Sometimes you don’t need bursting processors, or power in a laptop, but rather a big honking laptop, with enough screen real-estate and a decent amount of computing power. The 2015 modern 15.6-inch Acer Aspire E5-573G-59C3 certainly is that, but cuts the cloud as the moderately priced replacement for that wheezing ancient laptop that can only last fifteen minutes before it is plugged for a recharge.
The Aspire E5 has a 5-6 hour battery and excellent performance for a system that is on the high end of the budget laptop category. On performance, this system overrides the competition, but the fact that it is slightly expensive than most budget laptops we’ve reviewed, with even better specs, holds the Acer Aspire E5-573G-59C3 back from earning top honors.
Design and Features
Connectors are plentiful, thanks to all the space on the sides of the system. You’ll find an Ethernet port, an HDMI port, a headset jack, a Kensington lock port, an SD card reader, one USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, and a VGA port. The extra chassis space also means that the keyboard deck is wide and comfortable, with a non-backlit, chiclet-style keyboard with full numeric keypad.
The keys are all full size, an improvement over the narrow keypad keys on the 15-inch desktop-replacement laptops like the Acer M5-583P-6428 and the ASUS N550JX-DS74T. That’s still better than the Acer Aspire E5-471G-527B, which lacks the space a numeric keypad. As expected in most modern laptop, the Optical Drive is absent, and the system has 802.11ac wireless, which offers larger coverage than traditional 802.11bgn, and Bluetooth 4.0.
The Aspire E5-573G ‘s faux vinyl black exterior glossy, black exterior measures 10.08 by 15 by 1 inches (HWD) and weighs 5.3 pounds – is slim and lightweight with great build quality. That means the system is ready to replace that six-year-old 15-inch laptop you’ve been toting around. It eschews weight-gaining features like a touch screen (it has none) and optical drive (it has a dummy insert instead of a DVD drive). Audio on the system isn’t great, but you can hook it up to external speakers for a better experience.
Picky users will be miffed to see a bit of screen-door effect on the Acer Aspire 5‘s display. You can visually pick out individual square pixels, especially on solid colored tiles on the Start screen. This is understandable, since it’s a symptom of a 1,366-by-768 resolution blown up on a 15.6-inch screen. It’s one of the tradeoffs that Acer had to make in order to put a higher-performing Core i5 processor in a budget system.
The glossy 15.6 inch non-touch regular high definition display with 1366 x 768 pixel resolution offers decent image quality and you can get 1080p FHD resolution on an external monitor or your large HDTV. Either way you can play games just fine and they look good on this laptop’s HD screen and the discrete NVIDIA GeForce 940M card with 2GB video memory for better gaming performance as it can run most games at medium to high settings and frame rates per second.
Performance
The Aspire E5-573G is outfitted with dual core Broadwell Intel Core i5-5200U processor at 2.2 GHz base speed that is taken up to 2.7GHz by turbo boost function, 8GB DDR3L SDRAM at 1600MHz which is a lot of memory for the majority of computer users and is upgradeable up to 16GB, very large 1TB Serial ATA hard drive at 5400rpm spindle speed and 8GB Solid State Drive so you get to boot up faster.Thanks to all these newer components, it is more than a match for the Pentium-powered Dell Inspiron 15 and the AMD A6-powered Gateway NV52L06U, especially on media editing and light gaming among other daily computing needs.
Thanks to the discrete NVIDIA GeForce 940M card with 2GB video memory, gaming is quite decent for the category at medium to high settings. In my test, I had subtle frame rates per second on common gaming titles such as Call of Duty, Battlefield 4, WOW, Planetside and others won’t be a problem as the system can l use both this discrete and integrated Intel HD 5500 GPU for lighter tasks so it won’t use as much power.
Battery life
The Aspire E5-573G’s performance dominance extends to battery life as well: the energy efficient Core i5 processor in the Aspire E5-573G help it achieve 5-6 hours battery life, much better than the Dell Inspiron 15 and the 5 hours of the Gateway NE72206u. Still, that is not great for the battery. The 14-inch Acer Aspire E5-471G-527B has even better battery life (7 hours) in the category. The system’s sealed battery is impossible for the end user to replace easily, which is unfortunate. Replaceable batteries let you keep using the laptop for longer periods of time.
Summary
And there’s the rub: The Acer Aspire E5-573G-59C3 is one of those systems that skirts the mainstream and the budget categories, and at this price or higher you really want a touch screen. The Aspire E5-573G cost relatively more than the Dell Inspiron 15 (i5547-3750sLV), which is our Editor’s Choice in the budget category. That makes the Dell Inspiron a much better value, since aside from performance, the two laptops are competitive, feature for feature.
Yes, Acer Aspire E5-573G-59C3 lasts two hours longer on the battery rundown test and is perceptibly faster, so it earns our recommendation for budget-minded people who are impatient or want to use the system unplugged. The majority of general users trying to save (more than) a few bucks on a new system will be better served by the Dell Inspiron 15 that offers similar performance.
