Page 63 - PCWorld (September 2019)

the Aspire’s 4,973-minute score lands in the needs a single core to handle most
ballpark, albeit near the rear of the pack. Ahead mainstream desktop chore. The PCMark 8

of the Aspire are laptops that are either much benchmark already told us that the Aspire
pricier (like the Lenovo ThinkPad L480) or bigger sails right through those types of tasks.

and therefore easier to cool (like the hefty Acer E If you’re planning on editing 4K videos,
15). Lagging behind the Aspire is the 2.7-pound however, then yes, the Aspire 5 may get sluggish
Asus ZenBook 13. As expected, a couple of as it tries to cool itself off. It’ll still get the job done

dual-core Acer laptops, including a Core- much faster than a dual-core laptop could.
i3-packing version of the Aspire 5 line (full review
coming soon), bring up the rear. Cinebench

Looking under the hood using Intel’s Another benchmark that pushes a CPU to its
Extreme Tuning Utility, we can see that the limits, Cinebench measures how long it takes

Aspire is frequently
engaging thermal
throttling during the Cinebench RT15.038

HandBrake test. In other (Single/multi threads)
words, it’s repeatedly
Acer E 15 E5-576G-5762 153
pumping the brakes on (Core i5-8250U) 567

the CPU’s performance Lenovo IdeaPad 730S-13IWL 156
(Core i5-8265U) 555
to keep it from
overheating, most likely Lenovo ThinkPad L390 Yoga 142
(Core i5-8265U) 546
a concession to the
Aspire’s slim chassis. Acer Aspire 5 A515-51-58HD 141
(Core i5-8250U) 524
The Aspire’s so-so
HandBrake score Acer Aspire 5 A515-54-51DJ 146
(Core i5-8265U) 493
matters only if you have
Acer E 15 E5-576-392H 143
ambitious plans for this (Core i3-8130U) 356
laptop. Activities like
Acer Aspire 5 A515-54-30BQ 143
web browsing and (Core i3-8145U) 300
editing Office
Single Multi
documents don’t
LONGER BARS INDICATE BET TER PERFORMANCE
demand multi-core
performance; generally
As with HandBrake, the Aspire 5’s all-threads Cinebench score is lower than
speaking, the CPU only we’d like, although its single-thread score is right where it should be.

SEPTEMBER 2019 PCWorld 63