Acer Aspire VX 15 review – CNET

Acer may have an attention-grabbing gaming laptop with its $9,000 limited-edition Acer Predator 21 X, but it’s the Aspire VX 15 that people are actually going to buy.

Starting at $800 and topping out at $1,100, the VX 15 is just a really good deal for an entry-level gaming laptop with current-gen components. Straying from the typical Aspire streamlined designs, Acer gave the VX 15 body a “gaming system” look including two large stylized fan vents at the back to keep this system nice and cool (for the most part, anyway). If you appreciate a little splashiness — but just a little — this should do the trick. It’s a lot like the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 in this respect as well as what’s inside, but I like the Aspire a bit more.

The 15.6-inch laptop is available with either a 4GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 or 1050 Ti paired with either an Intel Core i5-7300HQ or Core i7-7700HQ processor. The GPUs aren’t sufficient for VR, but provide enough muscle to run a modern game at 60 frames per second at full HD, which just so happens to be the max resolution for the VX 15’s IPS display.

A little goes a long way

The words “budget” and “cheap” mean different things to different people. The fact is, while you can game on something that’s $500, the experience isn’t going to be great. But at $800 for the base model VX 15 I tested — the VX5-591G-5652 — you get an enjoyable experience playing old and new games and the laptop in general is solid. You can find similar though slightly better configurations in the UK and Australia for £850 and AU$1,600, respectively (differences are noted in the chart above).

View full gallery

Like the insides, the outside is nicer than you might expect for the money. It looks like a gaming system with its red lid accents and pronounced fan ducts, but it stops shy of being over the top. The body is mostly plastic, but Acer did its best to make it look like metal, giving it a more premium appearance.

Another positive for the design: You can easily open it up and install up to 32GB of memory and put in a 2.5-inch HDD with a free mounting kit from Acer. That’s good because the smallish 256GB SSD could fill up fast once you start installing games. (You might also consider removing the large amount of preinstalled software and apps from Acer and others to free up some storage space.)

Acer to gave the VX 15 a spacious keyboard along with a small number pad. The keys have a good amount of travel with a satisfying response. The entire keyboard is backlit in red with the WASD keys getting some extra illumination around the edges. The touchpad gets the job done, but there’s room for it to be larger or have discrete left and right mouse buttons. It does support all of the multitouch Windows 10 gestures, though its palm rejection could be better.

View full gallery

The single biggest issue

The Dell Inspiron 15 7000 gaming laptop is an all-around excellent deal except for one key component: the display. The VX 15’s wins here, but not by much. The Dell is horrible off-angle, so you have to find a sweet spot and stay in it and even then it’s still washed-out-looking. The Acer’s IPS panel is much better for off-angle viewing, though it too looks washed out. It’s also not very bright. Still, I’d take this over the Dell. (Note: Some regions use a TN panel on the VX 15 instead of the IPS panel on the US version.)