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

2 years ago

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

Melvin

1 year 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

1 year 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

1 year ago

Reply to Simeon Nikolov

Thanks much, I really appreaciate your feedback!