Acer Aspire E5

Acer's Aspire E5-575G is one of the first laptops based on the Kaby Lake architecture, the successor of the Skylake lineup introduced in 2015. Technically, not much has changed in the new generation. Thanks to the optimized 14 nm manufacturing, Intel can now offer somewhat higher clock rates at the same power consumption, while the per-MHz performance stagnates at a high level. This equates to a clock headroom of 2.5 to 3.1 GHz (2-core Turbo: also 3.1 GHz) in the case of the Core i5-7200U ULV model (TDP: 15 watts) installed here, which is 200 to 400 MHz higher than the previous Core i5-6200U (2.3 to 2.8 GHz, 2-core Turbo: 2.7 GHz). Most of the other technical specifications of the dual-core processor with Hyperthreading support have not been modified.

Although the HD Graphics 620 integrated into the Kaby Lake chip is somewhat stronger than the previous ones, Acer has opted for an additional dedicated graphic solution by Nvidia. The GeForce GTX 950M, which is still based on the Maxwell architecture built in 28 nanometers, promises three times the performance of the processor GPU and has 2 GB of GDDR5 memory. The GTX 950M is only enabled during 3D application via the Optimus technology for reducing the power consumption, as opposed to simple desktop applications that are accelerated via the HD 620.

Considering the purchase price, the user has to be satisfied with a conventional hard drive that, however, offers a very generous capacity of 1000 GB. Furthermore, thanks to the empty M.2 slot, an SSD can be retrofitted as a second storage device. The 8 GB of working memory (1x8 GB DDR4-2133, single-channel, one empty bank) could also use an upgrade in the long run.