Inside Acer Aspire 5 (A515-57) – disassembly and upgrade options

There are 10 Phillips-head screws you need to undo, to access this laptop’s internals. After that, pry the panel with a plastic tool and lift it away from the chassis.

2. Battery

Inside, we see a 50Wh battery pack. It lasts for more than 9 hours of Web browsing, or about 7 hours and 30 minutes of video playback. Unplug the battery connector, and undo the two Phillips-head screws that hold it in place.

3. Memory and storage

Memory-wise, there are two SODIMM slots, which fit 32GB of DDR4 RAM in total. As for the storage, you get two M.2 PCIe x4 slots, one of which supports Gen 4 drives.

4. Cooling system

The cooling system here looks very simple but effective. There are two heat pipes connecting to a long heat sink, where two fans blow the heat away.

Check out all Acer Aspire 5 (A515-57) prices and configurations in our Specs System or read more in our In-Depth review.

Acer Aspire 5 (A515-57 / A515-57G) in-depth review

Acer is looking to supercharge its Aspire 5, and boost its chances against the IdeaPad 5s and the Vivobooks of the world. It is paired with a 12th Gen ULV processor by Intel. This could take on the Zen 3-equipped everyday notebooks out there.However, there is something else about the machine. Recently, NVIDIA released the RTX 2050 - its most affordable ray-tracing capable mobile graphics card. And it can be found in the G-version of this device.Unfortunately, there was no such device in the store in our area, so we had to settle for a non-G model. Nevertheless, it has an extremely low[...]

Read the full review

Pros

Thin and light design
Alder Lake-U CPUs
Thunderbolt 4 + Wi-Fi 6
Touchpad + great input devices
Capable cooling
2x SODIMM + 2x M.2 PCIe x4 (one supports Gen 4 drives)
Good battery life
Doesn't use PWM for brightness adjustment (BOE NV156FHM-N48 (BOE0A56))

Cons

No SD card reader
51% sRGB coverage (BOE NV156FHM-N48 (BOE0A56))

Author: Alex Iliev

4 Comments

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Hasan

1 year ago

Are you sure total ram support is 32gb? I have 12450h version which Intel says is supported up to 64 gb.

Melvin

11 months ago

Reply to Hasan

Hi there,

what is the maximum storage per pcie slot? for pcie gen 3 what is the maximum? and for pcie gen 4 what is tha maximum? thanking you in advance

Can I do 4TB both? total of 8TB

Admin

Simeon Nikolov

11 months ago

Reply to Melvin

The A515-57, it *officially* supports up to 32GB (as per Acer’s specs sheets) but there are configurations on the market with up to 64GB, like this one:
https://laptopmedia.com/laptop-specs/acer-aspire-5-6209/

Regarding the storage, again, officially, the A515-57 supports up to 2x1TB but here’s a configuration with 4TB SSD + 64GB RAM:
https://laptopmedia.com/laptop-specs/acer-aspire-5-6395/

I can’t be 100% sure that the laptop BIOS would recognize larger drives, unfortunately, it has to be tested.

Melvin

11 months ago

Reply to Simeon Nikolov

Thanks much, I really appreaciate your feedback!