Acer Aspire 3 (A315-41-R98U) Review

Acer ‘s Aspire 3 is a big-screen budget laptop that delivers a roommate 15.6-inch display, a comfortable keyboard, and horsepower for productivity work—and tied a bit more. Our $ 529.99 review model ( Acer ‘s identifier is A315-41-R98U ), based on an AMD Ryzen CPU with on-chip Vega graphics and an SSD boot drive, dips under $ 500 at times from retailers, and it keeps pace with early low-end and mainstream machines, including a few priced american samoa senior high school as $ 700. Before you get excessively excited about a $ 500 laptop sparring so far above its burden class, though, know the price mandates some sacrifices. The expose is dull and a coarse 1,366-by-768-pixel native settlement ; the battery life is hours shorter than competing models ; and the touchpad is subpar. The Aspire 3 ‘s natural calculate and graphics might for the money is admirable, but an upsell to a model like the Asus VivoBook S15 will satisfy more folks .

Ryzen Pep in an Plain Shell

On the Aspire 3, the only passing from the basic black of its credit card enclosure is a brushed-texture traffic pattern on the eyelid and keyboard deck. otherwise, the Aspire 3 is about deoxyadenosine monophosphate vanilla as black laptops come. Silver Acer logos on the eyelid and bottom bezel, plus a copulate of AMD stickers below the keyboard, are the only exceptions to the monochromatic design .
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Since 1982, PCMag has tested and rated thousands of products to help you make better buy decisions. ( See how we test. ) At 4.3 pounds, the Aspire 3 forces you to carry a few more ounces than the 3.7-pound Lenovo IdeaPad 530S or the 3.97-pound Asus VivoBook S15 ( $ 769.10 at Amazon AU ), two other late-model 15-inch budget laptops. At an inch thick, it ‘s besides a moment thick than those two models. It measures 15 inches broad by 10.4 inches deep. With the combination of its thickness and the thin plastic used for the chassis, the Aspire 3 feels bouffant, a bite like the laptop equivalent of a bag of potato chips before you open it.
That said, the hinges that hold the display feel uncompromising enough. They keep the display in position with little to no wobble and offer assuring resistance when adjusting its lean. Although the keyboard deck and back empanel flex inward a act when you grip the laptop and pick it up, the keyboard itself feels solid underneath my fingers. I ‘m a heavy-fingered typist, and I felt no give as I thundered away on the keys .

The key action is hushed and offers good travel, for a reactive feel. The key layout feels roomy, besides. That is no hateful feat, given the presence of a give total diggings in the key-deck quad afforded by a 15.6-inch screen .

Alas, the touchpad fails to match the firm feel or good vibration of the keyboard. The surface is loose and onionskin along its bottom edge. besides, when stroking it, the pad wobbles without being clicked, which makes performing an actual chatter feel like it requires more storm than it should. Plus, a gap around the edge of the touchpad will be a bunker for crumb and dirt .

Display and Connections: The Very Basics

Given the crafty touchpad, I had hoped to avoid using it and alternatively trust upon touching the screen for some input. not to be, though : This screen is not a touch dialog box, which means you and I are lodge using the touchpad, unless we want to attach a mouse .
In addition to lacking touch support, the Aspire 3 ‘s expose besides comes up short on brightness and bare-assed resolution. The filmdom remains slightly dull even when you crank it up to max brightness, and the native resolution is a ex post facto 1,366 by 768 pixels. A 1080p native resolution is more typical for a 15-inch laptop and results in a finer photograph. This control panel barely feels like a atavist .
The incorporate webcam, excessively, is below average. It offers only a 640-by-480-pixel solution, which delivers farinaceous videos. The 720p webcam on the Asus VivoBook S15 or Lenovo IdeaPad 530S is a clear step up in picture quality .

The speakers are median, at best. Audio end product is tinny, with barely enough dynamism to project across a minor room. This is not a laptop that will double as a sound system for a dormitory room ( few budget machines are ), but its phone suffices for YouTube viewing when you are seated directly in front of it .
In the same vein as the screen, the Aspire 3 ‘s port choice is sparse and dated. It lacks any newer-style USB Type-C ports, and it has more USB 2.0 ports than USB 3.0 ports. A USB 3.0 port, an HDMI port, an Ethernet jack, and an SD poster slot model on the leave english …

On the right side, you ‘ll find a pair of USB 2.0 ports, a earphone jack, and the baron connection …

Cooling vents cover closely half of the bottom panel, and boastfully vents take up half of the back edge of the laptop, which makes it a bit uncomfortable to hold when carrying the close laptop under your branch. That ‘s more ocular discharge than common for a laptop with a mainstream mobile CPU and integrated graphics, but may be a consequence of the specific Ryzen chip used here .

In summation to its sea of vent, the bottom dialog box hides an unusual feature of speech for a budget laptop : two little panels that afford easy entree to the memory and hard drive ( or quite, to a hard driveway bay ). The compartments ‘ lids are each prevail in position by a single cheat. Behind one you ‘ll find the memory modules, and behind the other is an evacuate 2.5-inch drive true laurel .
The Aspire 3 ‘s boot drive is a 256GB solid-state drive that lies elsewhere on the motherboard, so you can add a second tug ( a Serial ATA 2.5-inch intemperate drive or SSD ) to boost the storehouse. That ‘s actually a rare fringe benefit in a budget laptop, and the idea of a decent-size boot SSD paired with a roommate intemperate drive ( you can find 1TB 2.5-inch intemperate drives for $ 50 or so ) is an attractive deal .

More Power Than a Typical Budget Banger

personal computer Labs does n’t get to see about american samoa many AMD-based laptops as Intel-based ones, so this Ryzen 5-based unit is of special matter to .
I compared the A315-41-R98U to a host of competing Intel-based machines in the like general price sphere. The Aspire 3 ‘s AMD Ryzen 5 2500U processor competes directly with the Intel Core i5-8250U CPU that ‘s in the rest of this distribute. The competing laptops ‘ core components are outlined below …

With its combination of a quad-core/eight-thread Ryzen 5 CPU and a rapid SSD, the Aspire 3 felt bouncing for basic tasks. Windows booted quickly, apps loaded with gingersnap, and I found a fairly academic degree of multitasking possible before operation started to bog down ( and the cool fan kicked in ). On the responsiveness front, this is no budget-laptop cad. Too many of the outside hardware bits give away its entry-level condition, but its performance is no slouch for the money .

Productivity, Storage, and Media Tests

PCMark 10 (Productivity Test) and PCMark 8 (Storage Test)

PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the personal computer benchmark specialists at UL ( once Futuremark ). The PCMark 10 test we run model different real-world productiveness and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system operation for office-centric tasks such as give voice process, spreadsheeting, Web shop, and videoconferencing. The test generates a proprietary numeric score ; higher numbers are good. PCMark 8, interim, has a storehouse subtest that we use to assess the amphetamine of the storage subsystem .

The Aspire 3 ‘s PCMark 10 score of 3,163 was within the gross profit of erroneousness of most of the scores of the Core i5-8250U-based laptops, including an Optane Memory-equipped Aspire 5 that features only 4GB and a slower hard drive paired with the Optane module. Thanks to its rapid SSD, the Aspire 3 ‘s PCMark 8 Storage score was squarely in the center of the battalion .

Cinebench R15

adjacent is Maxon ‘s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make manipulation of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU quite than the GPU to render a complex image. The consequence is a proprietary score indicating a personal computer ‘s suitability for processor-intensive workloads .

The Aspire 3 turned in a strong second-place showing on Cinebench, trailing entirely the overachieving Asus VivoBook S15. You would n’t want to spend a sidereal day in a video-editing suite with the Aspire 3, but it does have the brawn for the casual video-editing tax without making you wait for long stretches for it to finish render .

Photoshop CC

We besides run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud translation of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test visualize. We time each operation and, at the end, add up the sum execution time. This task stresses CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can besides take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with knock-down graphics chips or cards may see a boost .

The systems were tightly grouped on our Photoshop test. These budget laptops are capable of some meek Photoshop work without making it feel besides arduous .

Graphics Tests

3DMark Sky Diver and Fire Strike

3DMark measures proportional graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, suited to unlike types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more befit to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demand and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff .

The Ryzen 5 CPU includes AMD ‘s desegregate Radeon Vega 8 graphics silicon. now, this is not the equivalent of the Radeon RX Vega graphics on AMD ‘s background video cards, but in the rare times personal computer Labs has gotten to test laptops powered by mobile Vega, it has pleasantly surprised. ( For exemplar, see our reappraisal of the 2018 Dell XPS 15 2-in-1. ) here, it ‘s clearly well more able than its integrated Intel rival. The Aspire 3 posted 3DMark scores that were about doubling that of the Intel-based systems .

Unigine Superposition

next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D setting and measures how the system copes. In this case, it ‘s done up in the company ‘s eponymous Unigine locomotive. This different 3D workload scenario offers a second impression on the machine ‘s graphic art .

You wo n’t mistake the Aspire 3 ( or any laptop with integrate graphics ) for a bet on machine, of course, but the Aspire 3 did mail high frame of reference rates on our superposition benchmarks than the Intel-based budget laptops. distillery, with frame rates below the 30fps goal for politic gameplay even at 720p, you ‘ll need to keep your gaming expectations in check .

Battery Rundown Test

After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the car in power-save mode ( as opposed to balanced or high-performance mood ) and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in training for our unplug video summation test. ( We besides turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop in Airplane mode. ) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the Blender Foundation unretentive film Tears of Steel—with filmdom luminosity set at 50 percentage and volume at 100 percentage until the organization conks out .

The good operation news for the Aspire 3 ends here. It lasted entirely 5 hours and 33 minutes, at least three hours shorter than the next-best laptop in this competitive fit. notably, the Asus VivoBook S15 endured more than doubly as farseeing .

These Good Guts Need a Better Body

Thanks to its AMD Ryzen 5 central processing unit and integrated Vega graphics, this Aspire 3 loadout impresses with some identical all-around performance for a budget machine. The boost that the Radeon Vega 8 graphics confers is particularly significant. Kudos go to AMD for the core hardware .
Alas, the battery biography and the body are not up to snuff. many users can swallow this classify of abridge battery runtime in a big 15-inch laptop, since it is n’t all that portable and will spend much of its life plugged in. But even for an entry-level machine, the Aspire 3 ‘s design is, well, sterile. The dull, low-resolution display and rackety touchpad make a recommendation difficult. The Editors ‘ Choice-winning Asus VivoBook S15 S530UA retains its belt as our current budget choice. It ‘s worth the add funds for its satiny design, superscript display, and like operation .

Acer Aspire 3 (A315-41-R98U)

3.0

See It
$ 599.99

at Amazon

MSRP $ 529.99

Pros

• Ryzen CPU/Vega graphics surrender impressive pep for price .
• comfortable keyboard .
• Easy RAM and storage upgrades .
• vacate 2.5-inch drive bay .

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Cons

• short battery life .
• Dull, low-res filmdom .
• Flimsy touchpad .
• No USB Type-C ports .

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The Bottom Line

This AMD Ryzen-based version of Acer ‘s Aspire 3 budget laptop offers healthy pep for the money, but the touchpad, the battery, and the 15.6-inch display let down the team .

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Category : Reviews