The cheapest AMD Ryzen laptop has a feature all laptops should have
An Amazon Prime Day special, but is the Acer Aspire 5 worth it?
Acer Aspire 5 laptop - $280 from Amazon
The Aspire 5 from Acer is a solid entry level AMD Ryzen laptop that doesn’t break the bank. It is probably the fastest notebook that sells for less than $300 and - with a full HD display, 4GB RAM and a 128GB SSD - should outperform laptops costing far more.
From afar, you might mistake the Acer Aspire 5 laptop for an older variant of Apple’s MacBook, thanks to a few shared design elements.
The laptop is currently on sale at Amazon as part of the Prime Day "deal of the day offer". Available at $280, it carries a discount of almost 25% on its original price tag ($360).
However, the laptop has a few flaws which, depending on what you want to do with the device, may impact negatively on performance.
At the heart of this laptop is an AMD Ryzen 3 3200U, a dual-core processor that can run at up to 3.5GHz, which is paired with Radeon Vega 3 mobile graphics. There’s also 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD, which is just about enough to run Windows 10 and a few applications.
However, we usually recommend a quad-core processor (Core or Ryzen) with 8GB of RAM and 256GB storage at a minimum for a decent Windows 10 user experience.
It’s worth noting that this laptop is Amazon Alexa-enabled, which is a much better option than Microsoft’s Cortana and far more versatile as well.
Other worthy features include a full HD IPS display (no TN here), nearly eight hours of battery life, a backlit keyboard and a dedicated numeric keypad.
On each side of the A515-43-R19L are three USB ports, one HDMI connector, an audio port and a Gigabit Ethernet port. But it's a shame there’s no microSD card slot nor a Type C connector.
TechRadar is rounding up all the top deals over the Prime Day sales period, and we’ve put all the best Prime Day deals in an easy-to-navigate article to help you find the bargains you’re looking for.
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Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.