Digit Zero1 Awards and Digit Best Buy Awards 2022: Best Mainstream Laptop

A mainstream laptop is a laptop that can handle most basic tasks with relative ease, while being at a reasonable budget, for the purposes of our category, between the ₹50k-₹80K mark. At this price range, you want a laptop that can smoothly handle most basic work and productivity tasks, maybe handle some light gaming, and also offer good battery life and portability. Keeping the above in mind, this year's Zero1 Award winner for best mainstream laptop beat out the runner up by a very small margin, primarily due to the presence of a dedicated GPU. The same laptop also won our Digit Best Buy Award, so without further ado, let's get to our winner.

Digit Zero1 Award 2022 & Digit Best Buy Award 2022 Winner: Acer Aspire 5 (A515-57G) (Buy Here)

Price: ₹62,999 

The Acer Aspire 5 A515-57G is our Digit Zero1 Award winner for best performing Mainstream laptop, and at a price of ₹62,999, it also wins our Digit Best Buy award for Mainstream laptops. When it comes to performance, the Aspire 5 comes with an Intel Core i5-1240P processor, which performed as expected. While it's weaker than the H variant i5 processor which is present in our runner-up, the Aspire 5 also has an Ace up its sleeve; it comes with a dedicated GPU in the NVIDIA RTX 2050. This gave it a leg up in the performance department, while also allowing for some light gaming, even with more recent AAA titles giving decent frames at low settings. We would still have preferred to have seen an H variant processor, but at this price point this is a decent configuration. The Aspire 5 comes with 8GB of DDR4 RAM and 512GB of SSD storage, and the accompanying 15.6-inch TFT FHD display has a peak brightness of 250 nits which is average. The display does not score too highly in colour accuracy. The presence of a GPU might have suggested some light content creation capabilities, but the display does get in the way of that. The Aspire 5 has a good selection of IO ports as well, including Thunderbolt 4 support, and a backlit keyboard being present is always nice. Overall, the Acer Aspire 5 is a just good all-round mainstream laptop, with performance where it counts, allowing you to do everything you want to at a reasonable budget.

Runner-up: HP Pavilion Plus (14-eh0021TU) (Buy Here)

Price: ₹79,999

The HP Pavilion Plus 14 had the winner beat in just about every department, but the lack of a dedicated GPU was what put it behind the winner in the performance department. It may seem unfair, but the benchmark scores speak for themselves. All things said, the Pavilion Plus 14 is a solid mainstream laptop, powered by a 12th gen Intel Core i5-12500H processor, paired with 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a 14-inch 2.2K OLED display with a refresh rate of 90Hz. The display is good enough for light creator work as well, thanks to its high colour accuracy. All the specs mentioned above are better than the specs present on the Zero1 winner, however the Pavilion Plus 14 comes with integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics. Like the Aspire 5, the Pavilion Plus 14 also comes with 512GB of SSD storage, and both the SSD and RAM scores for the two were similar in our benchmarks. The laptop has a good selection of IO ports as well, however it's missing a Thunderbolt port, which actually is present in the Aspire 5. It is frankly surprising that the Pavilion Plus 14 doesn't have one. Other than that, the Pavilion Plus 14 has a lot of other features, like a fingerprint sensor, backlit keyboard, a pretty decent webcam, and more. All of which are desirable features on a mainstream laptop. If you're in the market for a mainstream laptop and don't mind the lack of a dedicated GPU, then our Digit Zero1 Runner-up for best performing Mainstream Laptop might be the one for you.

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Manish Rajesh

Manish can usually be found fervently playing video games of all kinds or… no wait he’s pretty much always playing games View Full Profile