Acer Aspire 5 A514

A solid choice if your budget is £500 or under, but if you have more to spend then look elsewhere

SCORE

Range starts at: £358 (£429 inc VAT) Model tested: No longer available

Acer’s Aspire range is designed to do one thing: sell in droves. It’s a mass market laptop built on a budget, and if that means chunky bezels and a predominantly plastic chassis then so be it. It’s the supermarket own-brand of jeans – none of that designer label nonsense.

To a large extent, this approach works. The Aspire 5 A514 range, which is primarily on sale at Currys, starts at £429 for a Core i3 system with 4GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. This is enough to run Windows 10, although upgrading the RAM by 4GB will make things smoother (it’s possible to add this yourself if you follow online video guides). Sadly, the specification that Acer sent to use for review is no longer available, which reflects just how quickly such affordable models sell out.

Attempting to decide which version of the Aspire 5 A514 to buy without understanding Intel’s naming conventions is a dangerous game. Ideally, you want a chip with “11” at the front of its name to indicate it’s part of Intel’s 11th generation of chips, but that will push up the price: for example, the Core i5-1125G7 version costs £649. The tenth-gen models are cheaper but also significantly less powerful, and that’s in games as well as day-to-day speed. The graphs on p92 reveal all here.

In truth, if you’re spending more than £500 on a laptop then we’d hesitate to suggest the Acer Aspire, simply because you can get more for your money if you opt for the £549 version of the Honor MagicBook 14. This offers an all-metal chassis, whereas only the Aspire’s lid is made from aluminium, and with a Ryzen 4000 Series chip inside it’s faster too.

There’s little to choose between the two for screen quality, with a lowly gamut coverage and poor colour accuracy meaning that colours lack punch. Still, this 14in Full HD panel is sharp and hits an adequate peak brightness of 293cd/m2.

The keyboard is almost identical to that of the Swift 3 we review on p78, so we won’t repeat ourselves. Think solid rather than spectacular. The same can be said of the 720p webcam, which, together with the clear microphone, is up to the task of videoconferencing. There’s one more nice touch for housebound workers: the usual Wi-Fi 6 is complemented by a wired Ethernet port. Note the USB-C port is only for data transfers, but there’s an HDMI port for hooking up a monitor and three old-style USB ports too.

This all adds up to a competent machine, albeit one that’s lacking in excitement. We recommend you stick to the sub-£500 models if you’re after a bargain.