Reviewing the Acer Aspire VX 15

Unboxing the Acer Aspire VX 15  

The Acer Aspire VX 15 comes packaged in a premium box made from black cardboard. On its front, you will see printed only two things: the brand and the model name of the laptop.

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The back of the box is also scarce in information, but if you turn the box on its side, you'll find a paper tag that tells you all about the contents. As you can see in the image below, the exact model we reviewed was Acer Aspire VX 15 VX5-591G-D0DD. The hardware specs aren't printed anywhere on the box, so if you want to see them, you'll have to read the next section of this review or go straight to Acer's website.

Open the packaging and you'll find the Acer Aspire VX 15 laptop tucked inside a protective foam, alongside with its power adapter, power cable(s), and the customary documents.

The Acer Aspire VX 15 gaming laptop arrives in a premium box made from recyclable black cardboard. The packaging is minimalist in terms of design and printed information.

Hardware specifications

The Acer Aspire VX 15 gaming laptop is powered by an Intel Core i7 7700HQ processor, running at 2.80 GHz and a maximum turbo frequency of 3.8 GHz. It has four physical cores, each of them able to run 2 threads simultaneously, thus offering a total of 8 logical cores. The Intel Core i7 7700HQ processor was launched in the first quarter of 2017 and it's one of the most powerful processors you can find in a laptop today.

The Intel Core i7 7700HQ processor supports up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM memory running at 2400MHz. The Acer Aspire VX 15 laptop that we had in testing had 16GB of RAM memory, which should be enough for any modern game.

The Acer Aspire VX 15 is a gaming laptop, and that means that the graphics power is extremely important. And here's the good news: besides the integrated Intel HD Graphics 630 video chip, this laptop also packs a powerful NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti video card, with 4GB of GDDR5 memory. It's a video card that will give you enough power to play any game launched this year, at high settings in Full HD resolution.

Speaking of Full HD resolution, that's exactly what you'll get from the screen of the Acer Aspire VX 15. It's a display with a diagonal size of 15.6 inches, a Full HD resolution of 1920x1080 pixels, and a 16:9 image aspect ratio. The display panel uses TN technology which means that its viewing angles are narrow. Although it won't offer you a brightness and colors as good as an IPS panel, the advantage of this type of display is that it has a faster response time, which is exactly what you want if you are a gamer. The Full HD resolution might also seem a bit outdated to some, but we didn't mind it at all because, most times, the hardware you can fit inside a laptop doesn't have the power to run modern games in 4K.

As for the storage, the Acer Aspire VX 15gaming laptop came with 512 GB SSD drive manufactured by Hynix and a 1TB hard disk drive manufactured by Toshiba. However, there's no optical drive unit available, so if you're still using CDs, DVDs or Blu-Ray discs, you'll have to use an external optical unit. The sound is handled by 2 stereo speakers which will do their job well in games but won't satisfy any music fan.

In terms of connectivity options, the Acer Aspire VX 15 laptop offers 1 HDMI port, 1 USB 2.0 port, 2 USB 3.0 ports, one USB 3.1 port with a USB Type-C connector, an RJ-45 Ethernet (network) port, and an SD memory card reader slot. You also get the best in networking options: an integrated wireless network adapter (Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7265) which supports the 802.11ac standard. Together with the wireless card, you also get a Bluetooth 4.0 chip. As for the wired networking, it's worth noting that the Ethernet card is a Realtek RTL8168/8111 Gigabit-LAN, capable of transfer speeds of up to 1 Gbps.

The autonomy of the Acer Aspire VX 15 is provided by a 3-cell battery with a capacity of 4605 mAh, and the power adapter is capable of an output of 19 V DC, 7.1 A, 135W, which should be enough to keep the laptop going even in very long gaming sessions. The Acer Aspire VX 15weighs 91.71 oz (2.6 kg), its power supply weighs 20.46 oz (580 grams), and its size is of 1.26 x 15.35 x 10.43 inches (32 x 390 x 265 mm) in height, width and depth.

If you want more details, you can find the official hardware specifications here: Acer Aspire VX 15.

The Acer Aspire VX 15 offers some impressive hardware specs, with components that should be able to let you run any game at high quality settings.

Using the Acer Aspire VX 15 gaming laptop

First of all, let's talk a bit about the design and the build quality of the Acer Aspire VX 15. This is one good looking gaming laptop, with a design that will probably be liked by many gamers. Like many other gaming laptops, the Aspire VX 15 uses black and red colors: blacks all around, with some small red lines and other finishing touches. It's not original by any means, but it looks good. At first sight, you might even be tempted to think that the lid, for instance, is made from brushed metal, but the truth is that it's just plastic with a brushed appearance. Given the price that Acer announced it would sell this laptop for, we can't argue about the use of plastics because metal cases don't come cheap and they would raise the selling price.

Open the lid to see the screen and the base of the laptop. You'll find that the screen and the main body of the laptop are connected through a central hinge, which is only two-thirds of the laptop's width. The edges of the screen are practically cut in diagonal. Here's a picture to see it more clearly:

Although the hinge between the screen and the body feels very sturdy, we can't say the same about the lid. It takes only a small amount of pressure and the plastic twists and the screen flickers. But, the body is more rigid, and it takes quite some force in order to feel the keyboard sink.

Speaking of which, the keyboard was definitely created with gamers in mind, more specifically for gamers who like first person shooters: the WASD keys are emphasized with bolder borders when compared to the other keys. By the way, all keys are illuminated in red, so they'll all be easy to see and identify in dark environments too. This is good because gamers tend to play a lot during the night.

Although gamers will never use the built-in touchpad for gaming purposes, it's worth noting that the one you'll find on the Acer Aspire VX 15 is of good quality. It's large, with good sensitivity and its silky texture makes it easy to glide your fingers on it. It's OK for Solitaire too, although the chances that a fan of this game will buy this laptop is rather slim. :)

The sound you get from the two stereo speakers on the bottom of the Acer Aspire VX 15 is good: strong and loud enough for you to hear in-game sounds and correctly identify their origin. Unless you're a music aficionado, the audio quality will be enough to satisfy your needs, although we can't characterize it as high quality.

One key feature of any gaming machine is its cooling system. The cooling system found on the Acer Aspire VX 15 evacuates the hot air from inside, to the bottom and to the back side of the laptop, where two large red vents are found. They look like they were designed by a sports car manufacturer, and they do their job very well. Even when playing demanding, the Acer Aspire VX 15 managed to keep its temperatures low enough not to become uncomfortable to use.

The Acer Aspire VX 15 gaming laptop looks good although the colors and the general design lines are not what you'd call original. Even if its case is built only with plastic materials, the overall build quality is good.