Acer A515-43-R19L Review: An Affordable Powerhouse

Acer A515-43-R19L: At First Glance

Acer stays at the top of the list when it comes to providing sleek laptops at moderate prices. The Acer A515-43-R19L is one of those laptops.

The Acer A515-43-R19L packs a lot of mouth-watering features but for an affordable price.

Talking about the price, at the time of writing this article (January 2022), its selling price was $398.59

The big question for this review is this: does the Acer A515-43-R19L really offer great features for an affordable price? Please read on to find out.

Acer A515-43-R19L: Design, Dimensions and Weight

Low-budget laptops are popular for being boxy and bulky. However, Acer has been able to defy that notion by making the Acer A515-43-R19L look slim despite its aluminum exterior.

In addition to its slimness, the Acer A515-43-R19L is also light, sleek, and has a premium look.

Speaking of its premium look, it is easy to see that right from its aluminum lid. You can even rotate the lid back a little beyond 180 degrees, meaning you can lay the laptop completely flat with the lid open.

When the lid is closed, it holds firmly down against the chassis which makes it a little difficult to open. However, once you do open it, your eyes are faced with a pleasing design.

Firstly, you will notice the medium-sized black bezel surrounding the display. This medium-sized bezel shapes the screen in an attractive way, giving it a look far above its price.

Moreover, the Acer A515-43-R19L has a big screen size which is nicely complemented by the bezels. Talking about the display size, the Acer A515-43-R19L has a display of 15.6 inches.

This display has an FHD (1920 x 1080) resolution.

For the screen brightness, the screen is reasonably bright for a low-budget laptop. The maximum brightness of the screen is about 260 nits.

Also, the screen has an IPS display which allows you to view the screen from many angles. This looks pretty good up until you move your head to about 45-degree.

Even then, the screen brightness only reduces slightly. Indeed, sharing the Acer A515-43-R19L screen with a friend shouldn’t be much of an issue.

Meanwhile, Acer A515-43-R19L’s anti-glare “ComfyView” design does a good job of blocking distracting reflections. On the downside, Acer A515-43-R19L doesn’t offer a touchscreen option.

Above the display, there is a 720p resolution webcam with decent but slightly blurry video quality. Also, the webcam lacks a face recognition feature.

Moving on to the keyboard area, the keys themselves have a pretty solid responsive bump with a springy rebound. Although the key travel is a little shallower than you might expect.

To be clear, key travel is how far the key moves on each keystroke. Also, there is a dedicated numeric keypad with a bit of a narrow design, which makes the keys look somewhat squished.

On the good side, the keys are backlit making them easy to use for your intense typing sessions at night.

As for the touchpad, it doesn’t have a built-in fingerprint reader and lacks left and right-click buttons. Instead, the entire surface on the pad is clickable and this results in a fairly mushy feel when you click.

As for the ports, the port selection on this budget Acer A515-43-R19L model is fair. The left edge has a power connector, Ethernet port, HDMI port, and two USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports.

Meanwhile, the right edge holds two USB 2.0 ports, a Kensington-style cable, and a 3.5mm audio output. As for Wireless connectivity, there is Bluetooth 4.2 and 802.11ac Wi-Fi.

Moving on to the weight of the Acer A515-43-R19L, the system weighs 1900.5 g. Comparatively, the Acer A515-43-R19L is slightly heavier than the Lenovo Yoga C740 which weighs 1360.78g.

However, the Acer A515-43-R19L is lighter than the Asus VivoBook S15 (S533F) which weighs 1814.37 g. Proceeding to the dimension, the Acer A515-43-R19L measures 363.2 x 246.3 x 18.0 mm (W x D x H).

In comparison, the Acer A515-43-R19L is more portable than the ASUS VivoBook S15 (S533F) which measures 358.14 x 233.68 x 15.24 (W x D x H). However, the Lenovo Yoga C740 which measures 322.58 x 215.9 x 15.24 is more portable than the Acer A515-43-R19L.

In conclusion, Acer did a good job in the design of the Acer A515-43-R19L, hence, I rate it eight in this design section.

Acer A515-43-R19L: Processor (CPU) Performance

In the aspect of processor, the Acer A515-43-R19L has a 2-core AMD Ryzen 3 3200U processor. This processor has a base frequency of 2.60 GHz, a boost frequency of 3.50 GHz, and 4 MB cache memory.

Equipped with the 2-core AMD Ryzen 3 3200U, this Acer laptop is sufficient for basic computing tasks like data processing and web surfing. It also has the capacity to perform some heavy computing tasks and multitask.

As a matter of fact, this laptop can work smoothly with twenty Chrome tabs opened. Meanwhile, these Chrome tabs may also incorporate videos streaming on YouTube.

That said, it is proper to state that with the AMD Ryzen 3 3200U processor, the Acer A515-43-R19L is a fairly powerful machine. However, it is important to bear in mind that this is a low-budget laptop.

With that being said, I will include the standard Geekbench 5.0 benchmark test result about the processor performance of the Acer A515-43-R19L. Geekbench 5.0 is a benchmark test that measures the general processing performance of a laptop.

Additionally, a higher score on the benchmark test depicts a better performance of the laptop’s CPU. Thus, based on the Geekbench 5.0 test result, Acer A515-43-R19L scored 2,744 points.

Sadly, this is less than the mainstream laptop average of 3,452 points. 

However, the score is not entirely bad for a laptop with an AMD Ryzen 3 3200U processor. Although when compared with the ASUS VivoBook, the Vivobook scored higher with 3,560 points.

However, it is important to mention that the ASUS VivoBook has a more powerful Core i5-10210U processor.

In conclusion, I will rate the Acer A515-43-R19L an eight out of ten in this processor review section.

Acer A515-43-R19L (RAM) Performance

The Acer A515-43-R19L comes with a 4 GB DDR4 SDRAM on its double memory slot. Therefore the 4 GB RAM is not the maximum memory the laptop allows.

Hence, you can upgrade the memory of this laptop to more than 4 GB. However, it is surprising to see that the laptop allows a maximum memory capacity of up to 16 GB.

This is because the Acer A515-43-R19L is a low-budget laptop. Thus, it is not so common to see inexpensive laptops with a memory extension – let alone supporting up to 16 GB!

With 4 GB RAM, the Acer A515-43-R19L should be adequate in handling day-to-day computing tasks, and moderate multitasking.

However, if you are a heavy multitasker and need more memory, then you can attach an additional memory stick to the second memory slot. Delving into its performance and how it does multitasking, this Acer laptop can open many applications at the same time.

For instance, as I mentioned in the processor section, the laptop can comfortably open about 20 Chrome browser tabs. In addition to these browser tabs, some of the tabs can run apps like digital painting projects, Spotify and Google Docs simultaneously.

For further clarification of the laptop’s memory performance, I will share a standard benchmark performance test. Specifically, the benchmark test is PCMark 8.

The PCMark 8 benchmark simulates daily computing tasks such as tinkering with spreadsheets, online shopping, light video chat, and other common chores.

A PCMark 8 score above 2,000 denotes that you shouldn’t see any speed bumps when working on a Word document for instance. Also, any score from 3,000 should produce better productivity performance.

According to this benchmark test results, Acer A515-43-R19L scored 3,072 points which is above the category average for this laptop.

In comparison, the Acer A515-43-R19L performed less than the Lenovo ThinkPad L390 Yoga – the Lenovo ThinkPad L390 Yoga scored 3,413 points.

Nevertheless, the Acer A515-43-R19L will handle all basic computing tasks without any stutter.

That being said, I rate the Acer A515-43-R19L seven in this memory review section.

Acer A515-43-R19L: Storage Options and Performance

Talking about the storage, the Acer A515-43-R19L features an SSD storage drive with a 128 GB storage capacity. If you are a heavy storage user, you may find 128 GB of storage space to be small for saving documents, games, videos, and songs.

Sadly, the laptop does not feature an SD card reader for storage expansion.

Delving into the storage performance of the Acer A515-43-R19L, we will consider a video transcoding test. In the test, it took the laptop 21 minutes and 55 seconds to transcode a 4K resolution video to 1080p resolution. 

However, the ASUS VivoBook S15 and the Lenovo Yoga C740 both outperformed the Acer A515-43-R19L. In the same video transcoding test, the ASUS VivoBook S15 took 17 minutes 22 seconds while the Lenovo Yoga C740 took 20 minutes 42 seconds.

Also, in a file transfer test, the Acer A515-43-R19L took 14 seconds to duplicate 5GB of mixed-media files. These files were duplicated at a transfer rate of 369.4 MB per second (MBps).

Comparatively, the ASUS VivoBook hits 408 MBps while the Lenovo Yoga C740 topped the list with its 848.2 MBps transfer rate. Apparently, Acer A515-43-R19L performed worse than these two closely competing laptops.

In conclusion, unfortunately in the video transcoding and the file transfer tests, the Acer A515-43-R19L performed worse than two of its competitors. Also, the laptop does not offer an SD card reader for storage expansion.

Therefore, the Acer A515-43-R19L does not deserve more than a seven in this storage review section.

Acer A515-43-R19L: Graphics Card Performance

For the graphics card, the Acer A515-43-R19L comes with an in-built AMD Radeon Vega 3 Graphics. This graphics card runs at a boost GPU frequency of 1200 MHz.

Also, this graphics card is an integrated graphics card. This implies that the graphics card is embedded in the CPU of the laptop.

This is what I meant when I said that the AMD Radeon Vega 3 Graphics is an in-built graphics card. In essence, the graphics card is in-built (or embedded) into the CPU.

Therefore, the graphics card lacks its own VRAM. Hence, the GPU and the CPU share the laptop’s memory – the 4 GB memory discussed earlier in the memory review section – to function.

The lack of a dedicated GPU denotes that asides from lightweight gaming like Minecraft or Steam indie titles, the laptop is not expected to play heavy games. This is because the integrated graphics card is not designed to handle heavy-weight gaming.

Hence, you can’t expect much in the aspect of gaming performance from a laptop with an integrated graphics card.

Moving on from the graphics specs, another way we evaluate the performance of a computer’s graphics performance is to look at a benchmark test. The benchmark test to be used is a 3dmark11 benchmark.

The 3dmark11 is a tool that determines the graphics performance of a GPU. According to the benchmark test result, Acer A515-43-R19L made 3,855 points.

In comparison, Acer’s score is below that of the Lenovo ThinkPad L390 Yoga which made 4197 points. To understand how the 3dmark11 benchmark test works, the higher the score, the better the GPU performance.

In conclusion, the Acer A515-43-R19L is just suitable for low graphics demanding games. Hence, I will rate the laptop a seven out of ten in this GPU review section.

Acer A515-43-R19L: Battery Life and Performance

In the aspect of power, a 3-cell 4200 mAh Lithium Polymer battery powers the Acer A515-43-R19L. Acer claims that this battery can last up to 7 hours.

However, the longevity of the laptop’s battery will depend on its usage. Nevertheless, it is important to verify Acer’s claim.

Therefore, we will consider a battery rundown test. The test involves looping a 4K resolution video till the laptop goes off.

Also, for this battery test, the brightness of the laptop’s display is set to medium.

According to this battery rundown test result, the Acer A515-43-R19L lasted for 6 hours and 55 minutes. This is below the 9 hours 22 minutes category average.

However, the battery life should get you through the day’s work or enough to watch three movies. In comparison, both the ASUS VivoBook and Lenovo Yoga C740 lasted longer at 8 hours 23 minutes and 10 hours 18 minutes respectively.

For the charge time, it takes the Acer A515-43-R19L up to 3 hours to charge from empty battery to full battery.

After considering the Acer A515-43-R19L’s battery life, I will rate it a seven out of ten in this battery review section.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

There’s so much to like about this inexpensive Ryzen 3 processor powered Acer A515-43-R19L laptop. From its slim and light chassis to its overall solid performance it is not difficult to love this laptop.

However, the short battery life on this particular Acer model is tough to overlook. But, if frequently charging a laptop is not a problem for you, then you can buy the Acer A515-43-R19L.

In terms of performance, many other low-budget laptops could be worse than this productivity-minded workhorse. For college and basic home-office use, the Aspire A515-43-R19L will not disappoint.

Hence, we recommend spending $398.59 on the Acer A515-43-R19L laptop and getting value for your money.

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