Small Business Computer and students from Acer, a Acer Aspire V5-561PG-6686

Hangouts on Chrome OS have always had a tendency to get jerky and drop frames, especially with multiple participants and if you're trying to multitask with, say, a text file at the same time. On the Core i3 C720

Introduction & Design

With all the buzz over ultrabooks, tablets, and convertibles, it's easy to forget there's a huge swath of the PC market that just wants a feature-rich, reasonably powerful laptop at a good price. No flip screens, no pop-off keyboards, no razor-thin platinum chassis with quad-HD screens—just a not-too-heavy clamshell for work and maybe a little light gaming.

That's where the Acer Aspire V5-561PG-6686 comes in. Priced at $699, this mainstream laptop delivers more features than a bare-bones budget machine—namely Intel Core i5 power, 8GB instead of 4GB of RAM, dedicated instead of integrated graphics, and a touch screen—but without all the bells and whistles of a higher-priced portable. It has its shortcomings—the reasons it only flirted with instead of ultimately winning our Editors' Choice nod—but the Aspire is an unassuming overachiever.

Design

As with past Acer budget-friendly models, the V5's design is handsome enough. A marketing type might call it understated; we call it a bit bland. The gunmetal gray lid does a good job of approximating the brushed aluminum that is all the rage among higher-end laptops, but one touch and you'll know it's plastic. (Our marketing friend might point out that it's very good plastic.)

At this price you also sacrifice the engineering that makes more expensive laptops remarkably thin and light. That said, at 5.6 pounds and an inch thick, the Aspire is not overly bulky for a laptop with a 15.6-inch screen.

One design area where the V5-561PG-6686 does have thinner, lighter laptops beat is in port selection. There's enough real estate on the edges that nothing had to be sacrificed. The left edge houses a VGA port (an increasingly rare commodity that's a boon for consumers with older monitors), an HDMI port, an Ethernet jack, a USB 3.0 port, and a headset jack. An SD slot lives on the front edge (you'll need an adapter to accommodate other memory-card types), and the right edge houses two USB 2.0 ports.

   

   

There looks like a spot on the right for an optical drive, but on this model it's just a plastic panel; other versions of this chassis do deliver an optical drive. Another rarity these days is the Aspire V5's user-replaceable battery, as opposed to the sealed-in power packs that have become almost ubiquitous. The machine's 4-cell battery pops out from the back edge, and you can order a spare ($39.99) directly from Acer or its resellers.

Features

The 15.6-inch screen delivers very good image quality, with excellent brightness and well-saturated colors. The V5's budget roots show, however, in that the panel does not deliver the full 1080p (1,920x1,080) resolution that HD purists desire. Truth be told, we're okay with that. The display's 1,366x768 resolution suits us just fine, since it means text is perfectly legible at default sizes and zoom levels. The resolution is also more suitable for touch-screen use, since pudgy fingers aren't trying to tap teeny-tiny on-screen elements.

Speaking of the touch screen, the abilities of the V5's screen are a match for any we've tested, with smooth response and accurate reaction to input. We do wish the panel featured in-plane switching (IPS) technology, which would deliver wider viewing angles. Especially with video playback, the viewing sweet spot for the Acer is fairly narrow.

Cost-cutting also shows in the onboard speakers, which deliver tinny sound when playing back music and noticeable distortion when you crank the volume. But the audio quality is fine for Web audio and the like. The V5's built-in Webcam delivered a decent image in bright light, with accurate color reproduction and little to no motion blur. In dimmer light, however, digital noise became evident, lending an overall grainy effect to the image.

The Aspire offers a roomy keyboard, complete with a dedicated numeric keypad. The function keys and inverted-T cursor arrows are on the small side, but all other keys are full-sized.

There are no dedicated buttons for volume and mute controls, which is a shame given the copious space on the keyboard deck. The island-style keys themselves are neither the best we've typed on nor the worst: The key plunge (up-down range of movement) is fine, but the feel is just a little off. You might not notice it if you have a softer touch, but heavy-fingered typists may find the key action too abrupt and the noise a bit clacky. Also, there's no backlight for the keyboard, a feature we've grown to rely on even in sub-$1,000 laptops.

But we have no complains about the touch pad. It is generously sized, and the textured surface reduces friction for smooth and accurate cursor movement. A large one-piece mouse button is responsive and provides just the right amount of audible feedback when clicked.

The other features the Aspire V5 delivers are typical for a budget mainstream notebook. You'll find a 500GB hard drive but (it bears repeating) no optical drive, which is odd for a full-size laptop. Wireless connectivity comes by way of 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 chipsets.

As you'd expect for the price, the software bundle is heavy on trialware and Acer's own utilities but light on full-blown applications. You'll find Acer media, photo, and backup/recovery tools, as well as Acer Screen Grasp and Touch Tools apps to make best use of the touch-screen abilities. Trials include McAfee LiveSafe and Microsoft Office. Acer backs the V5 with a limited one-year warranty.

Performance & Conclusion

Under the hood, the Aspire V5-561PG-6686 is a cut above other low-priced competitors. The 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-4200U processor is nothing extraordinary for a $699 laptop, but the standard 8GB of RAM and dedicated AMD Radeon R7 M265 graphics processor (with its own 2GB of memory) stand out.

In our graphics and gaming tests, the discrete GPU helped set the Aspire apart from other mainstream models we've tested recently, namely the Acer Aspire M5-583P-6428$718.88 at Amazon, Asus VivoBook V551LB-DB71T$819.99 at Amazon, Dell Inspiron 14R, and Toshiba Satellite E45t-A4300. But in our multimedia and general performance benchmarks, its numbers were merely okay.

In PCMark 7, a synthetic suite that assesses overall system performance, the Aspire V5 landed mid-pack among the group—impressively close to the more costly, Core i7-powered Asus, though its lack of an SSD cache left it well behind the Toshiba.

But in our CPU-crunching Cinebench test, which renders a complex image to show a PC's suitability for processor-intensive tasks, the Acer trailed the other Core i5 models. In fact, it jockeyed for position with the Dell machine, which has a lowly Core i3 chip.

   

   

Multimedia Tests

Cinebench is usually a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing test, which transcodes a five-minute 1080p clip to smartphone format. Sure enough, the V5 finished next to last (ahead of the Inspiron).

But the V5-561PG-6686 came charging back in our Adobe Photoshop image editing test, which applies a series of complex filters and effects to a large JPEG. It finished the chore in the second shortest time, behind the Core i7 Asus.

Graphics & Gaming Tests

No, the V5 we tested can't compete with a hardcore gaming rig, but its 3D prowess is leagues above the typical Angry Birds-playing entry-level laptop. Of course, part of its success here is the low-def 1,366x768 screen resolution, which allows it to push fewer pixels than a 1080p system. Still, on 3DMark 11, which measures overall graphics performance, the Aspire topped our chart, including the Asus (which also has dedicated graphics).

At medium quality settings, the Aspire V5 exactly hit the 30 frames per second threshold for smooth gameplay in our DirectX 11 gaming sim Aliens vs. Predator. (It was a couple of frames slower in our other sim Heaven, not charted here.) This indicates that, while it may not be up for the toughest triple-A titles, the Acer can go beyond low-end to mid-level or moderately challenging games at its native resolution.

Battery Life & Conclusion

Considered on its own, the Aspire V5's battery life is fine for a 15-inch laptop: The notebook delivered almost six hours of runtime in our demanding battery rundown test, which exceeded Acer's conservative four-hour claim. Yes, the others here lasted longer. But if you need a full workday away from AC power, Acer gives you the option of swapping out a depleted battery for a fresh one.

Spending $699 these days should get you more than a no-frills laptop. The Acer Aspire V5-561PG-6686 falls down in some frills—its Webcam and speakers are disappointing—but it's a bargain when it comes to the essentials. To put it another way, the Aspire V5 isn't a dream machine. But to get this level of performance parts and a large touch screen at this price might be a dream come true for students, small business owners, and home users on a budget.

Review via computershopper