 Acer is amongst the top brands on the market. However, they still stay behind the likes of Lenovo, HP, and Dell when it comes to market share, so they need to step their game up. Recently, they did well to improve their Predator gaming series to a new fresh look. Then, the Swift and Spin series followed, but as with the other manufacturers, there is one thing that sells best, budget laptops. As such, the Aspire Subrand is arguably the most important one in Acer's portfolio. But what if you want a budget notebook that has the power to perform more than just daily tasks? You might want to play a game or two, or you have some productivity tasks on the line. Well, the Aspire 7 is here and it has something interesting for you. One of the key selling points here is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card, which is still viable in 2021 and gives you the opportunity to play every triple a title out there, albeit with reduced eye candy. But what about the processor? Well, instead of the power-hungry 45W solutions out there, Acer has chosen the energy efficient Ryzen 5 5500U, and Ryzen 7 5700U they are both Zen 2 chips disguised in the Ryzen 5000U series paint, but they offer quite a lot of performance. It will be pretty interesting to see how well will the dedicated GPU work with the low voltage CPUs, but we are pretty confident that the Zen 2 architecture has all it takes to provide great productivity, especially with proper cooling. Inside the package, you will see some paper manuals, as well as a 135W power brick. Well, this laptop's casual business looks provide a decent foreground for a lot of people. Honestly, we really like what Acer did visually, and the fact that the finish is pretty stain resistant. Now, in terms of measurements, we have pretty average values of 22.9 mm of thickness, and 2.15 kg of weight. Also, its body is surprisingly rigid, despite the plastic material being used here. On the other hand, the lid is pretty bendy, but it thankfully opens easily with a single hand. This is further aided by the hinges, which are placed on the far two ends of the chassis. In this case, the design looks a bit dated with a pronounced chin and forehead, but at least the side bezels are thin enough. Also, you get an HD camera above the matte display. Which is good for the age we live in. Next in line, we have the keyboard. It is backlit, which is great for nighttime users. Also, it has a number pad section, for quick calculations of the odds of the next El Classico game. Other than that, the unit itself is pretty average, with a somewhat short key travel, and good feedback. Unsurprisingly, we saw some deck flex, but it was nothing dramatic in our view. If you look further down, you will see the touchpad, which houses a fingerprint reader. Thankfully, the area around the sensor is actually usable, unlike many other notebooks out there. So, the touchpad itself has smooth gliding, thanks to the glass surface, but the tracking and latency are far from the best in the class. Now, turn the laptop upside down, and you will see the speaker cutouts, as well as the ventilation grills, which are so big, that you can see the entire cooling solution through them. Respectively, the hot air escapes unimpeded from the back and from the right side of the machine. On the left side of the notebook, there is a security lock, followed by an RJ45 connector, an HDMI connector, a USB Type-C 3.2 Gen 1 port, and two USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports. Then, on the right, you will see the power plug, a USB Type-A 2.0 port, predating the Roman Empire, and an audio jack. To get this notebook disassembled, you will need to remove the bottom panel. This happens by undoing 13 Phillips head screws and prying the panel with a plastic tool. The battery pack has a capacity of 50.3 watt hours, and it is the first thing you need to unplug before you proceed with the teardown. Thankfully, there are two RAM Sodom slots, which support up to 32 gigabytes of DDR4 memory in dual-channel mode. Storage-wise, there is one M.2 PCI-EX4 slot. Given the fact that this laptop has a low-voltage processor, we are happy to see that the cooling solution consists of three heat pipes. Two of them are common for the CPU and the GPU, with the third one dedicated to the graphics card. Also, you can see that the VRMs and the graphics memory are also actively cooled. Interestingly, we see a very long heat spreader, supported by a smaller one, which only has the GPU heat pipe connected to it. Acer Aspire 7 in our configuration is equipped with a full HD IPS panel. It's diagonal is 15.6 inches, and the resolution 1920 by 1080 pixels. The screen ratio is 16 to 9, and we are looking at a pixel density of 142 pixels per inch, and a pitch of 0.18 H0.18 millimeters. The screen turns into retina when viewed at distance equal to or greater than 60 centimeters, from this distance one's eye stops differentiating the separate pixels, and it is normal for looking at a laptop. Viewing angles are excellent. We offer images at 45 degrees to evaluate image quality. The measured maximum brightness of 253 nits in the middle of the screen and 252 nits as an average for the whole area, with a maximum deviation of 16 percent. The correlated color temperature on a white screen is 6,530 Kelvin, practically matching the sRGB standard of 6,500 Kelvin. In the illustration you can see how the display performs from a uniformity perspective. In other words, the leakage of light from the light source. Values of De 2000 over 4.0 should not occur, and this parameter is one of the first you should check if you intend to use the laptop for color sensitive work. The contrast ratio is good 1,100 to 1. To make sure we are on the same page, we would like to give you a little introduction to the sRGB color gamut and the Adobe RGB. To start, there's the C1976 uniform chromaticity diagram that represents the visible specter of colors by the human eye, giving you a better perception of the color gamut coverage and the color accuracy. Inside the black triangle, you will see the standard color gamut, sRGB, that is being used by millions of people on HDTV and the web. As for the Adobe RGB, this is used in professional cameras, monitors, etc. for printing. Basically, colors inside the black triangle are used by everyone and this is the essential part of the color quality and color accuracy of a mainstream notebook. Still, we've included other color spaces like the famous DCI-P3 standard used by movie studios, as well as the digital UHD Rec 2020 standard. Rec 2020, however, is still a thing of the future and it's difficult for today's displays to cover that well. We've also included the so-called Michael pointer gamut or pointers gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day. The yellow dotted line shows Acer Aspire 7's color gamut coverage. Its display covers 51% of the sRGB web, HDTV standard in CIE1976. Our design and gaming profile delivers optimal color temperature, 650K, at 140K per square meter luminance and sRGB gamma mode. We tested the accuracy of the display with 24 commonly used colors like light and dark human skin, blue sky, green grass, orange, etc. You can check out the results at factory condition and also with the design and gaming profile. Here you can compare the scores of Acer Aspire 7 with the default settings left and with the gaming and web design profile, right. The next figure shows how well the display is able to reproduce really dark parts of an image, which is essential when watching movies or playing games in low ambient light. The left side of the image represents the display with stock settings while the right one is with the gaming and web design profile activated. On the horizontal axis, you will find the gray scale. And on the vertical axis, the luminance of the display on the two graphs, you can easily check for yourself how your display handles the darkest nuances. But keep in mind that this also depends on the settings of your current display, the calibration, the viewing angle and the surrounding light conditions. We test the reaction time of the pixels with the usual black to white and white to black method from 10 percent to 90 percent and vice versa. We recorded fall time plus rise time equals 26 miz. After that, we test the reaction time of the pixels with the usual gray to gray method from 50 percent white to 80 percent white and vice versa between 10 percent and 90 percent of the amplitude. Pulse width modulation PWM is an easy way to control monitor brightness. When you lower the brightness, the light intensity of the backlight is not lowered, but instead turned off and on by the electronics with a frequency indistinguishable to the human eye. In these light impulses, the light no light time ratio varies while brightness remains unchanged, which is harmful to your eyes. You can read more about that in our dedicated article on PWM. Acer Aspire 7's display doesn't use PWM to adjust its brightness levels at any point. This makes it comfortable for use during long work periods without harming your eyes in this aspect. Installing our health guard profile not only eliminates PWM but also reduces the harmful blue light emissions while keeping the colors of the screen perceptually accurate. If you're not familiar with the blue light, the TLDR version is. Emissions that negatively affect your eyes, skin, and your whole body. You can find more information about that in our dedicated article on blue light. Acer Aspire 7 speakers produce a sound with pretty low maximum volume and deviations across the entire frequency range. Now, we conduct the battery tests with Windows Better Performance setting turned on. Screen brightness adjusted to 120 nits, and all other programs turned off except for the one we are testing the notebook with. This device's 50.3 watt hour battery pack lasts for 12 hours and a half of web browsing and 9 hours and 15 minutes of video playback. Currently, this notebook can be purchased with either the Ryzen 5 5500U or the Ryzen 7 5700U. Rebranded Zen 2 processors, part of the latest ULV lineup of AMD. As for the graphics, the Aspire 7 version comes equipped with a GTX 1650 with 4GB of GDDR6 memory. Here are some gaming tests. Post up on the ridge and let's get the lay of the lab. Contractors, security, good targets. No Russian military presence. Call it NCIA. Blue Viking 5, this is Echo 3-1. Troops in the open, south gate, you are cleared hot. Roger, 3-3 in 5 seconds. 5 seconds! Much obliged, Viking. We'll take it from here. Looks like someone was playing with fire. Serves him right. I'm in a surprise it's not on our side, boys. Stay frosty. Earth has been reduced by 36.8%. There are two hell priests remaining. In this test we use 100% on the CPU cores, monitoring their frequencies and chip temperature. The first column shows a computer's reaction to a short load, 2-10 seconds. The second column simulates a serious task, between 15 and 30 seconds. And the third column is a good indicator of how good the laptop is for long load such as video rendering. The fact that this laptop has a proper cooling solution, designed for a lot more power-hungry processors, shows that the only limiting factor for the Ryzen 5 5 500U, in this case, is power. It is able to maintain a TDP of 25 watts, which is impressive for silicon of this size, and the clock speed is very close to 3 GHz. As far as the temperatures, well, 62 degrees Celsius after 15 minutes of stress testing is nothing short of spectacular. With a TGP of 50 watt, the GTX 1650 inside of this notebook was able to perform as expected, while the temperatures it was running it were pretty low. Interestingly, even during gaming, the fan noise levels were not too high. And although the 44 degrees Celsius plus temperature on the keyboard may seem a lot, it is within what can be considered as reasonable. Before we start, we have to consider the price tag of this notebook. We would like to give credit to Acer for giving their best to keep the costs down, while not really sacrificing the quality of their product. Yes, you won't find Thunderbolt connectivity here, and unfortunately, there is no SD card slot of any sort. Also, the materials of the build are predominantly plastic, but this doesn't mean that the laptop feels cheap. In fact, it is pretty solid, with the chassis being able to withstand a good amount of physical stress. But enough about the design, which you can see by yourself. The true hero here is the processor. Although Acer has gone for a low voltage solution, it handles perfectly, thanks to the potent cooling solution, borrowed from the older gamer-centric Nitro 5 series, and ultimately the Aspire 7 from last year. Actually, we have never been expecting anything but greatness from the Ryzen 5 5500U, but what we were more surprised of, was the fact that it manages to drag the GTX 1650 at the same pace, as the 45W Ryzen 5 4600H does. Moreover, the low TDP of the ULV CPUs, actually results in significantly lower noise levels, as the laptop is practically silent during day-to-day use. Acer Aspire 7's IPS panel has a full HD resolution, comfortable viewing angles, good contrast ratio, and a non-flickering backlight. On the other hand, the narrow color coverage reveals the budget nature of the display, which can't really be used for professional work. Additionally, the battery life is solid with 12 hours and a half of web browsing, and 9 hours and 15 minutes of video playback. This, combined with the dual Sodom slots for memory upgrades, makes it a comfortable performer, even for the near future. Well, yes, there is only one storage option here, but at least it supports fast M.2 PCI-EX4 drives. So, if you were troubled by the fact that the CPU might be inferior to the Intel iteration, due to its lower TDP, worry no more, as the Ryzen 5 5500U is now a more viable option than the Core i5-10300H. 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