Acer Aspire 5 with Tiger Lake: A notebook like many others

When manufacturers decide to use the newest processor generations, this should ideally provide users with at significant performance boost. If, however, htey always use the same basic notebook model, some potential advantages go to waste.

Our review of the Aspire 5 A515-56-511A focuses on the Tiger Lake CPU Intel Core i5-1135G7. This is very generously dimensioned with a PL1 of 28 Watt and a PL2 of 64 Watt. While this leads to a good single-core result during our Cinebench R15 test, multi-core performance is subpar. 

The clock rates drop to 1.2 GHz during our continuous load test - significantly lower than the base rate of 2.4 GHz - which might be due to the cooling system. The core temperature remains below 85 °C at all times, but this comes at the price of CPU throttling. As the maximum power consumption is below 40 Watt according to our measurements, the chip basically never reaches PL2. 

The Acer Aspire 5 A515-56-511A's performance is more than enough for its intended purpose. The internal Xe graphics unit enables slightly better graphics performance than the usual UHD and Vega CPUs. Overall, however, users who are purely interested in office applications will receive the same system performance from Aspire 5 models with previous CPU generations.

Find out what else to expect from the Acer Aspire 5 in our detailed review.