Acer Aspire 5 (A514-55) review – good budget daily driver

Design and construction

The design of this laptop is similar to the Acer Aspire 5 (A514-56M) – non-intrusive, with minimal branding, and rounded corners. This little fella is for sure portable because its weight is 1.49 kilos and has a profile of 17.9 mm.

The chassis is stable with a few exceptions. You can flex the aluminum lid a bit and you can bend the plastic base in the zone between the Space key and the touchpad. The rest seems rigid. You can’t open the lid with a single hand.

The bezels around the display aren’t among the thinnest we’ve seen. Above the panel, we can spot a 720p Web camera with Temporal Noise Reduction.

The lever mechanism of the lid raises the backside of the chassis when the lid gets past the 90-degree angle of opening. This is good for ergonomics during typing and the cooling fan can suck more fresh air in this mode.

The base houses a keyboard with an optional backlight and big keycaps. They have long keytravel and clicky feedback and that’s why the board is comfortable for long hours of usage.  The touchpad is small and has an optional built-in fingerprint reader. The pad’s smoothness and accuracy are good for the class. The con of this unit is the loud clicking during work.

The bottom panel houses a big ventilation grille that reveals the cooling solution, a battery reset pinhole, and two cutouts for the speakers. The hot air is guided through a vent on the back of the notebook. Some amount of heat reaches the display when the CPU is under heavy stress.

Ports

The majority of the ports are on the left side – a power connector, LAN, an HDMI 2.1, two USB Type-A 3.2 (Gen. 1) ports (the former supports power-off charging), and a Thunderbolt 4 port with charging and DisplayPort capabilities. On the right, we can see a Kensington lock slot, one more USB Type-A 3.2 (Gen. 1) port, and an audio jack.

Author: Nikolay Palaozov

Author: eng. Kroum NikolovHead of Engineering at LaptopMedia.com, inventor and innovator with 40+ years of experience in electronics and high technology.

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