Acer Aspire 3 Reddit Verdict: Great for School, Rough Around the Edges

It's okay. Build on these don't feel great, though.

It isn't good for gaming. If you want for gaming buy gaming laptop.

Build quality is real bad. The whole top feels mushy, keys are mushy, you can't pick it up with the lid open without the whole thing flexing 10mm or so. I picked up a different config Aspire 3 last Black Friday and TRIED to make it work since I just needed a super budget laptop and it was a huge discount, but I couldn't. It feels pretty terrible.

7520U laptops were going for like $350 refurb on Amazon a year ago. These are truly crappy in so many ways. I tried ordering two different ones and it's hard to see the merit in these unless you are oblivious to fan noise, cheap plastic, and other corner cutting issues. I wouldn't call it a great deal, just, you get what you pay for, if even that.

Its good for basic tasks. Don't expect to be able to game though. The computer will have a very weak APU.

Yes, in the budget category, I think Acer Aspire are some of the best laptops.

This i call "Chromebook on steroids". Check ETA Prime channel on YT, there are some reviews on laptops.

You can't game on that, try to buy one with atleast a GTX 1650 for a decent gaming performance, and ofcourse that would be good for your school work too.

It's really bad. These Mendocino chips have worse CPU and GPU compared to mainstream AMD CPUs. Something like a Ryzen 5 5500 will be cheaper and faster.

It's pretty good for that price. It's got a Ryzen 5700U, which is an older 8 core Zen2 CPU, which holds up great and is far more than enough for most people. You'd probably find it difficult to find any other new laptop at that price. The Ryzen 7 5700U on the Aspire is probably the best you'll get at that price for gaming performance.

The performance is compatible with what I work with. I mostly use mine for AutoCAD, engineering softwares, Microsoft Office Suite, and Gaming (Dota 2 and YuGiOH Master Duel). I think it's great for school work because the laptop already comes with 16GB of RAM so it should make your workflow smooth enough.

FYI decent paper specs but laptop is shit. Entire thing feels flimsy. Lots of flex. Keyboard feels like shit. Screen is crappy.

I sometimes read PC World. They have generally liked the Aspire 3s and 5s when they tested them. They thought the speakers were a bit tinny. The screens are FHD, but some laptops priced at $599 had better color contrast. Their basic conclusion is they were some of the better $499 and under laptops.

I know I'm super late, but I just got the 1TB, 20GB RAM model, and I still can't believe that I got it for $480. Absolute steal.

How's the display screen on yours? I bought an Aspire 3 with Intel i5-1235 and the display is atrocious. The colors look washed out and patchy and turn negative if I look at the screen at any angle other than straight on.

Hey, hows the Aspire 3 keeping up after 5 months? Just bought one and wondering how it holds up in the long run.

I have mine and it's about 4 months old. At the lower left side of the screen panel, there is some sort of gap — like when you slightly pinch it, you can feel it moving and creaking. You don't hear it audibly but you can feel it. It's not a very big gap but it's very concerning that it's got this problem so early. I'm honestly worried — I'm a freshman at college and this is my first laptop and probably will be for the next 5 years.

I have this exact notebook although with 16GB of RAM and it's quite good for what you're looking for. Ran the Sims 4 without any issue and I also played Dark Souls 1 and 2 on it without any issue. Battery life is good and doesn't get that hot when putting it under pressure. CPU and iGPU are quite good although the build quality is not that great — and one of the exhaust fans is directly towards the screen so that can be a problem in a few years.

Crackling or popping audio — how do I correct this problem? Every video on YouTube etc. has annoying static on my Acer Aspire 3.

The 7520U is a REALLY poorly marketed CPU. It really should be marketed as a Ryzen 3, not a Ryzen 5. It's a very low end CPU with Zen2++ cores, and only 4 of them. So extremely low end.

Thanks for the insight. So for Dota 2 it runs well at low to medium graphics and for Valorant, low settings is the way. Good to know.

Yea, mine can run valorant at 60fps no stutter.

I know this is old but in case anyone thinks about buying this laptop just don't it's quite literally a POS. I have one sadly due to the fact that I am broke and can't afford anything better. Don't even — I restart mine every single day constantly to get it to work barely. It sucks that bad. Yeah you can run certain games like the Sims 4 but don't expect it to not act up halfway through your playtime. It's just overall been the worst laptop I've ever had.

The charging cord SUCKS. The teeny tiny pin gets bent so easy.

It can run games I would say released up until 2016 with mid-high graphics. I've played Witcher 3, Dying Light and Red Dead 1 on it with almost high settings no problems. Later releases, I really can't say because I never tried.

I bought my Acer Aspire 15 from Costco last year. I bought it for school. It did a great job. Easy for word processing and spreadsheet calculations, it had a free MS office software that came with the computer. Great for going online for Youtube videos and even for watching movies. But is definitely not for gaming. Best $350 I spent.

I bought the Acer Aspire 15 with the Ryzen 5 7520U and 16GB of RAM. Performance-wise, it's pretty good; I use it for school and light gaming, and I get around 60–75 FPS in Fortnite on low settings. However, the build quality is horrible. The hinge broke once and the frame started coming apart, so I sent it in for repair. A few months later, the exact same thing happened. Now I'm just going to keep it as a backup laptop.

It's garbage. Wi-fi connection alone still uses up all your memory and CPU, not to mention it can't even run the basics like YouTube — it won't even run Task Manager.

I am confident with the performance of it since I got this laptop second handedly. Still, it can run Sims 4, 3 and 2 with ease after I upgraded my RAM and hard drive to 12GB and 1TB, I got all the DLCs, a bunch of CC/MODS/Gshade. Played Alice Madness with it as well. Got some lag sometimes but manageable. Still surviving after 3 years since I got my hands on it.

This CPU is based on Zen 2, very outdated architecture from AMD — like from 5 years ago. While integrated graphics on AMD in general is pretty good for not having a dedicated GPU, don't expect a lot from this laptop for gaming.

Bought one two years ago for under $200 on Black Friday but that only had 8GB RAM and a Ryzen 5 7520U. It's good for most things but for gaming it's a potato, though for the price it's phenomenal.

You might need to change the thermal paste. My parents have the same model and it hit 60°C at IDLE which is very hot. Changed it with some high quality paste and now it's at 35°C. Might just be a one-off but I hate when companies cheap out on critical parts. Big plus for being super easy to service though — much simpler than my Lenovo.

The computer was not fantastic but it was good enough for some time. For office work and streaming/watching things it was decent; however it can't run games well at all. I found even Google made the disk go to 100% so I recommend using Firefox.

Man it should be illegal to sell laptops with soldered RAM. It is planned obsolescence.

Mine is a dreadful experience. My 8 year old previous laptop had 200x better screen than this. And to add to that the network card/adapter is literally messed up. My wifi disappears every 2-3 days — and not just a connection issue, the whole section disappears including the Bluetooth tab. Then I need to install a new driver for the network card, which works roughly 1 out of 10 times.

I've had mine for almost 2 years now and some things I've noticed are: I've had to replace the battery twice, the display cover has popped off the display, multiple keys have lost/dulled their usability, the screws are constantly coming loose, and the 'Metal' feels really flimsy and has started to crack like plastic would.

MacBook more premium. The Ryzen 5 CPU is good. So, you are getting a decent budget laptop with nice speed from Acer, but I think the Apple speakers and screen will be better for sure.

I bought that computer for studying and programming, so enough performance for my needs. The storage and RAM are upgradable. It's coming with the Vega 2 GPU, so it's good with low setting games.

I bought this from Walmart for $400, except it has an i5-1235U CPU, and it runs 30+ tabs of Chrome, streams music, YouTube and Discord simultaneously without slowing down at all. It doesn't get too hot, and is lightweight with a good size display. The touchpad isn't the best, but it's large and works.

Battery lasts like 9-10 hours for me.

I bought it and it is solid. Only downside is not the best battery life, but it lasts a whole day of classes so I guess it's alright.