If you take a look at the sub $400 price bracket Aspire 5 A515-46-R14K is a great overall package. It features a beautiful design, powerful performance, and good battery life. These features make it a perfect companion for students. To give a more in-depth look before you actually purchase this laptop. Here is our review of Acer Aspire 5 A515-46-R14K.
Design, Display, and Keyboard
Starting with the design, the Acer Aspire 5 A515-46-R14K comes in pure silver color which looks elegant. It has a sturdy aluminum finish that looks and feels quite premium. The laptop weighs just 1.8KG (3.97 lb) considering the fact it has a large 15.6-inch display the weight distribution is perfect. It is a compact, portable, and beautiful-looking laptop in its range. On the display front, the laptop packs a 15.6-inch IPS LCD Full HD (1920×1080) display. The screen-to-body ratio is around 82.58% percent very impressive for a laptop costing below 400 bucks. Acer has used In-plane Switching (IPS) Display Technology which it likes to call ComfyView. In my usage, the Display was vivid, bright, and colorful. Acer has used a backlit keyboard here. It also has a congested 10 key numeric keypad. We rarely see a laptop in this range that features a backlit keyboard but also a dedicated numeric keypad. In real-world usage the keyboard was responsive the keypress feels smoother and tactile. The keyboard can easily fulfill all your typing needs.
Performance
Processor: The Acer Aspire 5 A515-46-R14K is powered by an AMD Ryzen 3 3350U processor. It is a Quad-Core processor clocked at 2.10 GHz. In comparison to its Intel counterparts Ryzen 3 3350U stacks up against 10th Gen Intel Core i3-10320. No doubt it is a pretty capable mid-range processor. You can play YouTube videos with ease, attend online classes, etc. But to be very frank, don’t expect something groundbreaking. RAM: Coming to RAM, It has 4GB DDR4 SDRAM. You might be wondering how much you can expect from the amount of RAM this laptop offers. Let me tell you 4GB DDR4 RAM is enough for normal web browsing on your favorite browser where you have opened multiple tabs. There should be no issue using apps like Zoom, Microsoft Teams. You can easily run multiple apps without any performance decrease. Storage: Before talking about storage I would like to shed your attention, this might be the only area where Acer Aspire 5 A515-46-R14K could disappoint you. It comes with only 128GB of SSD storage. Although the storage is based on a fast PCI Express interface 128GB seems a little bit lower. Acer should have provided at least 256GB of SSD storage. Graphics: With the increasing popularity of battlegrounds games like PUBG Mobile, Call Of Duty Mobile, and many others, graphics has become a center point of attraction among gamers. On that note, the Acer Aspire 5 A515-46-R14K packs an integrated AMD Radeon Vega 6 graphics. No doubt the graphics card used here is enough for giving you a good amount of pixels while watching videos or playing normal games. For playing higher graphics games you should not look at this laptop but pick a gaming laptop that has a dedicated graphics card. Software: It’s not just hardware that plays a role in performance but the software is equally important to utilize the hardware specs. Currently, Acer Aspire 5 A515-46-R14K boots Windows 10 operating system. Some of you might be wondering is upgradable to the newly launched Windows 11. Yes, It is the laptop that fulfills all the TMP 2.0 requirements. Be rest assured you will get the Windows 11 when it will be publicly available later this year.
Battery Life
Usage of our electronics devices whether smartphone or laptops are higher than ever. Almost all of us are spending more time on these devices. In that case battery life becomes one of the important factors before buying a laptop. If we take a look at the battery capacity of the Acer Aspire 5 A515-46-R14K the company claims is to be 10 hours. In my usage of almost 2 weeks, I got an average usage time of around 7 hours. So depending upon your usage you can easily expect a similar battery life.
Connectivity and extras
Connectivity-wise Acer Aspire 5 A515-46-R14K supports the latest dual-band Wi-Fi 6 standard. It has support for Bluetooth 5.1. No one will argue Webcams have become much more useful than they were before the pandemic. Having a nice quality Webcam is something everyone should look at before making a purchase decision. The HD Webcam present on Acer Aspire 5 A515-46-R14K will get things done with ease. Understanding the port situation, There are 4 ports in this laptop. One USB 2.0 port, one USB 3.2 first-generation Type-A Ports, and two USB 3.2 first-generation Type-C Ports. Yes, It has a USB Type-C port that supports up to 5Gbps data transfer speed. Also, there is an HDMI port to connect your Television with the laptop. It also has a fingerprint sensor on the top left corner of the TouchPad. The Acer Aspire 5 A515-46-R14K comes with dual stereo speakers that are tuned with Acer TrueHarmony technology.
Verdict
After discussing everything about the Acer Aspire 5 A515-46-R14K, now it’s time for a final verdict on whether you should buy this laptop or not. After using this laptop for almost two weeks now I can confidently recommend it to college students and working professionals who were looking for a solid package under their budget of $400. One can not go wrong with beautiful design, good display, backlit keyboard, Ryzen 3 3350U Processor, Radeon Vega 6 graphics on top of a 7 hours battery life. What do you think about the Acer Aspire 5 A515-46-R14K? Drop a comment to let us know your thoughts.
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