A lot of midrange laptops have pretty bad wireless connectivity, especially the Wi Fi modules inside them are not that good. But the Acer Aspire 7 is different. The price may be high, but it boasts excellent connectivity options, good Wi Fi, and pretty incredible battery life to be a serious contender for the best laptop with i7 processor and the best laptop crown.
Why We Like It – Acer Aspire 7
The Acer Aspire 7 is a good laptop for office usage and light casual gaming. For productivity workloads that don’t require the GPU, it’s incredibly fast because of its fast memory and NVME SSD. And features like Bluetooth 5.0, fingerprint reader, 2×2 MU-MIMO, HDMI 2.0 port with HDCP 2.2 really help alleviate this gaming laptop even more.
- 16GB of fast DDR4 memory inside
- 512GB NVME SSD
- Built-in fingerprint reader for Windows Hello
- It comes with an underpowered Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050
- Display bezels are way too large
- Extremely high price
Power & Performance
The Acer Aspire 7 sports an Intel Core i7-9750H processor inside, which is pretty good. Most people would like to see an AMD Ryzen 4000 CPU as it crushes even Intel’s latest offerings, both in terms of power efficiency/battery life (because of its much smaller 7nm node, compared to Intel’s 14nm) and performance. But that came out after this laptop came out, so it wasn’t possible for Acer to include that. And it has 16 GB of 2400mhz fast DDR4 ram to compliment the CPU. Also, because of the PCI-E SSD, the operating system always feels smooth and fluid. If you desire to purchase an Acer laptop for a student who requires one for classwork, you can check out the Acer aspire e 15 review.
Battery
Even though it features an older, more inefficient Intel CPU, the battery life of this laptop is excellent compared to other Acer laptops. Even with the most demanding workloads, you should easily get above six hours before you have to plug it in again. And if you are just doing office work, it should last well above seven hours. The smaller Full HD IPS display also doesn’t draw much power. Another Acer laptop with a battery power of eight hours is featured in our Acer aspire 5 a515 review.
Ports & Expandability
The Acer Aspire 7 features a pretty expansive list of ports. You get a USB type C 5Gbps port, two USB 3.1 gen 1 ports, one USB 2.0 port, an HDMI 2.0 port, gigabit ethernet, and a 3.5mm combo jack. If you find the lack of an SD card reader concerning, you can also opt for the HP Spectre x360 13t thin and light ultrabook.
Build Quality
Just like other laptops at its price bracket, the Aspire 7 comes with a full metal body. The magnesium alloy material does make the laptop much lighter than some other gaming laptops, making it much easier to carry around. However, the finish feels cheap; it doesn’t feel premium in hand. Also, the keyboard (which in itself is decent) has a lot of flex to it, which is pretty bad price-wise. And the small trackpad is just straight-up unacceptable at this price. Even the Microsoft Surface Book 3 is a much better, more premium feeling laptop at the same price bracket.
Value
You can easily find similarly specced (if not better) laptops with much better build quality at less than half the price of the Aspire 7 nowadays. So, needless to say, at MSRP, the value proposition of the Acer Aspire 7 is pretty poor. If you can’t find a good deal on a used one, just spend a couple hundred more in order to get the MSI P65 Creator instead.
Acer Aspire 7 Wrap Up
The Acer Aspire 7 is not a bad laptop overall. But its low-end GPU, subpar build, and especially the high price heavily lets it down compared to its other competitors.
