Acer Aspire E15

A WINDOWS 10 LAPTOP WITH AMD INSIDE.

DO YOU FONDLY remember good old-fashioned laptops that weren’t small enough to t inside a purse, couldn’t convert into 27 di erent shapes and weren’t powered by a fusion engine? So do we, and the Aspire E15 is one such classic laptop. It’s big enough to make it a pleasure to use all day, which gives it room to squeeze in hardware that rivals desktop PCs, all at a price that won’t break the bank.

It seems strange to say that the 15.6” screen feels large, yet it does thanks to the glut of 10-inch and 11-inch laptops around these days. Sadly the resolution of 1,366 x 768-pixels means pixel structure is very obvious, and we’re not big fans of the glossy nish. e large screen dictates the overall size of the unit, giving Acer enough room to squeeze a full-sized keyboard onto the base. e entire unit is made from plastic, yet feels nice and sturdy. e weight of 1.58kg isn’t a backbreaker if you need to haul it around all day.

Acer has gone for a rather unique mix of hardware inside the E15. Firstly there’s the AMD CPU. e A4-7210 CPU packs four cores running at 2.2GHz under load, and also features AMD’s Radeon R3 integrated GPU. is graphics architecture ran rings around most of the competition, making the E15 one of the few machines suitable for casual gaming. However, the E15 didn’t hold up too well in our other tests, likely as a result of the use of a mechanical drive instead of an SSD.

While we love having a terabyte of storage, the loss of performance is a bit of a deal breaker. When compared to Gigabyte’s a ordable laptop, the E15 simply doesn’t have the extras to justify the $200 price hike.