[Review] Acer Aspire E5-571-58CG Core i5, 6 GB of RAM and more

Pros: 5th generation Intel Core i5 processor, 6 GB of RAM, 1 TB of internal storage (HDD), Budget Price Point (see price here)

Cons: Integrated GPU (shared graphics).

A few days ago, I would have counted the lack of an SSD as a con for this laptop, but the thing is that at this price range an HDD is actually preferable. Yes, it’s still slower than an SSD, but it probably has more than four times the storage you would have found in another $500's or so laptop with an SSD. Besides, if you really want an SSD you can always buy a 256 GB Samsung EVO SSD for roughly $100 so stop whining. 

Another advantage of the Acer Aspire E5-571-58CG is that it comes with 6 GB of RAM, something quite rare for most mid-range laptops (they usually come with 4 GB). If you wanna know all the details, then you’re in luck because our in-depth review of the Acer Aspire E5-571-58CG is about to begin. Here we'll uncover the pros and cons of this interesting laptop and ultimately help you decide if it's worth buying or not (hopefully). 

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The Acer Aspire E5-571-58CG has a pretty standard, gray-ish design; nothing too noteworthy about it except for the keyboard. 

The keyboard is wide, the keys are big and they have a good amount of space between them. The arrow keys have a different size and are separated enough from the rest of the keys so you don’t end up pressing ctrl, shift or the number 0 instead of the arrow key you wanted to press (a far too common problem with laptops, if you ask me).

It even has a big, integrated numpad that looks like it came out of a full-length keyboard, for god’s sake. It really doesn’t get better when it comes to portable keyboards (in this price range, anyway).

The 15.6-inch, LED-backlit display is pretty good as well, rocking an HD, 1366x768 resolution and a 16:9 aspect ratio. If you want to go Full HD (1080p) so you can watch your movies with more detail, all you have to do is connect the laptop to your monitor or TV through the HDMI port.

The Acer Aspire E5-571-58CG also comes with a VGA port for maximum external display compatibility, but our recommendation is that you stick with the HDMI one for better quality.

Moving on with our detailed review of the Acer Aspire E5-571-58CG, we can appreciate that it's a very powerful machine for its price, packing a 5th generation, Broadwell based, Intel Core i5-5200u processor that runs at 2.2 GHz (2.7 with Intel’s Turbo Boost) and comes with 2 cores, 4 threads and a 64 bit architecture for maximum RAM efficiency.

Speaking of RAM, the Acer Aspire E5-571-58CG comes with 6 GB of DDR3L SDRAM memory that runs at 1600 MHz to easily please most multitasking needs without a problem.

The graphics department isn’t that powerful, though. The Intel HD 5500 graphics card is not dedicated so it has to share its memory with the CPU. That being said, the Acer Aspire E5-571-58CG is still able to fluidly run (at more than 30 fps) popular games such as Counter Strike: GO, League of Legends, Hearthstone and many others as long as you tweak the graphical settings first.

You’ll also be able to run video and photo editing software such as Adobe Premiere or Photoshop, but you’ll have to be a little bit patient when it comes to video rendering and other highly demanding processes.

Like I said in the introduction of this review, the lack of an SSD (solid state drive) is not much of a problem because of the 1 TB of internal storage that the HDD (hard disk drive) brings to the table. 

This is more than enough storage for the average and the not-so average user, but you’ll also be able to connect your external storage drives (including SSDs for faster speeds) through the USB 3.0 port. The Acer Aspire E5-571-58CG also comes with two USB 2.0 ports and an SD card reader for maximum storage compatibility.

The 5000 mAh battery is actually better than I expected, being able to provide up to 7 hours of mid-to-heavy use. To give you a better idea of how good it is, most mid-range laptops only last about 5 hours with the same usage.

We’re about to wrap up our review, so let’s talk about the physical ports because I already mentioned a few of them. All in all, we've got a pretty standard set of ports starting off with the HDMI port, a VGA port, 2 USB 2.0 ports, 1 USB 3.0 port, an SD card slot, a headphone/microphone jack and an ethernet port for your wired LAN connections.

The Acer Aspire E5-571-58CG also comes with WiFi (802.11 b/g/n) and Bluetooth v4.0 antennas so you can easily connect to your wireless networks and devices. Pretty standard if you ask us. 

Regarding the operating system, it comes with Windows 8.1 out of the box. The good thing is that Windows 10 is already available as a free update (at least until mid-2016), so you’ll be able to get the latest version of Microsoft’s desktop OS in no time (and by “no time” I mean that it all depends on your Internet connection speeds).

Overall, we can wrap up our review of the Acer Aspire E5-571-58CG by saying that it's a reasonably powerful machine with a big keyboard that is particularly useful for those of us who have to write for several hours every day. The screen is pretty good as well and it’s big enough for basic multitasking.

The 6 GB of RAM and the 1 TB of storage are huge advantages as well, especially for work purposes. Although, I do know that not everything in this life is about work, so I’m just glad that the new Acer laptop is also able to handle a couple of hours of League of Legends, Counter Strike: GO and my friday nights' Netflix marathons.