Acer Aspire E 15 (E5-576G-5762) Review

The decision to supersize something, whether it's a fast food meal or an SUV, is often fraught with controversy.

Not so with the $599 Acer Aspire E 15 (E5-57G-5762).

Spending just a bit more—say, $99 more than the $500 we typically consider the cutoff for a budget laptop—yields a 15-inch full-HD display, surprisingly good build quality, a capacious SSD, and a discrete graphics processor.

All of these things make the E 15 ($699.00 at Amazon) an excellent desktop-replacement laptop for buyers on a limited spend.

The list of useful features doesn't stop there, and the excellence is only dampened a bit by flaws like bloatware (fixable) and a flimsy touchpad (not fixable).

Overall, this system deserves our Editors' Choice award for the best budget desktop-replacement laptop you can buy.

Hefty, but Writes DVDs

Many consumer ultraportable laptops now boast 13-inch screens and weigh less than 3 pounds, dimensions that make the Aspire E 15 look gargantuan.

At 1.19 by 15.02 by 10.2 inches (HWD) and 5.27 pounds, this is not a laptop that you'll want to carry around every day.

It's the same size and just a few ounces heavier than a similar E 15 model that we reviewed about a year ago.

That E 15 (E5-575-33BM) costs even less ($349), but it also lacks the Nvidia GeForce MX150 graphics card and comes with a slower hard disk drive.

The Aspire E 15 is also chunky compared with one of its chief competitors, the Dell Inspiron 15 3000, which measures 0.9 by 14.7 by 10.2 inches, weighs 4.96 pounds, and still manages to include a DVD drive.

Beyond gaining the expansive screen real estate and a roomy keyboard, one of the main reasons to buy a large laptop is to pair it with a DVD drive, to give life to your old movie collection.

The Aspire E 15's tray-loading drive pops out from the right edge and can both read and write DVDs, tasks that cloud storage and USB drives have largely replaced.

Still, it's nice to have the option, especially if you still have most of that massive stack of blank DVD-R or CD-R discs you bought at Costco a decade ago.

The right edge also features the port to connect the 65Wh power adapter, a USB 2.0 port, and a headphone jack.

On the left, you'll find a receptacle for a Kensington-style lock slot, a USB Type C connector, an HDMI output, and two USB 3.0 Type A connectors.

That's a fairly standard complement for a 15-inch laptop, but Acer doesn't stop there.

The Aspire E 15 also boasts a VGA display output (for connecting to older monitors or projection systems) and an Ethernet jack, meaning you'll be very well prepared not only for connecting to legacy technology, but also enjoy a means of escaping poor Wi-Fi connectivity.

On the other hand, if you've got good reception, the Wi-Fi radio supports 802.11ac, and there's Bluetooth as well.

With a native display resolution of 1,920 by 1,080 packed into the 15-inch panel, the Aspire E 15 offers enough screen real estate to comfortably use two app windows side by side, something that isn't possible with smaller laptops.

While this resolution is on the low end compared with quad HD or 4K displays, it's nevertheless far better than the 1,366-by-768 resolution that was standard for budget laptops a few years ago.

The panel's backlight was bright enough to be seen in the fluorescent-lit PC Labs with no problem, and the matte finish virtually eliminates glare.

Alas, though, you get no option for a touch screen.

Faux Textile Finish

Above the display, there's a 720p webcam that works well enough for Skype sessions but takes grainy still images.

On the lower deck, you'll find a full-size keyboard with a number pad, a setup that's typical for laptops in this screen-size class.

The keys are backlit and remarkably sturdy for a budget machine.

There's a bit of flex in the middle of the board, near the G and H keys, but the supremely solid key switches largely make up for that.

Unfortunately, the clickable touchpad is not a ruggedness match for the keys.

It feels flimsy, especially near the bottom corners, where you'd be forgiven for worrying that a too-firm click would send your finger through the bottom of the laptop.

The touchpad is really the only unfortunate physical attribute we noted on the Aspire E 15, though.

With the lid closed, you can't help but admire the understated-but-still-noticeable faux textile finish, which goes a long way toward making the otherwise vast expanses of gray less boring.

The build quality is excellent throughout, with stiff display hinges that result in very little screen bounce when you tap it.

The textile finish is also present on the bottom, where you'll find easily accessible screws for access to internal components, as well as the two speaker grilles.

Audio quality is largely the same as on last year's Aspire E 15: adequate, but certainly not high-quality.

At full volume, the sound is tinny, especially the highs, and there's not much bass.

Acer offers the same one-year warranty on this machine as it does on the rest of its consumer laptop lineup, with the exception of certain gaming laptops that get two years.

Beware of Bloatware

Evaluating the performance of a budget laptop is fraught with caveats.

Even though it might have relatively high-end components, like the latest 8th Generation Intel Core i5-8250U and 256GB SSD you'll find in the Aspire E 15, the manufacturer may have cut other corners to keep the MSRP down, such as ladling on software from commercial sponsors, otherwise known as bloatware.

The end result is that a laptop that receives a glowing review for its excellent mix of price and features might not be all that pleasing to use every day.

In the Aspire E 15's case, performance on our benchmark tests was very good, especially when it comes to gaming performance, but I did notice a few quirks over the course of several days of testing that might give some buyers pause.

First, let's look at the numbers.

On the all-encompassing PCMark 8 Work Conventional test, the Aspire received a score of 3,034.

Anything above 3,000 on this proprietary benchmark signals very good performance when it comes to everyday tasks like watching videos, browsing the web, and editing spreadsheets.

The difference between this result and the 2,491 that last year's Aspire E 15 (with a slower Intel Core i3) achieved is especially notable, even if the overall high score in our competitive set below belongs to the Acer Spin 5 ($799.99 at Acer) .

The Aspire E 15 also did well on our specialized multimedia tasks, posting class-leading scores on the Handbrake video-encoding test and the Cinebench R15 3D rendering benchmark.

While it's far from a multimedia workhorse, this laptop's processor and 8GB of memory can still step up to the plate if you need to rip a DVD and convert it into a smartphone-friendly video format, for instance.

The best part about the Aspire E 15's benchmark performance, though, is its gaming prowess.

This is by no means a gaming laptop, but because of the GeForce MX150 graphics card, it offers frame rates that are several times what you'll find on competing systems with Intel integrated graphics.

The frame rates on the Heaven and Valley medium quality game simulations are especially promising, since they're both well above the 30 frames per second (fps) threshold necessary for smooth gameplay.

In addition to the GeForce MX150, the Intel Core i5 also has an integrated GPU.

You can easily verify that your game or other graphics-intensive app is running off of the Nvidia chip instead of the integrated chip by clicking on the GeForce icon in the Notification Center.

Now, about those quirks.

Bloatware is noticeable on this laptop, with taskbar links to the Netflix app and a pre-installed copy of the Mozilla Firefox web browser that is inexplicably several versions old, and several more links to commercial websites lurking in the Start menu.

Worse, after one restart and system update, the Acer software utility explained in a pop up message that it had updated to the latest version, and a link to the Ebates cash-back shopping portal concurrently appeared on the desktop.

See How We Test Laptops

This behavior should give pause to casual buyers who don't want to root through folders and settings panels to disable or uninstall Acer's bloatware.

On the other hand, if you're a power user who plans to wipe the hard drive and install a clean copy of Windows 10, you probably don't need to worry as much.

In either case, the SSD goes a long way toward eliminating sluggishness that bloatware might cause, and of course, you can uninstall the bulk of it without too much trouble if you're determined enough.

Rebooting and loading apps is very snappy, something that can't be said of cheaper configurations of the Aspire E 15 or its competitors that use spinning hard drives.

Lasting just a bit longer than 14 hours on our rundown test, the battery is excellent.

This might not be much of a consideration if you're using the Aspire E 15 plugged in on your desk most of the time, but it's nice to know that it has better battery life than many ultraportables we've tested.

Aspire to Replace Your Desktop

The Acer Aspire E 15 offers most things you want in an inexpensive large laptop, from a high-quality display to a sturdy keyboard to a bit of extra graphics power.

There are a few things you'd probably rather avoid, such as bloatware and a flimsy touchpad, but the palatable $599 price makes up for them.

And thanks to a DVD burner and a VGA display output, the Aspire E 15 is even better if you take a gradualist approach to replacing yesteryear's technology.

If you'd rather make fewer compromises and open your wallet much wider, the Dell XPS 15 Touch ($2,149.00 at Dell Technologies) and the Microsoft Surface Pro 2 are our top picks in the high-end desktop replacement category.

You could also buy a cheap all-in-one desktop if you don't care about portability at all.

But if the big-laptop form factor is what you're after, and your budget limit is right around $600, the Aspire E 15 will prove an excellent value and should be near the top of your shopping list.