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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.
We were impressed with the laptop’s keyboard, though. We found it easy to type on thanks to the spaced-out Chiclet-style keys, and typing was also comfortable thanks to the fact each key had plenty of bounce and provided lots of tactile feedback. At times they felt a little too spread out, but this is generally one of the better budget laptop keyboards we’ve seen. The keyboard is also backlit by a white LED, which made the keys much easier to see in low light. It’s also always useful to have a separate numeric keypad.
The laptop’s large, all-in-one touchpad is slightly offset, but we found it didn’t get in the way while we were typing. We found it wasn’t particularly accurate or as responsive as we’d like, and we didn’t get on with the all-in-one design, which we found made clicking fiddly. We would have preferred separate buttons.
The touchpad supports multi-touch gestures, but these were particularly tricky to use correctly, and pinching the screen to zoom in was almost impossible to do with any degree of accuracy. We would also sometimes bring up the Windows 8 Charms bar or switch between individual windows unintentionally by swiping either from right to left or left to right, but we soon trained ourselves to avoid this by staying within the boundaries of the touchpad and not swiping in from its edges accidentally.
The V5’s 500GB hard disk should provide you with more than enough space for all your work and media files, and there’s a single USB3 port to attach super-fast external storage. The laptop also has a VGA and HDMI port for external displays, an SD/MMC reader and two USB2 ports.
The V5-571 may be stylish, but its performance and battery life let it down. If you’re after a budget laptop the Acer Aspire E1-571 is faster and cheaper, and if you’d like some pizazz we’d recommend the touchscreen Asus VivoBook S200.
