What is the Acer Aspire 3 A315-51?
On paper, at least, the eighth generation Acer Aspire 3 laptop seems to offer a lot for its relatively low price. You get a good size and 15.6-inch Windows 10 machine, which includes a Full HD screen and an Intel Core i3 chipset. The specifications for an economical laptop are not bad. Without a doubt, it is an option that is worth considering for students and families who want to connect online without having to go through banking.
Does the latest wallet-friendly Aspire really offer great value for money? Or should bargain hunters look elsewhere?
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Acer Aspire 3 A315-51 – Design and build
For a budget laptop, the Aspire A315 is pretty attractive. The attractive tan gray chassis has a textured finish, both on the lid and on the inside. It is a clean finish that complements the durable construction very well. A lot of punctures and punctures did not reveal weak points in that frame, although the lid is bent a little under coercion. Fortunately, not to a disturbing degree.
While this Acer machine is not as portable as some other budget rivals, including the company's own Chromebook 14, I had no trouble carrying it in a backpack. That 15.6-inch frame is relatively thin and not too heavy to a shadow of more than 2 kg. Still, I recommend consulting some alternative notebooks if you want something to load with every day.
Aligning the edges, you will find a wide selection of ports. Three USB connections (including a single USB 3.0 port) mean there is plenty of room for peripherals. There is an HDMI connection and an SD card reader, plus a small clean Ethernet port that opens on demand.
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Acer Aspire 3 A315-51 – Keyboard and touchpad
One of the highlights of this laptop economic is the full-sized chiclet keyboard. This extends through a good piece of the chassis, which means that each key is well dimensioned and spaced. No crushed cursor or cursor keys to ruin your typing experience. There is even room for an adequate numeric keypad, although I would have preferred a gap between that and the rest of the board.
The typing action is impressively firm, even towards the center of the keyboard. Combined with the not very shallow travel of each key, I found this writing experience perfectly comfortable.
Lower your gaze below the board and you will see the touch panel, housed in the palm rest as standard. This reasonably spacious notebook is perfectly sensitive and supports multi-touch gestures, to pass web pages, zoom documents and similar things.
However, the integrated mouse clicky buttons are a serious pain in the back. A left click often sends the mouse cursor sliding across the screen, so it ends up selecting something completely different. Of course, you can always lightly touch the surface of the pad instead.
The touchpad is also quite far to the left of the palm rest, which is not ideal for right-handed users.
Acer Aspire 3 A315-51 – Screen
The first indication that this is an economical laptop is that 15.6-inch screen. "See everything in great detail from an excellent HD screen", shouts marketing advertising. Sadly, the only part of that sentence that sounds true is the bit & # 39; HD display & # 39 ;.
It's a Full HD screen, which means that the images are at least pleasantly sharp. Watch long enough and you can still see individual pixels, but that 1920 x 1080 resolution means sharp results, whether you're browsing your photo collection or responding with a movie.
Unfortunately, the color reproduction of the Acer screen is quite abysmal. Only 59% of the sRGB range and 44% of the Adobe RGB range are covered, which in simple terms means a serious lack of precision. Photo editors should be careful.
Visibility is also occasionally a problem. At higher levels of brightness, the Aspire does not exactly brown your retinas. Fortunately, the matte finish means that reflections are kept to a minimum.
However, the viewing angles are incredibly narrow. If the screen is tilted slightly, the image darkens immediately, so you can not see anything of what you are doing. Too good, then, the screen hinge allows you to force that panel back 180 full degrees, until you find the optimal point.
If you demand better viewing quality on a budget, try the Lenovo Ideapad 510s instead.
Acer Aspire A315-51 – Audio
The sound is sent through two speakers, which, unfortunately, are located at the bottom of the laptop. That means that any audio ends up muffled by your desk or your lap. It's fine just to watch some YouTube videos, but we recommend that you connect speakers or headphones to enjoy a movie or some songs.
Acer Aspire 3 A315-51 – Performance
Running the show is Intel's Intel i3-6006U chipset, with a clock speed of 2GHz. This is backed by 4 GB of DDR4 RAM.
The name of the game is the basic performance. I discovered that I could happily surf the web, criticize criticism and broadcast multimedia content from the Web, without too much difficulty. Occasionally, the Aspire A315-51 loses its train of thought and stops for a couple of seconds, for example, when it moves quickly through a web page. However, most of the time it does a reasonable job when running your applications.
Of course, you'll want to avoid putting lots of software on this laptop, since, as a result, it will slow down. In the same way, we recommend regular cleaning of the unit, to avoid constantly slow performance.
We ran our standard benchmarking tests on the Aspire, which spit out the following basic scores.
GeekBench 4.1.1 Single Core: 2361
GeekBench 4.1.1 Multi-Core: 4821
PCMark 8: 2097
Yes If you fancy a round of games on the Aspire A315-51, you'll want to keep your ambitions knee-high. As with all inexpensive laptops, you will not find any dedicated graphics here. Older titles, such as Serious Sam 3, work well in low to medium environments, with perhaps occasional stuttering. Anything more demanding will look more like a slide show.
In addition, the 128GB solid state drive will not have many games before it starts to fill up. And speaking of that SSD, it worked as expected. In our comparative tests we saw read speeds of 523.9MB / sec, as well as write speeds of 367.9MB / sec. That's on par with other inexpensive laptops, and again, it's fine for simple everyday tasks.
Acer Aspire 3 A315-51 – Battery life
With economical laptops like this, one of the best aspects is usually the battery life. I always hope to get a full day of use of each load, so I do not have to charge the adapter when I'm out of the office.
The Acer device did not disappoint. When criticizing documents and surfing the web (all while transmitting music in the background), those energy warnings did not begin to blink until late afternoon. And with the benchmark standard Trusted Reviews (a cycle without interruptions of Internet scams and video playback), the machine lasted more than seven hours in total.
However, if you & # 39; Always on the road, keep in mind that the Aspire A315-51 is not the best for longevity. The likes of the Asus Vivobook L403 and Acer's own Chromebook offer about ten hours of life per charge, for example. And as expected, the game drains that battery much faster.
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Why buy the Acer Aspire 3 A315-51?
The biggest problem with the Aspire A315-51 is that 15.6-inch screen, which suffers from poor visibility and a great lack of color accuracy. However, look beyond these flaws and you will find a perfectly decent economical laptop.
Acer's solid design, along with a satisfying keyboard, respectable connectivity and decent battery life make this Aspire worth considering as a familiar or student machine.
Verdict
Ignore the basic screen and the Aspire A315-51 is a decent laptop, available for a low sale price.