Acer Aspire E5-573G-792V Review
The Acer Aspire E5 is a mid-range 15.6-inch laptop. With an Intel i7-5500U CPU, eight gigabytes of RAM, a one terabyte mechanical hard drive, and an Nvidia GeForce 920m graphics card, it is useful for a range of activities; from casual web browsing, to watching movies, to gaming.
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On the top and underside, the E5 has a good looking design made of plastic, which has a texture somewhere in between brushed aluminium and wood grain. When the lid is lifted it opens to a not so good looking, grey plastic design that on the plus side, due to its rough finish does a great job of resisting finger prints.
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For connectivity, the E5 has on the left a combined headphone & microphone jack, two USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI out connector, gigabit Ethernet, a VGA connector (useful if you want to use the laptop with older projectors or monitors) and a Kensington lock. On the right it has a charger, one USB 2.0 port and, surprisingly, a DVD read write drive. Overall, not bad for a mid-range laptop.
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Moving on to the display, the E5 has a 1366 by 768 at 60p TN panel, with average and rather washed out colour, good enough viewing angles and a glossy screen making it harder to see the display with sunlight coming through a window behind me. Though at this screen size it would have been nice to see a 1080p panel.
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The keyboard is an average affair, with fairly normal key travel, that when typing, makes an irritating rattling noise. Due to the body of the E5 being plastic, it has some noticeable flex when pressure is applied.
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The trackpad is a Multi-touch supported, reasonably standard plastic pad with left and right click buttons built into the main pad. Due to the placement of these buttons, the trackpad has a large amount of flex, leading to simply using it with two hands, or disabling it outright and using an external mouse.
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On the inside, the E5 has a dual-core Intel Broadwell i7-5500U at 2.4 gigahertz, with a max turbo frequency of 3 gigahertz. Alongside this it has a fairly standard eight gigabytes of LPDDR3 RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce 920m graphics card with two gigabytes of dedicated VRAM. Because of these impressive specifications, the E5 will have no trouble running most games at sixty frames per second, once you have finished work for the day. Almost everything is fast and responsive, although some tasks are bottlenecked by the 5400rpm mechanical hard drive, which favours size over speed. I would have preferred to see a smaller SSD or at least a higher rpm hard drive over the one used. Despite these, the E5 still manages to provide solid performance for the price.
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Overall the E5 is a compelling buy. With an i7, dedicated graphics card and eight gigabytes of RAM, all for one-thousand-two-hundred New Zealand Dollars (at time of writing), and because of these great specifications, despite its shortcomings, provides amazing value for the money.
