Acer Aspire E5 871G is another solid laptop which we received for review. It looks similar to its predecessor Aspire E3-111, but has got some updates in specs as well as in price. The solid laptop is made for all rounders and suitable for both work, and entertainment.
Legacy of E series Aspire design: The slim and stylish shell of the notebook made of plastic that gets a beautiful brushed metal finish finish. Entire body gives you a sturdy look and firm grip. The bottom panel is rough and tough to tackle with any surface. It gets a matte surface at the back and the display bezel is glossy. The lid easily swivels to a great extent. With the fair balance in the dimensions, it gives a firm grip to the laptop.
Display, sound, and webcam: Acer Aprire E5-571G has a 15.6" HD (1366 x 768) TFT LCD display that produces natural colors. It is bright enough to enjoy games, movies etc. Playing graphic intensive games are also possible as it has a 2GB NVIDIA GeForce 820M graphics. We played several games including Thief, Shadow of Mordor, etc. and it performed really well. There was a little lag while playing Shadow of Mordor, but as its not a gaming laptop, so you can expect it. Still we found it good enough for day to day work as well as entertainment. This has two speakers, located on the bottom, which produce pretty average sound, but they are loud enough to enjoy movies and games.
The laptop is also equipped with Acer Crystal Eye HD webcam (1280 x 720). This enables user to do video conferencing using Skype etc. But it attracts noise in low light and even day light images are not much impressive.
The laptop has all the standard ports including single USB 3.0, two USB 2.0, optical drive DVD Super Multi with Tray-loading, HDMI and VGA, LAN port, combo audio jack, and a Kensington lock. It also has card reader and a set of indicators. The laptop comes with built-in Wi-Fi 802.11 b / g / n, though we were expecting Wi-Fi 802.11 ac, and Bluetooth 4.0.
Decent performer: Operating the laptop for day-to-day usage was a pleasure, we never found any lag in the performance thanks to its i7-4510UIntel Core processor and 12 GB DDR3L RAM. The E5-571G runs on Wiindows 8.1 OS. It can handle multitasking and entry level games as well, though you may notice a little lag while running heavy software or games. However when we played HD videos, Adobe Photoshop and Chrome browser simultaneously and it managed all the tasks without any visible lag. Thanks to its cooling system, we didn’t notice extreme heating issue with it. In our benchmark testing it scored well and resulted in P1410 on 3DMark and 2525 on PCMark.
The laptop backed with 56 Wh 5000 mAh 11.1 V 6-cell Li-ion battery that last about 6 hours in normal usage like internet browsing etc. With heavy gaming and video playback it can last for more than 3 hours. In the Battery Mark benchmark it lasted for 1 hour and 58 minutes.