Review Acer Aspire 5 (4500U)

You want a good and a six-core 7nm CPU in a budget laptop?
Then you should really read this review…

We choosed the Aspire 5 in combination with the 4500U since it is a rather cheap (or at least the cheapest in germany ( https://geizhals.de/?cat=nb&xf=6763_Ryzen+4000 ) entry laptop for around 500 euros which still has a six-core cpu. In this review we gonna take a look at the whole laptop and see, how it performs in standard tasks, what kind of runtime we can except in several usecases and how the laptop performs in games and benchmarks.

• Acer Aspire 5
• Ryzen 5 4500U (6 cores / 6 threads)
• Vega 3 (6 CUs / 384 shader)
• 15,6 inch IPS (1080p + anti-glare)
• 4+4 GB SK Hynix RAM (dual channel)
• 256 GB Western Digital NVME
• Wifi 5 (802.11 ac) + Bluetooth 4.0 (Qualcomm chip)
• 1x RJ-45, 2x USB 3.2, 1x USB 2.0, 1x USB-C, 1x HDMI, 1x Headphone
• Battery with 3220mAh (48wh)

Lets start with the first impression…

A rather simple sleek silver laptop with a good surface feel and no sharp edges on it. Beside the panel and keyboard, there are no fancy lights. Nothing to complain about. Sure, there are laptops (like my T460s Thinkpad) which feels a bit more solid, but i will always keep the price in mind when i compare stuff, and the price is a very big point towards the Aspire 5

We do have a backlight keyboard which stand very well against the Thinkpad (T460s). It is brighter and does more light through the letters, numbers etc. Perfect for working in the evening.

The Display is an IPS panel which has nearly no backlight bleeding. Only some small/soft spots are spotted on the edges. But i must admit, i have seen worse on more expensive models. The viewing-angle is also very good but i did not except here worse, since an IPS always have a better angle than an TN-panel

Inner construction

Now we opened up the laptop to see the mainparts:

On the left side we have a spare-place for an additional 2,5″ SSD/HDD. The adapter and cable are included in the package.
In the middle you can see the fan beside the apu, the APU is hidden under the copper heatpipe. Close to the fan is the wifi-bluetooth card, it is a Qualcomm Athereos chip.
On the upper left you can change the sk hynix ram stick which we will do later to test flex-memory.
Beneath the ram you see the Western Digital SSD and on the left side of it the battery.
The laptop is well ordered inside and everything looks replaceable. It should be easily fixed if parts inside broke.

Games

Lets do the games benchmark first. Since this is not really a dedicated gaming laptop, I tested most of the games in a GPU friendly 720p resolution.

All tests have been done on Windows 10 (1909) and the stock driver which gets shipped with the Laptop (AMD Driver 19.40.40)

Game	Settings / Preset	FPS avg. or Score
ROTR	720p – low	46,34 FPS
Tomb Raider 2013	1080p – normal	48,6 FPS
Strange Brigade	720p – low	58 FPS
Deus Ex: MD	720p – low	34,6 FPS
GTA 5	720p – normal	74,88 FPS
R6: Siege	720p – low	102,7 FPS
Civ 6 GPU	1080p – low	52 FPS
CIV 6 CPU	1080p – low	8,04 round-time
Mad Max	720p – low	63 FPS
Firestrike	–	2435 pts

Firestrike: https://www.3dmark.com/fs/22857687

All games can also be seen in our review Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSk1sKynyfo

Productivity

Ok, now we want to talk about the CPU, productivity tasks and wattage tests.

In Cinbench R20, the 4500U performs close to a stock i7 7700k, with ~2211 points. In the older Cinebench R15 you will achieve ~880 points.

Office, Autodesk (stock room data) and SQL tables in MS Access are performing without any kind of delay. Everything is really fluent and there is nothing to complain about.

Power Draw

Now we are coming to the one-and-only part of a laptop review. How long does it run on the battery?
All tests have been performed on low-light display settings and normal performance mode.

All results are the overall draw of the whole laptop

• Idle = ~3.5w
• Office = ~5w-6w
• 1080p Youtube = 7,5w
• GPU heavy = ~20w
• CPU heavy = ~30w (peak at 40w)
• Combined workload = 33w

Conclusion

We have to admit, the Acer Aspire 5 is a nice laptop at all. Even when there are still some small contra points, like the open-up and the current ac-adapter bug (more on this later).

In our opinion the laptop is totaly worth the money since it has a good and rather low power draw in daily tasks, an outstanding performance in cpu heavy tasks and is still good for some minor gaming from time to time. This points together gave it a really big value for an entry level notebook.

We will now do further tests with this laptop for our website and youtube channel, and will keep you informed about changes, new game benchmarks and updates about the Acer Aspire 5.