Acer Aspire 3 review: A budget laptop or is it just cheap?

Budget Windows laptops in crisis. 

Buying a laptop for $500 is as easy as ever in 2024, but most that dart beneath that price do it with outdated processors that come paired with truly terrible integrated GPUs. 

The Acer Aspire 3 exemplifies the problem. It’s a capable laptop for basic tasks. But if you can stretch your budget to $700 or $800, you can snag a laptop that’s at least twice as quick and a much better value for your money.

Looking for more options? Check out PCWorld’s roundup of the best laptops under $500.

Acer Aspire 3: Specs and features

The Acer Aspire 3’s most prominent specification is the AMD Ryzen 5 7520U processor. It’s a relatively basic AMD CPU with a total of four processor cores and eight threads as well as a cut-back version of Radeon integrated graphics.

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 7520U
• Memory: 16GB LPDDR5
• Graphics/GPU: AMD Radeon 610M
• Display: 15.6-inch 1920×1080 IPS non-touch 60Hz
• Storage: 1TB PCIe Gen 4 solid state drive 
• Webcam: 720p with dual-mic array
• Connectivity: 1x HDMI, 1x USB 3.2 Type-A, 1x USB Type-C, 3.5mm combo audio, barrel plug power adapter
• Networking: Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.1
• Biometrics: None
• Battery capacity: 50 watt-hours
• Dimensions: 14.3 x 9.4 x 0.79 inches
• Weight: 3.8 pounds
• MSRP: $499.99

Acer doesn’t skimp on memory or storage, as the Aspire 3 has 16 gigabytes of memory and a terabyte of PCIe Gen 4 SSD storage. Many competitors, including Lenovo, Dell, and HP, offer similar RAM and storage for around the same price, but it’s still good to see these specifications aren’t sacrificed to stay below the five-hundred-dollar price point.

Acer Aspire 3: Design and build quality

IDG / Matthew Smith

IDG / Matthew Smith

IDG / Matthew Smith

The design of Acer’s Aspire lineup is well-established, with a basic silver-on-silver that lacks distinctive badging, patterns, or textures. It’s boring, to be honest, but that’s not unusual for a budget laptop.

Plastic is the material of choice, but the laptop is reasonably stiff and rigid. The display doesn’t show much flex when it’s opened and it feels rigid when moving it in and out of a backpack. It’s not an Apple MacBook or Razer Blade, but the Acer Aspire 3 feels well put together, especially for the price. 

Unfortunately, the Aspire 3 I received rattled when the laptop was picked up and even when typing on the keyboard. The culprit seemed to be a spring or component near the touchpad. It’s not a functional problem, but did make the laptop feel a bit cheaper than it otherwise would have. 

On the plus side, the Aspire 3 is portable for a budget 15.6-inch laptop. It’s a bit wide at 14.3 inches but only 0.79 inches thick and weighs a mere 3.8 pounds. It can easily fit in most bags meant to accommodate a laptop, and it’s light enough that it won’t feel tiring to haul around campus or between meetings.

Acer Aspire 3: Keyboard, trackpad

IDG / Matthew Smith

IDG / Matthew Smith

IDG / Matthew Smith

A spacious keyboard, which includes a number pad, stretches across the Acer Aspire 3’s interior. It has plenty of room to provide large keys, except for the left-side tab, caps lock, and shift keys, which are slightly undersized. The numpad keys are shaved down a hair but remain comfortable and easy to find.

Key feel is mixed. There’s enough travel for a good tactile sensation, but I found the action of each key was a tad too springy, and the rattle I mentioned earlier gave the keyboard an unpleasant sound.

A keyboard backlight is absent, making the laptop difficult to use in dimly lit rooms. While not unusual for a laptop around $500, this is a price point where keyboard backlights are available, and it would’ve been a nice feature to include.

The touchpad is a highlight, measuring over 5 inches wide and about 3 inches deep. It can’t compare to the size of touchpads on more expensive laptops but provides enough room for Windows’ multi-touch gestures. It also felt responsive and didn’t pick up any unintended inputs during my time with the laptop.

Acer Aspire 3: Display, audio

IDG / Matthew Smith

IDG / Matthew Smith

IDG / Matthew Smith

Acer ships the Aspire 3 with a non-touch IPS display boasting a resolution of 1920×1080. It’s an acceptable display though, perhaps unsurprisingly, far from the best available.

The display makes a good first impression. Spreading 1080p resolution across a 15.6-inch display works out to a pixel density of 141 pixels per inch. A 27-inch 4K monitor has 163 pixels per inch, so the Acer’s display isn’t far behind and, in many cases, will look just as sharp. It’s also fairly bright with a maximum measured brightness of 324 nits. That could be higher, to be sure, but it’s acceptable for a budget laptop. 

However, the Aspire falls back in color performance and contrast. It can look dull or washed-out, especially when viewing darker movies and games, like The Batman or Resident Evil 4. It’s also not the best choice for content creation due to both its resolution and color performance. Video and photo editors, digital artists, and other creative workers are going to need to buy a more expensive laptop.

But it’s difficult to find a better display at this price. The display is comfortable to use for hours at a time in both brightly and dimly lit rooms. That’s not a high bar, but it’s one not all budget laptops can jump. The Acer Aspire 3 is up to the task.

The built-in speakers, on the other hand, are inadequate. They’re not loud even at maximum volume and often sound muddy or unclear, especially when bass is required. They also fire downward, which means audio performance worsens if the laptop is placed on a surface that absorbs sound (like, say, your lap). It’s not a great experience. 

Acer Aspire 3: Webcam, microphone, biometrics

A basic 720p webcam is squeezed into the Acer Aspire 3’s top bezel, and it’s bad. The webcam’s image quality is fuzzy, dull, and lacks both contrast and color. None of this is unusual for an inexpensive 720p webcam, but it remains a huge step down from the 1080p webcams that are now common in more expensive laptops. It’s ok for casual video calls, but that’s about it. 

The microphone performs better. It picks up good volume and filters out some annoying background noise, like the sound of a space heater or a dog barking outside. Recorded dialogue tends to sound distant and tinny, so I wouldn’t recommend recording a podcast, but the microphone is more than adequate for most voice and video calls.

Biometrics login isn’t available on the Acer Aspire 3. That’s not a surprise, as nearly all laptops sold below $600 omit this feature.

Acer Aspire 3: Connectivity

IDG / Matthew Smith

IDG / Matthew Smith

IDG / Matthew Smith

The Acer Aspire 3’s connectivity, though basic, should be enough for most people. It has two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports and one USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port. The USB-C port also supports DisplayPort and USB-C Power Delivery, so it can be used to connect a monitor and/or charge the laptop (Acer doesn’t ship the laptop with a USB-C charger, however, and instead uses an old-school barrel plug). A 3.5mm combo audio jack and HDMI 2.1 port rounds out the options.

That covers most devices a typical owner will want to connect. The only port missing is Ethernet, which is a shame, because there’s enough room on the laptop’s flanks to accommodate it. Ethernet connections are possible, but you’ll need to use a USB-C to Ethernet adapter or a USB-C hub with an Ethernet port.

Wireless connectivity is a bit behind the curve. The laptop supports Wi-Fi 6, which is now a couple generations out of date; Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 can offer better performance. Bluetooth 5.2 is available, too. 

Acer Aspire 3: Performance

The Acer Aspire 3 is powered by AMD’s Ryzen 5 7520U, an entry-level mobile processor launched in September of 2022. Its modest specifications include four processor cores, eight threads, and a maximum boost clock of 4.3GHz. It also has a rather low default thermal design power of 15 watts. None of this is great news for the laptop’s performance.

IDG / Matthew Smith

IDG / Matthew Smith

IDG / Matthew Smith

PCMark 10, a generalized system benchmark, puts the Acer Aspire 3 off to a lackluster start with a score of 4,115. That’s not great, as it positions the Acer Aspire 3 far behind many other laptops we’ve tested recently. 

Clearly, the step down from a laptop with a current generation mid-range mobile SoC (like the Intel Core Ultra 5 125H or AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS) to the older AMD Ryzen 5 7520U is steep.

IDG / Matthew Smith

IDG / Matthew Smith

IDG / Matthew Smith

Cinebench, a heavily multithreaded short-duration CPU benchmark, puts the Acer Aspire 3 in an even less favorable position. Core count is important in this test, so it’s not surprising to see the quad-core Ryzen 5 7520U fall behind more expensive alternatives with at least twice as many cores. 

Intel’s Core i3-N305 is the only recently tested processor that’s slower. It’s actually an eight-core CPU, but doesn’t support hyperthreading and relies entirely on Intel’s Alder Lake E-Cores, which aren’t nearly as quick as the P-Cores found in more expensive Intel processors. 

Still, this again is a steep step down. It suggests that laptops priced around $800 to $1,200 are more than twice as quick in bursty multi-threaded workloads, which brings the Aspire 3’s value into question.

IDG / Matthew Smith

IDG / Matthew Smith

IDG / Matthew Smith

Handbrake, a heavily multithreaded long-duration CPU benchmark, doesn’t change the story. The Ryzen 5 7520U is much, much slower than more modern Intel Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen 8000-series CPUs. 

IDG / Matthew Smith

IDG / Matthew Smith

IDG / Matthew Smith

Next we get into graphics performance—and this is where the Acer Aspire 3’s stumble turns into a gnarly face-plant. 

The AMD Ryzen 5 7520U has Radeon 610M integrated graphics with just two (yes, two!) graphics cores. By comparison, the new AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS has Radeon 780M graphics with 12 graphics cores.

The Acer Aspire 3’s IGP severely underperforms most laptops we’ve tested in the last few years, aside from those with similar entry-level AMD Ryzen 3 and Ryzen 5 processors. Even the Acer Aspire Go 15, which has a cut-down version of Intel’s aged UHD Graphics, scores a small victory over the Aspire 3 in 3DMark’s Time Spy benchmark. 

While the Aspire 3’s CPU and integrated GPU fail to impress, the laptop offers 16GB of RAM and a 1TB solid state drive. That’s a lot of capacity for a $500 laptop, and it goes a long way towards making the laptop feel snappy and useful in typical day-to-day use. Despite its lackluster performance, it often feels as quick as far more expensive laptops—if you stick with less demanding applications like web browsers and office suites.

Acer Aspire 3: Battery life

At a glance, the Acer Aspire 3’s mediocre performance would seem to hint at excellent battery life. However, as noted, it uses an older version of AMD’s Ryzen mobile processor line which isn’t as efficient as more modern architectures. The laptop also makes do with a 50 watt-hour battery, which isn’t large for a 15.6-inch laptop in 2024 (many have 60 to 70 watt-hours, or more).

IDG / Matthew Smith

IDG / Matthew Smith

IDG / Matthew Smith

That has a consequence for battery life. While Acer says the laptop could achieve over 18 hours of battery life in a best-case video rundown scenario, our standard video rundown test (which loops a 4K file of the short film Tears of Steel) drained the battery in roughly six hours and 45 minutes. 

General use didn’t sway my opinion. Using the laptop to write in Google Docs and browse the web sucked the battery at a rate consistent with six to eight hours of battery life. It’s not terrible for a budget Windows laptop, but certainly behind the curve. 

Acer Aspire 3: Windows 11 Home S

The Acer Aspire 3 is shipped with Windows 11 Home S mode enabled. Owners can upgrade to Windows 11 Home at any time, for free, and Acer sent the review laptop with this upgrade installed. 

Haven’t heard of Windows 11 Home S mode? It’s a mode found on some budget Windows laptops that locks app installation to those available on the Microsoft Store. The mode also locks the default browser to Microsoft Edge.

That’s not great. Swapping out of Home S mode is simple and free, but it’s an annoying extra step that might surprise users less familiar with Windows 11. 

Acer Aspire 3: Conclusion

The Acer Aspire 3 is a competent budget laptop with a decent display, lots of RAM, and spacious storage, but its lackluster CPU and GPU performance bring its value into question. 

The Aspire 3’s MSRP of $500 is extremely affordable, but spending a few hundred dollars more can snag you a laptop that’s roughly twice as quick in CPU benchmarks and over six times quicker in GPU benchmarks. It’s an acceptable choice if $500 stretches your budget to the limit, but it’s otherwise not the best value.

Shoppers considering this laptop may want to step down to an even more basic model, like the Aspire 3 A315-24PT-R288 or a Chromebook. That might seem strange, as those laptops are even less capable. But they’re also sold for as little as $300—and I don’t think the Aspire 3 can handle much they can’t.