Acer touts its Aspire E series as the company’s “better everyday computing” line, and the E 15 (the specific model I reviewed is the E5-576) is a standout laptop, offering surprisingly strong performance and at least one unique feature at a price with which few can compete.
Design
As the name suggests, the Aspire E 15 features a 15.6-inch screen, and while the big black clamshell design won’t immediately turn heads, the unique lid and palm rest featuring an attractive metallic textile pattern is at least eye-catching enough to make you forget the rest of its clunky appearance. The spacious keyboard includes a full numeric keypad, though Acer has inexplicably wedged a tiny delete key into an awkward spot in the top row, and a pair of small but loud speakers are on the underside of the machine. At 4.9 pounds and 32 millimeters thick, the Aspire is quite bulky, but, as I’ll explain, it has a good excuse.
Features
Have you ever been stuck without internet — or a working Netflix password — and wish you could just pop a DVD into your laptop? With the Aspire E 15, you can: This laptop has an actual DVD drive built in, a feature I haven’t seen in a laptop I’ve reviewed since 2014. This is the main reason the Aspire E 15 so much larger than competing machines, but the drive actually blends in with the computer so well I didn’t even notice it at first. While the screen (which offers 1920 by 1080 pixels) is dim and suffers from a chunky bezel around it, it’s bright enough to keep entertained anyone who isn’t a professional cinematographer.
Specs
The 1.8G Hz Core i5-8250U (eighth generation) processor, 8 GB of RAM, and 256 GB SSD are all standard features for low-cost laptops, but that’s where the Aspire’s familiarity ends. Aside from the aforementioned DVR drive, the E 15 also has Nvidia’s new GeForce MX150 graphics processor. The MX150 is a dedicated graphics chip that provides a step up from the usual integrated graphics system, though it’s definitely not Nvidia’s high-end GTX products. As for ports, the Aspire E 15 has two full-size USB 3.0s, a USB 2.0, a single USB-C connector, full-size HDMI, full-size ethernet, and even a (very) old-school VGA video output port. I haven’t seen a monitor with a VGA input in years, but if you’re still toting, say, a projector from the early 2000s, the port could come in handy.
Performance
The Aspire’s core components provide fairly average performance at general computing tasks (including web page rendering, business productivity applications, and digital media creation work), but tests that put the MX150 graphics card to work are where things start to get interesting. Here you’ll find that video benchmarks and gaming framerates are roughly 3 to 4 times better than systems with integrated graphics — though systems with a GTX graphics card (like the MSI GF63 reviewed below) will typically double what the Aspire’s MX150 can do. That’s good enough to make most modern games playable on the system, albeit at lower video settings. Overall scores look like this:
Battery
You might think a system like this — big, bulky and featuring dedicated graphics — would offer minimal battery life. You’d be wrong. With 13 hours and 23 minutes of run time, the Aspire E 15 bested every laptop in this roundup, tripled the score of the MSI GF63 and earned the best score I’ve seen on that test since 2013.
Conclusion
The Aspire E 15 isn’t the most stylish laptop on the market, but at $600 from Acer (and, as always, less if you’re a bargain hunter), it’s more than economical considering the pile of features you won’t find on many other systems in this category (or, in the case of the DVD drive, anywhere else at all).
