Acer Aspire 7 review: good for work, not bad for occasional gaming

Introduction

The Acer Aspire 7 is the sort of budget laptop tech fans might turn their noses up at. But it’s quietly one of the better buys for families and folks who want to do a bit of everything, without spending a fortune.

It’s seriously powerful considering it costs less than £700, has a large screen for comfy all-day use, and can do the job for some light (and actually not-so-light) gaming.

Acer gets this sort of breadth at an approachable price by using older components, and peppering the Acer Aspire 7 will a few key compromises. The important ones: the screen isn’t bright enough for comfortable use outdoors and the battery doesn’t get close to lasting a full day.

Design: elevating boredom

Acer maintains some snazzy laptop families. The Aspire series are not among them. This is where you find classic no-nonsense PCs for people who might approach the “I need a laptop” problem with a mild sense of dread. You get good specs for the cash, without the flash nonsense.

The Acer Aspire 7 is a plain, unassuming thing, but it does have an aluminium lid to elevate us beyond the rock-bottom basics. It also uses a “lift” hinge, where the rear of the laptop is lifted up just slightly when fully opened up, for more comfy typing.

This style of hinge always poses a bit of a challenge for build quality, as you’re creating an empty space below the laptop, inviting flex. There’s a minor bit of trampolining to the keyboard when you press down fairly hard as a result. But as is the norm for these meat and potatoes Acer laptops, build is perfectly solid.

Its vital statistics are entirely “mid” too. At around 2kg and 19mm thick, this laptop isn’t super-light or ultra-thin, but is reasonably portable for a PC with a dedicated graphics card.

Screen: A likeable dullard

The Acer Aspire 7’s screen comes across in person better than it does in testing. Maximum brightness? Poor. Colour saturation? Basic at best. And there’s no touchscreen. However, indoors it looks perfectly decent, and to my eyes has less obvious compromises than some of the budget OLED laptops you’ll find out there today.

It covers a barely passable 60% of the sRGB colour gamut and has just 211 nits brightness at its peak. That’s the sort of illumination I find fine indoors, but for roaming around the place you want 300 nits minimum.

This is a 1080p display, with a 16:9 aspect rather than the more trendy, taller 16:10 style. Still, it looks as smooth and clear as some performance laptops several hundred pounds more expensive. And it has a less clearly visible pixel structure than the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3.

Acer sensibly gave the Aspire 7’s screen a matte finish, which helps avoid light sources showing up the limited brightness while you’re at home. And at 15.6 inches across, there’s loads of space.

This is a basic screen. But would I be happy to work from it on a daily basis? Sure. It’s still an IPS panel with wide viewing angles and oddly good motion handling, considering how lowly some of the other specs are. There’s a maximum refresh rate of 144Hz, and multiple refresh options when you dig into Windows 11’s settings. It’s here, presumably, to give the Aspire 7 a bit more gaming clout, but can also make the cursor look a lot smoother when simply darting about the desktop.

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Keyboard and touchpad: See the light

The Acer Aspire 7’s keyboard and mouse are intensely ordinary in most respects, but have a few neat extras you don’t always get when shopping with this sort of budget.

First up, the keyboard has a backlight. This is crucial for typing in a dimly-lit room, and it’s sometimes left out when you have less than £700 to spend. There’s also a fingerprint scanner built into the touchpad, which is proof of quite how ubiquitous such things are these days.

The experience of actually working on the Aspire 7? Perfectly fine. The hinge lifts up the keyboard at a slight angle, as mentioned earlier, for comfort. But this also likely contributes to the ever-so-slightly hollow feel.

Key depth is standard stuff, just a little more substantial than a MacBook Air, but the feel isn’t especially meaty. You get a dedicated numerical keypad, and I’m glad Acer kept it slimline; it means the main QWERTY part still feels more-or-less centrally planted.

I wasn’t surprised the Aspire 7 has a plastic touchpad. Acer is big on its “Ocean Glass” trend, which means even its expensive models use recycled, textured plastic ‘pads. There’s no such fancy chat here – it’s plain plastic. It’s a decent looking pad, though, with the rounded off style of a more lifestyle-driven series.

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Performance: Golden oldies

Performance is where things get interesting. The Acer Aspire 7’s insides are dated, but very powerful given the price.

There’s a 12th-gen Intel Core i5 CPU of the performance-driven H-series, which is two generations behind the latest laptops on shelves. The Nvidia RTX 2050 is an entry-level graphics card, also from two generations ago. You could have picked up something with these specs a year or more ago, but you’d likely have had to pay a good chunk more for it too.

Don’t expect any tech bragging rights here, but from a real-world performance perspective the Aspire 7 is a wonder. Like any Intel Core-series laptop, Windows 11 feels great. The 12th-gen processor is also significantly more punchy than a low-voltage 13th-gen alternative. Just remember this isn’t a top pick for video editing; the 8GB of RAM will be fine for lower-end gaming and general work, but you ideally want 16GB RAM or more for more memory-intensive tasks.

Acer has instead prioritised a more mainstream-y upgrade: storage. The Aspire 7 has a generous 512GB SSD, double the size of what you’d typically get for the money. It’s speedy too, a proper PCIe 4.0 drive that can read data 5049MB/s, write at 3954MB/s.

Even though the RTX 2050 is not just an old card but an old low-end card, it’s still capable of some neat tricks. You can play Cyberpunk 2077 at moderate settings (without show-off ray tracing effects) at 30fps and up, which means only some of the latest titles like Alan Wake 2 may be beyond its chops.

Acer also squeezed quite a lot out of both the processor and the graphics card. These Nvidia graphics are rated for wattages of 35W and up, and this RTX 2050 can draw a consistent 50W according to our play time. Pump up the CPU instead and the Intel Core i5 can suck up a rather serious 55W. Sometimes these lower-end performance laptops don’t make the most of the stuff inside, but the Acer really does.

I was even impressed by the laptop’s thermals. Neither GPU or CPU ever seems to get remotely close to their thermal limits, beyond which you’ll see performance throttling. Look at the Acer Aspire 7’s underside and you can see its dual fans, and a whole lot of copper heat sink. Always a good sign. While the fan tone isn’t ideal, the Aspire 7 is pretty quiet for a quasi-gaming laptop. Not ideal how? There’s a higher pitch tone here, which pricier gaming laptops largely avoid.

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Battery life: Keep the charger nearby

A processor that can gulp power at a decent rate is usually not great news for battery life. Sure enough, you’re not going to get the Aspire 7 to last all day. In my light office work test the Acer Aspire 7 lasted 4.5 hours on the dot. That’s back in the doldrums of old-school productivity PCs, and way off the standards of ultraportable laptop class.

This mostly just cement what sort of laptop we’re looking at here. It’s a homebody. Take it between rooms, rather than between countries or counties.

The Aspire 7 also uses a classic cylindrical power connector, not the USB-C kind. These old-school connectors are still very common when your supply needs head above 65W; it delivers a juicy 135W here, which is plenty for the CPU/GPU combo. You can still use a USB-C charger – it’ll just refuel at a lower speed, and won’t supply the graphics card with maximum power.

There’s a decent spread of connectors at the sides, with three fast USB-A ports, a full-size HDMI and an Ethernet connector. Not common at the price, the Aspire 7 also has a Thunderbolt USB-C connector – a super-fast connection that can be used to hook up to a dock. However, everything the average home office setup needs, bar an SD reader, is already here. And getting Thunderbolt at this price? Bonus points.

Acer Aspire 7 verdict

The Acer Aspire 7 is proof that last-generation laptops don’t lose their relevance when they sell at the right price. At around £699 this PC offers fantastic performance that can even handle demanding games at least moderately well.

The keyboard is good enough for all-day work, as is the screen. Sure, it’s a bit undersaturated and too dim for ultraportable-style use. And the battery? You’re not getting anything like the eight-hour silver standard. But as a complete package it’s still a bit of a bargain.

Acer Aspire 7 technical specifications

Screen	15.6in, 1080p IPS, 144Hz
Processor	Intel Core i5-12450H
Graphics	Nvidia GeForce RTX 2050
Memory	8GB
Storage	512GB SSD
Connectivity	Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, Thunderboly 4, HDMI 2.1
Dimensions	1.9 x 36.2 x 23.7cm, 2.1kg