Acer has a solid entry-level laptop for those on a budget
The acer aspire a515-54 offers decent hardware at an attractive price. Its quad-core processor is capable of handling most common tasks, including email and word processing. It also performs well in our gaming benchmarks and in battery life tests, edging out the Asus Zenbook and Microsoft Surface Laptop. However, the Acer's poor SSD write speed holds it back in work-related benchmarks and its screen is disappointing.
You can get a version of this Acer for under PS600, which is a great deal for such good performance in a thin, affordable chassis. Inside, there's an 11th-generation Intel Core i3 CPU with 8GB of soldered DDR4 RAM and a 256GB SSD. There's also room for a 2.5-inch HDD in the chassis if you want to expand the storage.
Unlike some cheaper laptops, the Aspire 5 features an IPS-type display with wide viewing angles and decent color space scores. It's especially impressive for an entry-level laptop, and far better than the TN panels you often see in this price range.
The laptop's IO is very standard for this class of device, with two USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C ports and a Gigabit Ethernet port on the left edge, and an HDMI 2.0 output on the right. A headphone jack is included, too.
The Acer aspire a515-54's packaging includes a 65W charging brick, the laptop itself and the mandatory manuals and guides. The bottom of the chassis reveals the Acer's basic thermal design, with a single fan blowing air through an open back straight over a thick but short heatpipe. This doesn't leave much room for a dedicated graphics card (dGPU), but it's not too surprising given the price point.