clatter.

The temperatures on the inside of our Aspire 5 increase to up to 84 °C during our one-hour stress test. The clock rates drop to 1.2 and 2.1 GHz by the end of the test , which is below the base rate. As we do not expect users to reach this level of load during every day use, users should not experience issues related to high temperatures.