Acer Aspire V5-571 review

Acer’s Aspire laptops often offer a lot for not a great deal of money. The last V-series laptop we saw, the Acer Aspire V3-571, won a Best Buy award earlier in the year, so we had high hopes for hopes for the new V5-571.

The V5 makes a good first impression. It looks every inch the high-end laptop and is significantly smarter than the V3. Our review sample had a smooth, matt silver finish on the screen bezel, keyboard and wrist rest, and is a slim 23mm thick. Its 15.6in screen has the usual 1,366×768 resolution, but colours are both bright and vivid, and our test photos showed excellent contrast and plenty of detail.

Unfortunately, though, that’s more or less where the V5’s appeal ends, as our hopes were soon dashed when we started to use the laptop for more heavy-duty tasks. 4GB of RAM is plenty for Windows 8, but with a last-generation Intel Core i3-2367M processor running at 1.4GHz, the V5 performed dismally in our multimedia benchmarks, scoring only a measly 23 overall. Even at this low price, this is below what we’d expect; you’ll be ok with office tasks and web browsing, but we wouldn’t recommend any image editing and video editing is right out.

As you’d expect, this is no gaming laptop; the integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000 chipset failed to run our Dirt Showdown test at our standard settings of 1,280×720, 4x anti-aliasing and High detail. Even when we switched to Ultra Low quality and disabled AA, we only saw 17.8fps – possibly due to processor speed limitation rather than the graphics chipset. Needless to say, you won’t be buying the V5 for playing serious 3D games.

We also weren’t impressed with the laptop’s battery life, as we only saw 4 hours and 4 minutes in our light-use battery life test. We’re not expecting all-day battery life from a budget 15in laptop, but we like to see at least five hours.