Acer Aspire VX5-591G (VX 15) Notebook Preview

The Acer Aspire VX5-591G, which starts well below 1,000 Euros, uses a plastic chassis and we cannot find any issues in terms of design and haptics. The matte surfaces are nice to touch, and we cannot notice stability problems or creaking sounds when we handle it. There were no obvious build quality issues on the pre-production unit, either. You will, however, have to waive metal on the Acer Aspire VX 15, but this is not a real drawback.

Acer uses a completely matte black chassis with red accents not unlike the GL series from Asus. The red accents are two decorative stripes on the lid, the red fan exhausts at the rear as well as the red surrounding of the touchpad and the red keyboard illumination. The central hinge cover is silver.

The Acer Aspire VX 15 is average within the 15.6-inch gaming segment in terms of weight (~2.6 kg) and height (32 mm). High-end devices like the Acer Predator 15, for example, are noticeably thicker and heavier, but there are also gaming systems with very thin chassis constructions. Some laptops are slimmer than 20 millimeters, one example is the GS63 from MSI.

The Aspire VX 15 offers the most important ports. We get 2x USB 3.0, HDMI, Ethernet as well as a new USB Type-C port, but the latter does not offer any additional features (neither power nor DisplayPort worked in our tests). We like the layout: All ports are located towards the back of the sides, so it works for right and left handers. The card reader is also easy to access at the left side.

Touchpad

The touchpad with dimensions of around 10.5 x 7.8 centimeters provides very good gliding capabilities. It is a ClickPad without dedicated buttons. The areas that provide a mechanical click are generously sized and both the resistance as well as the tactile and audible feedback were well adjusted. Typical multi-touch gestures like two-finger scrolling on websites or zooming were no problem, either.

Our pre-production unit is not equipped with the display type we will find in the retail models, so we do not perform any measurements.

New device, new hardware: Acer's Aspire VX 15 is equipped with the latest processor technology from Intel, in this case the Intel i7-7700HQ in combination with an interesting Nvidia GPU, more precisely the Geforce GTX 1050 Ti. The designation "Ti" is carried over from desktop components. Both the GTX 1050 Ti and the GTX 1050 represent the entry-level gaming chips.

Besides these core components, our test model is also equipped with a total of 16 GB DDR4 RAM as well as a dual-storage solution consisting of a 512 GB SSD and a 1 TB hard drive from Toshiba. It is questionable whether this configuration will be available in retail model. It would certainly be an option for a higher-end SKU of the Aspire VN5-591G, which would probably cost more than 1,000 Euros.

Let's have a look at the new Intel Kaby Lake quad-core CPU. The chip is now manufactured in a 14nm+ process and has a clock range between 2.8 and 3.8 GHz. The TDP is 45 Watts, which is identical to its direct predecessor i7-6700HQ. A comprehensive analysis of the new Intel Kaby Lake Chips is available here.

Our initial benchmarks with the new 7700HQ CPU show that the performance advantage over the previous i7-6700HQ is rather small with only a couple of percent. However, we are still a bit cautious about the scores due to the pre-production status of our test model. Final adjustments for the driver, CPU and cooling solution could still change and improve the performance.

The Nvidia Geforce GTX 1050 Ti is the successor to the GTX 965M and bridges the gap between multimedia and gaming. Thanks to the performance increase of the Pascal architecture, the GTX 1050 Ti is on par with the older GTX 970M, which was the smallest chip for "real" gaming notebooks so far. The predecessor GTX 965M can be beaten by 20%, while the new GTX 1060 is still clearly ahead with an impressive advantage of 50%.

The new Nvidia Geforce GTX 1050 Ti seems to confirm the 3DMark benchmarks in our initial gaming benchmarks. It is around 20% ahead of its sibling GTX 1050 and also 20% ahead of the predecessor GTX 965M. The performance is sufficient to play almost all modern titles smoothly in the native Full HD resolution and high settings. The jump to the highest preset (Ultra) is reserved for the GTX 1060. We still want to mention that there can be changes on the retail product as a result of finalized drivers.

Our pre-production sample is surprisingly quiet in all scenarios. A silent operation is possible while idling and also with light workloads like web browsing, for example. Only the HDD is sometimes audible when you access files. Combined load for the CPU and the GPU (our stress test) will slowly increase the fan speed and we get a sonorous murmur with a deep frequency after a while. It can easily be tolerated as a background noise. The dual-fan solution seems to work very well here.

The chassis is inconspicuous and cool under load, but the Aspire VX 15 also leaves a good impression while gaming. We can only notice a perceptible temperature increase at the center of the top and the bottom. Palm rest as well as the area around the WASD keys stay conveniently cool.

Acer equips the Aspire VX5-591G with a 52-Wh battery. Many comparable devices have bigger battery capacities, but the VX 15 still manages good runtimes in our initial test. The gaming notebook did last around 6 hours in our WiFi test. This is sufficient for extensive web browsing or video playback on the go.