Acer Aspire 5 A515-54-51dj: Slim And Inexpensive, But Middling Quad-core Performance

We’ve seen faster quad-core laptops, but not for this price

- Ben Patterson

If you’re looking for an inexpensive quad-core laptop that’s less than threequarters of an inch thick, the Acer Aspire 5 A515-54-51DJ might fit the bill. This slim laptop packs in more than enough power for everyday computing tasks, and its quad core performance is respectable, if shy of awe-inspiring. A fingerprint reader and nearly all-day battery life will appeal to productivity minded road warriors, although they’ll have to settle for a display that’s on the dim side.

PRICE AND SPECIFICATIONS Acer packs a bewildering number of configurations into its budget Aspire 5 line—at least 22 by my count, ranging from $350 (at press time) for a dual-core AMD Ryzen 3 3200U-powered model with a bare-bones 4GB of RAM and a 128GB solid-state drive, all the way to a considerably beefier quad core Core i7-8565 model with a hefty 12GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and dedicated Nvidia GeForce MX250 graphics that cost about $850 at the time of this writing. Most Aspire 5 versions boast a 15.6-inch display (although I spotted at least one 14-inch model), with a mix of 1080p and 720p resolutions.

The Core i5-powered version of the Acer Aspire 5 comes with an impressively slim and trim shell

The configuration we’re reviewing here is a middle-of-the-road model, complete with a quad-core Core i5-8265U CPU, a Whiskey Lake processor that debuted in late 2018 as a modest upgrade (mainly a slightly faster boost clock speed) to 2017’s Core i5-8250U Kaby Lake Refresh chip. Comparable to a Core i7 processor from a couple of generations prior, the i5-8265U is a solid workhorse that can hold its own when it comes to CPU-intensive tasks like video editing.