Acer Aspire 5, A515-54-51DJ (2019)
Selection

My existing Acer Aspire 5 E5-573G (2016) has a non-IPS display, and the color rendition is muddy and very direction-sensitive. What really pushed me over the edge to get a new laptop was, I returned from a vacation, and when editing and organizing the photos, using the old laptop was out of the question; I had to use the server console, which has an IPS screen. This is ridiculous.

Selection Criteria

This time around, my selection criteria for the new laptop are (in approximate order of importance):

• Display issues are at the top of the list. I now insist on an IPS display, no exceptions. LED backlight is much preferred. (WLED, White Light Emitting Diode, is the current acronym to make the tech sound new.)

• The "HD" display size (in pixels) of 1920x1080px is satisfactory. Smaller displays won't be; the 1Mpx displays (866x1154px or thereabout) are rejected out of hand. I'm not interested in steroidal resolutions, 2400x1350px or whatever; I expect they would give more trouble and use more machine resources with not much benefit for my eyeballs.

• My eyes are getting worse. Making fonts bigger is of course one excellent way to deal with that, but I'm also looking very seriously at a 44cm (17.3in) diagonal display, upgrading from the existing 40cm (15.6in) one, about a 11% linear expansion or 22% display area expansion.

• Power management is a problem. The present laptop has a battery life of about 2.4 hours (on light web surfing or document editing, when new, less now), which is useful but still excludes it from a lot of off-grid use cases like a long wait for car repairs or my wife's doctor appointment. It uses about 0.6W when asleep in S3 (suspend to RAM). I would like the new one to behave like a Chromebook: 10 hours battery life in light operation and with a really low power S3 state.

  In customer reviews, the quoted battery life varies wildly, and obviously depends on the workload, power management settings, and user habits.

• For communication I would like IEEE 802.11ac Wi-Fi (2.4 and 5 GHz) and IEEE 802.3 wired Ethernet. Bluetooth 2.x at least (latest is Bluetooth-5). No WiMax, cellular data, WiDi (wireless display interface).

  About 802.3 (RJ45): I only use it for initial setup and when Wi-Fi is broken. An acceptable alternative is a USB NIC; I already have a spare one in storage.

• A civilized touchpad is required, capable of being set up with good stray touch rejection. I don't know good specific criteria to get what I want; I'll have to read reviews and/or try out the hardware at a brick and mortar store. Similarly for the keyboard. I would prefer a backlit keyboard.

• Customary wisdom is that Windows is a memory pig. Linux isn't. 8Gb RAM will be plenty for me. But I expect that the available options will be designed for Windows and will have 16Gb RAM. Trying to run Windows 10 in 8Gb causes numerous adverse product reviews by frustrated users.

• The CPU should be reasonably fast but its role is not a compute server. An Intel Core i5 is a likely choice. i7 is definitely not justified. i3 is acceptable but I think the extra cost for i5 will be modest and worth it. Celeron, Pentium and Atom are probably too slow for me. The Intel product line is not an official requirement but I'm looking ahead to how the selection campaign will probably play out, and there are issues with ARM (used in many Chromebooks) which probably will be hard to work around, even though power management on ARM is expected to be superior.

• The Samsung 850 EVO 250GB SSD (SATA) in my old laptop has been very satisfactory, Current disc usage on the old laptop:

  Role	Used (GiB)	Size (GiB)
  Root	12.6	20.0
  Swap	24.0	24.0
  Home	2.8	30.0
  Misc	40.3	108.0
  Misc2	0.0	50.8
  Total	80.9	232.8

  1GiB = 2³⁰ bytes. The misc space is mostly for a virtual machine. 35% of the available space is used; I'm rattling around in that disc. My tentative plan is to move this SSD directly to the new machine. They will probably give me (require me to pay for) a 1Tb rotating disc, which I will put in storage, just like the one that came with the old laptop.

• I would like these ports:

  • RJ45 for 802.3 wired Ethernet
  • USB-2 type A (host) female, one port on each side. A USB-3 type C connector might be useful in addition, but I have no USB-3 clients and EMI from USB-3 may be a problem, as I learned the hard way.
  • Full-size HDMI connector, female
  • VGA connector, female, adds flexibility but I'm not sure if I've ever used the one on the old laptop.
  • 3.5mm 4 wire headphone + mic jack.
  • A standard power connector, i.e. USB-3 type C with charging capability, would be appreciated but is not likely to be provided.

• Miscellaneous features in approximate order of importance:

  • Random number generator: required. All modern Intel and AMD CPUs have this.
  • Ability to run a virtual machine: required. Some Intel CPUs lack this; check the product page.
  • SD card slot: wanted (for working on the Raspberry Pi's). A less convenient alternative is a USB card reader; I have one already.
  • Audio and internal speakers: It's important that they work, but in practice I rarely (but not never) play audio on this machine.
  • Webcam: a nice feature, but in practice I have never made a video call in three years on the old machine due to software issues.
  • Wake on LAN: this is kind of irrelevant for a laptop.
  • PXE boot: irrelevant for a laptop, and I don't have it set up anyway.
  • Watchdog timer (iTCO): I don't use it.
  • Dock: I'm not going to buy one.

• The old laptop is crow color (black) with a gray deck around the display and keyboard. I hope the new one will be a little more attractive.

• Weight: The old laptop is 5.3lb = 2.4kg; 2.5kg is a hard upper limit. My wife would like something lighter, but I worry about fragility.

• Reseller: I have a fair amount of confidence in Amazon's competence in handling payments and delivering the product. Thus I'm looking for offers fulfilled by Amazon. Amazon's customer service and return policy are excellent (though I hope fervently to not have to use them), and so I'm looking for products sold by Amazon, ahead of those sold by Amazon affiliates (outside vendors). Amazon is definitely not the low price leader, because you're paying for things like free shipping, web site maintenance, and returnability, but in my experience the additional cost of buying from Amazon is worth it.

First Search for Candidates, 17in Screen

Searching on Amazon for laptop with these criteria: 17in display, new (not used). 84 hits, starting with steroidal machines that I'm not going to buy. Sort by price (low to high). 7 hits. Acronyms: SBSF Amazon means sold by and ships from Amazon. SB (vendor) FBA means Sold by (vendor), fulfilled by Amazon.

2017 HP 17.3" Business Flagship Laptop PC HD+ WLED-backlit Display Intel i3-7100U Processor 8GB DDR4 RAM 1TB HDD Intel 520 Graphics DVD-RW 802.11AC Wifi Webcam HDMI Windows 10-Silver

• $497, SB Meta Mart FBA.
• CPU: Intel Core i3-7100U @2GHz.
• RAM: 8Gb (1 DIMM).
• Disc: 1Tb 5400RPM serial ATA.
• Display: 17.3in 1600x900px. Intel HD Graphics 520.
• Comms: 802.11bg.
• Ports: (Left) RJ45, HDMI, 2x USB-3.1; (Right) 1x USB, 3.5mm audio 4 wire, card slot,
• Other features: DVD-RW, webcam and mic on lid top center.

This is an old machine, skip it. But there's a reference to another HP machine with an AMD CPU that might be interesting.

HP - 17.3" Laptop - Intel Core i5 - 8GB Memory - 1TB HDD;

• $529 SB Flashing Deals FBA.
• CPU Intel Core i5-7200U @1.8GHz;
• RAM: 1x8Gb 2133MHz
• Disc: 1Tb 5400RPM serial ATA.
• Display 17.3in, 1600x900px, Intel HD Graphics 620,
• Comms: 802.11bgn,
• Ports: 1x USB-3.1, 2x USB-2.0, HDMI, RJ45, 3.5mm audio 4 wire, card slot
• Battery 31Whr Li-ion battery.
• Other features: Webcam + mic; DVD-RW. Color: black; Weight 5.84lb; Keyboard is not backlit.
• First on Amazon 2017-02-13.

This looks like a relative of the one above (2017 HP 17.3 Business Flagship Laptop), an older model.

HP 2019 Newest HP 17 17.3" HD+ (1600x900) Premium Laptop (Intel Core i5-7200U, 8GB 2400 MHz DDR4, 1TB HDD, DVD+RW, HDMI, Wi-Fi, BlueTooth, Ethernet Gigabit RJ-45, Windows 10 - Black)

• $538 SB "Frugal Deals" FBA.
• A variant is available with i7-8550U, 16Gb for $980, oink.
• CPU: i7-7200U @2.5GHz, dual core.
• RAM: 8Gb
• Battery: 41Whr
• Weight: 5.4lb.
• First on Amazon: 2018-11-23.

The 7th generation chipset is discouraging because between generation 7 and 8 a lot of work was done to improve power management. Horrible customer reviews, one person says it's a 5 star machine running Ubuntu but with Win10 it's very slow, takes 10min to boot, and locks up if you have more than 2 apps open. (Sounds to jimc like swapping; 8Gb RAM isn't enough.)

And some more that are clearly unsuitable.

 

Conclusion from this trial: Machines in this group are dead fish from the previous generation, steroidal machines over $1000, or both. There are no Chromebooks with 17in screens (I saw one or two, six months ago). It looks like I'm going to lose the 17in battle. Reverting to a 15.6in screen and searching again.

Second Search for Candidates, 15.6in Screen

Keyword laptop, SBSF Amazon, new (not used), 24 hits. The results and offered filters seem to change every time I do the search. Laptop Computers in Computers + Tablets. Now I can filter the screen size. 15in and 16in and 17in. And now I can filter by seller: SBSF Amazon. Now it's 9 hits.

In summary, the 9 hits (in alphabetical order) are:

• Acer Aspire 5, 15.6in IPS, AMD Ryzen 3 3200U, A515-43-R19L; $315
• Acer Aspire 5, 15.6in IPS, Intel Core i5-8265U, A515-54-51DJ; $510
• Acer Aspire 5, 15.6in IPS, Intel Core i3-8145U, A515-54-30BQ; $360 (inexplicably not among the hits)
• Acer Aspire E 15, 15.6" Full HD, Intel Core i3-8130U, E5-576-392H (not IPS); $310
• Acer Aspire E 15, 15.6" Full HD, Intel Core i5-8250U, GeForce MX150, E5-576G-5762; (IPS or not?); $600
• ASUS VivoBook, Intel Core i5-8250U, F510UA-AH55; $550. (15.6in IPS)
• ASUS VivoBook, Intel Core i3-8145U, F512FA-AB34; (15.6in, yes IPS) $379
• ASUS VivoBook, Intel Core i5-7200U, F510UA-AH50; (15.6in, IPS or not?) $502
• ASUS VivoBook, Intel Core i7-8550U, S510UA-DS71; (15.6in, IPS or not?) $770
• Asus FX504 Gaming Laptop, 15.6in IPS, Intel Core i7-8750H, GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, FX504GE-ES72; $1136

Here are details on some of these machines: non-IPS displays are excluded, as are some that are clearly unsuitable.

Acer Aspire 5 Slim Laptop, 15.6" Full HD IPS Display, AMD Ryzen 3 3200U, Vega 3 Graphics, 4GB DDR4, 128GB SSD, Backlit Keyboard, Windows 10 in S Mode, A515-43-R19L

• $315, SBSF Amazon.
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 3200U @2.6GHz dual core (turbo to 3.5GHz)
• RAM: 4GB DDR4, upgrade by adding one Samsung 4GB DDR4 PC4-21300, 2666MHZ, 260 PIN SODIMM, 1.2V, CL 19 Laptop ram Memory Module ($23.95 on Amazon). Addressing limit 2x16Gb. (20Gb for Intel variant.)
• Disc: 128GB PCIe NVMe SSD; also a 2.5in SATA bay (unpopulated); you can have both at once.
• Display: 15.6in 1920x1080px IPS, LED backlight, AMD Radeon Vega 5 Mobile Graphics
• Comms: 802.11ac (2.4 + 5GHz); GBit Ethernet; Bluetooth-4.0
• Ports: Left: Power (barrel), RJ45, USB-2.0 type A, USB-3.1 type A, HDMI, audio. Right: USB-2.0.
• Battery: 4.2Ahr, 3 cells, 44Whr (est'd), Up to 7.5hr life sitting idle per product page.
• Dimensions: 14.31 x 9.74 x 0.71 in; mass 3.97lb
• Additional features: Aluminum top cover, display bezel is black with narrow edges, bottom and deck are silver-colored plastic. Kensington lock slot. Backlit keyboard. Stereo speakers + mics. Webcam 1280x720px. No CD/DVD. No fingerprint reader.
• Model: A515-43-R19L; Arcane part number: NX.HG8AA.001; Product page
• First on Amazon: 2019-05-24, and by 2019-10-03 has over 600 reviews. But the Intel and AMD variants' reviews are jumbled together.

Reviews: 4+5 stars 85%, lower 15%. Beware, the reviews for the 3 machines in the A515 family are mixed together.

• Jason (4 stars) likes his, for "basic computing needs". 4Gb RAM and 128Gb disc are skimpy (suggesting that he has the Ryzen). Screen is very sharp and high contrast. Speakers are better than the usual on a laptop. Touchpad feels a little loose to him. He would like to change the backlight timeout. The RJ45 on his machine doesn't open all the way. Someone else complains about down-firing speakers in general.
• J.odee (5 stars) says battery life (on Windows) is under 4 hours.
• Tom Firodaliso (5 stars) points out that the touchpad has no buttons (like jimc's current laptop). Jimc says: On Linux (and I assume Windows also) you can configure areas on the touchpad to emulate buttons.
• 2 reviewers report getting into a state where it won't boot, saying no boot device available. They sound clueless; I would check for trashed boot software, and if it's OK, re-flash the BIOS.
• Charlie C had a short circuit in something, causing smoke and needing a fire extinguisher.
• Shurak discusses Ryzen vs. Intel i3.
  • i3 costs $40 more (jimc says, A515-54-30BQ is now $45 more, A515-54-51DJ is $195 more)
  • AMD graphics reserves 2Gb for video RAM, Intel is flexible, usually under 0.5Gb, so he says. Others say the opposite.
  • Intel battery life is 7hr, Ryzen is 11hr, so he says. Product pages give these numbers but swapped; task is web browsing.
  • The Intel version has more ports (which ones?)
• Ari points out: No SD card slot! (Jimc does have a USB card reader.)
• Nathan Martinez finds the touchpad to be jumpy rather than smooth. Also with Ubuntu 18.04 it will suspend on lid close, but won't wake on lid open. (Watch out for this. I assume the OS is Windows. Which model does he have?)
• Michael Lutz says, Maybe 6hr battery life.

I've had good luck in the past with AMD CPUs and Radeon graphics. This machine looks good, and negative issues are not too common in the reviews.

Acer Aspire 5 Slim Laptop, 15.6" Full HD IPS Display, 8th Gen Intel Core i5-8265U, 8GB DDR4, 256GB PCIe NVMe SSD, Backlit Keyboard, Fingerprint Reader, Windows 10 Home, A515-54-51DJ

• $510 SBSF Amazon, for model A515-54-51DJ
• The model A515-54-30BQ ($360) has an Intel Core i3-8145U, but according to the product pages it is otherwise identical to the A515-54-51DJ. It competes with the A515-43-R19L with AMD Ryzen 3 3200U ($310), the previous stanza.
• There's a variant with discrete nVidia graphics ($850), which I'm not considering.
• CPU: Intel Core i5 8265u @1.6GHz up to 3.9GHz, quad core. Except a comment on the cpubenchmark.net page suggests that this is with hyperthread, i.e. 2 physical cores. CPU product page says 4 cores with hyperthread, or 8 threads. Update: the actual machine has 8 threads like the product page says.
• RAM: 8Gb DDR4 2666MHz. Reviewers say Intel graphics reserves 2Gb video RAM, others say AMD does this and Intel reserves less; 4Gb memory hardwired, and 1 expansion slot for up to 16Gb. This model gets 4Gb Kingston or Hynix. Acer rep says it supports 2133 or 2400MHz memory (vs. 2666MHz).
• Disc: SSD 256Gb PCIe NVMe (2 channels, not 4). Kingston PCIe 256Gb (model number not given). The brand of SSD and memory can vary depending on market conditions at assembly time.
• Display: 15.6in diagonal, 1920x1080px, IPS, LED backlit, Intel UHD Graphics 620. Acer rep says, IPS, 250nit, 25ms response time, viewing angle 170deg. Does not support DisplayPort over USB-C.
• Ports: 3x USB-3.1 (1 type A, another type A with poweroff charging, 1 type C), 1x USB-2.0 on right, HDMI with HDCP, RJ45. No SD card slot. Kensington lock slot? The product page doesn't mention it but it's on the machine.
• Comms: 802.11ac, Bluetooth-5.0, 802.3 gigabit wired Ethernet. Mark R. Wietsock says, Wi-Fi range is typical and speed is very good. (cf. another reviewer who says range is too short.) NIC is Intel Wireless-AC 9560.
• Battery: 3.2Ahr 4 cells, 45Whr, 11hr life (yeah). 9.5hr battery life (per a reviewer, what task?). Mark R. Wietsock says, OEM battery is rated for 12hr but he guesses that real world life is more like 8hr. Cannot charge from the USB-3 port(s), must use barrel connector. See: product page (footnote at bottom): machine at idle (Windows?) will run 11hr.
• Webcam: The product page doesn't mention it, but it's on the machine. Size 1280x720px I think; this is the spec for the A515-43-R19L (Ryzen).
• Other features: Fingerprint reader (what about Linux?), mic, stereo speakers. Backlit keyboard.
• Product page for i5 8265u confirms these features: 4 cores each with hyperthread, so 8 threads. Yes virtualization (VT-x) with directed I/O (VT-d) and extended page tables (EPT). Enhanced SpeedStep. AES acceleration.
• Dimensions: 14.3 x 9.9 x 0.7 in, 3.97lb = 1.80kg (product page says 4.19lb)
• Case color: Silver with a narrow black bezel around the screen. The top lid is aluminum; the rest is silver colored (metal flake?) plastic.
• Model: A515-54-51DJ; Arcane part number: NX.HG5AA.001; Product page
• First on Amazon: 2019-05-24

Answered question: Can the BIOS do the CSM boot? Acer rep says no. CSM = Compatibility Support Module, which emulates BIOS booting in the UEFI context. Modern Linux (grub2) and Windows can do native UEFI boot.

Reviews: They are identical to the ones for the A515-43-R19L with AMD Ryzen 3 3200U, q.v., i.e. all reviews for the A515 family are mixed together.

I'm leaning toward choosing this machine. This product family has all the features I want and gets good reviews. Comparing equivalent Core i3 vs. i5 candidates for some of my other machines , I've found that the additional cost of the i5 has been worth it (which is not true, for my use cases, of the i7).

ASUS VivoBook Thin and Lightweight FHD WideView Laptop, 8th Gen Intel Core i5-8250U, 8GB DDR4 RAM, 128GB SSD+1TB HDD, USB Type-C, NanoEdge, Fingerprint Reader, Windows 10 - F510UA-AH55

• $550, SBSF Amazon. Color grey, $30 extra for other colors, e.g. silver.
• CPU: Intel Core i5 8250U 1.6GHz (Turbo up to 3.4GHz), quad core
• RAM: 8Gb DDR4
• Disc: 128Gb SSD and 1Tb rotating
• Display: 15.6in diagonal, IPS, 1920x1080px, Intel HD Graphics 620
• Ports: (Left) USB-3.1 type C, USB-3.0 type A, HDMI, audio 4 wire, power. (Right) 2x USB-2.0, full size SDXC card slot. No RJ45.
• Comms: 802.11ac
• Battery: 42Whr
• Dimensions: 14.2 x 9.6 x 0.8 in, 3.7lb
• Other features: Fingerprint sensor; webcam (VGA); keyboard is not backlit; power button is next to Delete and Backspace (gets hit by accident, per reviewer).

Reviews: 4+5 stars 73%; 27% lower. There is not a lot of quantitative info in the reviews, but there are more very negative reviews for this machine than for the Acer variants. This makes me feel negative about the ASUS product line.

ASUS VivoBook 15 Thin and Light Laptop, 15.6in FHD, Intel Core i3-8145U CPU, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, Windows 10 in S Mode, F512FA-AB34, Slate Gray (product ID: Asus VivoBook 15 F512FA )

• $379 SBSF Amazon
• There is a variant with an AMD Ryzen 5 (r5-3500u, 3.6GHz turbo) and 256Gb SSD, $549.
• CPU: Intel Core i3-8145U @2.1GHz up to 3.5GHz. 2 cores.
• RAM: 8Gb: 4Gb hardwired and a slot for 4 or 8Gb.
• Disc: 128Gb M.2 SSD.
• Display: 15.6in, 1920x1080px, narrow bezel edges. Intel UHD Graphics 620.
• Ports: USB-3.1 type C and type A (right side), 2x USB-2.0 (left side), HDMI, 802.11ac, no RJ45 for 802.3 Ethernet.
• Battery:
• Other features: Backlit keyboard. Fingerprint sensor (what do you want to bet it's Windows only?) Accidental damage insurance (1 year included, 1 claim per machine).
• Dimensions: 14.1 x 9.1 x 0.8in. 3.75lb = 1.7kg.
• First on Amazon: 2019-05-20.

Answers to questions: No it can't charge from the USB-3.1 type C connector, only the barrel connector.

Reviews: AARGH, William D (2019-08-17, with i3-8145U). says it has a TFT panel (not IPS). He hates it. Dragon Eye (2019-08-31, with r5-3500u) says it's beautiful IPS, battery life 2-3 hours. I filed a missing information report saying the screen technology should be shown for each model.

Additional Research

CPU benchmarks: These are all from CPUBenchmark.net. They use PassMark for their benchmark. Results for relevant CPUs:

Dollar-denominated figures marked * are from a current offering on Amazon. Others are from the CPUBenchmark site. The latter are most likely prices reported by people submitting benchmark runs, and/or list prices (MSRP).

Passmark reports the average score (equally weighted) on 8 tests, run in parallel and summed over all cores, including hyperthread multiplicity. The tests are:

• Integer Math: add, subtract, multiply and divide 32bit and 64bit integers, equal numbers of each. 240kb batches fit in the cache.
• Compression: kbytes/sec, 16kb batches fit in the cache.
• Prime numbers: Sieve of Atkin, targets up to 3.2e7. Batches use about 4Mb RAM.
• Encryption (and hashing): algos are Twofish, AES, Salsa20 (ciphers), SHA256 (hash). It uses hardware acceleration if available. 1Mb batches.
• Floating Point Math: Same as Integer Math but done in floating point.
• Extended Instructions: Tests FMA, AVX, SSE, if available.
• String Sorting: Algo is qsort. 25Mb batches.
• Physics: Runs a physics simulation. This would be floating point.
• Single Thread: This score is reported separately; it is the average of Floating Point, String Sorting, and Compression, run on only one core, which with the right driver or BIOS settings will be overclocked. (The theoretically expected single thread score is S/N where S = multi thread score and N = number of physical cores not counting hyperthread.)

Tidbits found in research on some of the customer reviews:

• What is Windows in S Mode? For security you can only install apps from Microsoft's app store, not including Firefox, so you can only use Edge. You can irrevocably opt out for free; the procedure is simple. Windows 10 S is an older plan, and opting out is not free.

• PCWorld: NVMe SSDs: Everything you need to know about this insanely fast storage, by John L. Jacobi (2019-03-10). Read-write is 4 times faster than recent SATA SSDs, seek time is 10x faster (jimc says, how could that be?). Sustained reading: 2.9e9 byte/sec for NVMe vs. 0.5e9 by/s for SATA SSD and about 0.2e9 by/s for SATA rotating disc. Seek times: NVMe 2e-5 sec, SATA SSD 2e-4 sec, rotating 2 to 5e-3 sec, these are averages over (what). The drives in the photos go in a 80mm M.2 slot. M.2 to regular PCIe adapters are available for $25. MSATA is different. Samsung 970 Pro drive model is featured as a good one, among others, while some are dogs. See the article for a link to their review of SSDs. On Amazon, Samsung SSD 970 PRO 512GB - NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 SSD (MZ-V7P512BW) $148; Samsung 970 EVO 1TB SSD (MZ-V7E1T0BW) NVMe M.2 V-NAND Internal Solid State Drive, $170. Wow!

Evaluating the Candidates

From the bottom:

• ASUS VivoBook, Intel Core i5-8250U, F510UA-AH55; $550. (15.6in IPS.) While this machine is broadly competitive with the Acer A515-54-51DJ, the feeling I got from the product reviews was not exactly comforting.

• ASUS VivoBook, Intel Core i3-8145U, F512FA-AB34; (15.6in, yes IPS) $379. This one looks not bad, but given the various tradeoffs between risk of getting a general bad design, risk of getting a lemon, CPU power per dollar, reliability of the available information, and general feel, I'm not going to consider this one further.

• Acer Aspire 5, 15.6in IPS, AMD Ryzen 3 3200U, A515-43-R19L; $315. Since the Acer A515 family infrastructure (beyond the processor) is almost but not quite identical among the 3 family members analysed, the choice is going to come down to CPU power and how much I want to pay for it. I probably would not be disappointed with the A515-43-R19L, but I probably would be more appointed with the higher power (and higher cost) family members.

• Acer Aspire 5, 15.6in IPS, Intel Core i3-8145U, A515-54-30BQ; $360. Similar comments for this one. The two Intel processors have 4 cores, vs. 2 for the Ryzen. I'm running a virtual machine for development, and the additional cores will help with that.

• Acer Aspire 5, 15.6in IPS, Intel Core i5-8265U, A515-54-51DJ; $510. My budget covers the Intel Core i5-8265U, and while I'm not using this machine as a compute server, I expect subjectively that the greater CPU power will be worth the additional cost. This is the machine that I'm going to get.