Acer Aspire Go 15

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Introduction

The Acer Aspire Go 15 aims to cut through the noise of subpar, affordable Windows laptops and competitive Chromebooks that typically occupy its modest price point.

This laptop is available in a variety of configs, with base models starting as low as £300/$300 with an Intel N100 processor inside, making it one of the cheapest big-brand Windows laptops around.

The version I have is a mid-spec choice, with a much beefier AMD Ryzen 7 5825U processor inside, plus 16GB of DDR4 RAM, a 512GB SSD, a competitive port selection and a 15.6-inch Full HD IPS screen – it’ll run you £649/$549.99 at retail pricing.

This makes the Aspire Go 15 competitive against a range of devices, including stylish Chromebooks such as the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus and similarly-specced Windows choices, including the MSI Modern 15 F13MG. 

Whether Acer’s choice can do enough to pull ahead of the competition remains to be seen, though. I’ve been putting it through its paces to find out.

Design and Keyboard

• Cheaper-feeling chassis
• Excellent port selection
• Surprisingly robust keyboard

The Aspire Go 15 isn’t going to win any awards for any use of innovative materials or extra style against more expensive ultrabooks, but its chassis is there more to serve a purpose than to look good, arguably.  The silver colourway it comes in adds some style, although it is clear that this is a cheaper laptop from its looks alone. 

A weight of 1.78kg for a 15-inch laptop like this one is fine, and makes it somewhat portable to sling into a bag. Even with this heft in mind, I did find the chassis to have some flex and feel a little scratchy, so I’d be careful when bunging this laptop into a backpack.

Where the Aspire Go 15 does benefit against other cheap laptops is its port selection, coming with everything you could want or need for productivity use. On the left side, we’ve got two USB-A ports, plus a USB-C, full-size HDMI and even an Ethernet port for networking. The right side houses a further USB-A port and a headphone jack.

This Acer laptop houses a near full-size keyboard deck that’s the most solid part of the laptop’s chassis. It’s a snappy and tactile choice, and I didn’t have any problems using it for work over the course of a week. As with other larger decks, though, it suffers from the issue of having a squished-up number pad on the right side, which can take some getting used to.

I’m less enthusiastic about the Aspire Go 15’s trackpad. It’s generally smooth for most gestures, although it feels quite small for a laptop of this size and lacks some tactility for providing feedback for inputs.

Display and Sound

• Washed out Full HD screen
• Meagre colours and contrast
• Okay speakers

You usually have to watch out for the screens on cheaper laptops, as it’s typically where manufacturers like to skimp out. On the face of it, the display fitted to the Aspire Go 15 is par for the course for a more affordable unit, with a 15.6-inch 1920×1200 60Hz IPS panel. It’s okay.

It was at this point that I got my colorimeter out, and my suspicions about this screen were correct. It’s not brilliant in most regards, with a grainier finish, plus a generally dim and washed-out look that means it should only be used for the most casual of use.

As much as IPS screens are usually known for excellent colours, that isn’t necessarily the case here. My colorimeter measured just 61% of the sRGB gamut, meaning mainstream colours for productivity workloads are only partially well-represented, while the 46% DCI-P3 and 45% Adobe RGB results mean this isn’t a laptop suited for colour-sensitive workloads. Colours can look quite washed out with this screen.

A peak brightness of 242.5 nits also doesn’t meet our usual 300-nit target for laptop screens, meaning even at full chat, displayed images lack much in the way of life or punch. Its 7700K white point also gives this screen a greyer tinge.

Out of the box, the 0.28 black level isn’t brilliant, but it’s okay, although the 420:1 contrast ratio, combined with the lower brightness, means it’s a flat screen in terms of dynamic range and vibrancy.

The speakers, as with the screen in some respects, are par for the course. They’re nothing more than okay, sounding quite thin and lacking any real bass or depth. You’ll definitely want to use the headphone jack provided.

Performance

• Older Ryzen chip is still fine for basic tasks
• Intensive tasks may be more of a struggle
• Okay RAM and storage headroom for the price

The Aspire Go 15 isn’t using the latest or greatest components from AMD, Intel or Qualcomm in a bid to keep costs down. This mid-spec sample comes with an older AMD Ryzen 7 5825U, an eight-core/16 thread laptop processor of the 2022 vintage with a boost clock of up to 4.5GHz.

Putting it through the customary Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 reveals how far we’ve come with mobile processors in the last three to four years, with faster and more modern cores yielding much higher results in these tests against the 5825U.

With this in mind, that’s only one side of the story. In day-to-day use, I didn’t have any real issues with the Aspire Go 15, and for general productivity usage such as word processing and web browsing, it was completely fine. After all, most people may not need the beefiest of chips for casual tasks.

In addition, its PCMark 10 score, where it’s run through simulated office workloads, provided a score very similar to that of more up-to-date laptops, proving it’s no slouch for basic tasks. Its 3DMark Time Spy score is quite low, though, so don’t use this laptop for its integrated graphics.

Given the 5825U processor inside, we are limited to older DDR4 RAM, although there is 16GB of it, so a good amount of headroom for multi-tasking and tackling more intensive loads if you wish. The 512GB SSD is fine in capacity and in speed, too, considering the age of the other internal components – I measured 3723.11MB/s in reads and 3046.19MB/s in writes.

Software

• Somewhat bloated Windows 11 install
• Copilot key present
• Not enough AI horsepower to be a Copilot+ PC

Despite this Acer laptop having a slightly older AMD chip inside, it is bang-up-to-date in terms of software with a Windows 11 install. This is evidenced by the inclusion of the Copilot key on the bottom of the keyboard, even though this machine does not pack enough AI horsepower to be a fully-fledged Copilot PC.

Nonetheless, the key is there to call up Microsoft’s AI assistant, although you only get access to some of the recent AI smarts included, given the lack of AI horsepower.

Otherwise, the Aspire Go 15 is a little disappointing on the software front. It comes with some bloatware installed, including a random shortcut to the Booking.com website, plus unnecessary pop-ups for Dropbox cloud storage and McAfee antivirus.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 11 hours 38 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for one working day

Acer is quite modest with its battery life claims for the Aspire Go 15, stating that you should be able to get around eight hours of runtime from its 53Whr capacity cell. That would mean around a working day’s worth of use, although you’d probably want to stay closer to the mains.

In running the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery test, this Acer laptop exceeded both the claimed eight-hour runtime and our ten-hour target, managing to last for 11 hours and 33 minutes before conking out. That’s not a bad effort for a more affordable laptop, and means you’ll be able to get through a working day reasonably comfortably.

The Aspire Go 15 comes with a compact 65W DC charging brick, which isn’t the quickest at charging the laptop back up, admittedly. It took 58 minutes to get it back to 50 percent, while a full charge took 110 minutes.

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Should you buy it?

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