The Acer Aspire V5-472 deserves to be a great device, and it almost is. It’s a slim, well-built laptop with a great design, a lovely keyboard and great battery life. Sadly, the awful touchpad completely ruined the experience for us, almost rendering the laptop unusable. Whether that’s a deal-breaker for you or not is something only you can decide.
Design and build
The V5-472 is a quite a pleasant laptop to behold. What’s most noticeable is just how slim this laptop is, quite an achievement for a budget laptop with a 14” screen. The ports are strewn all over the laptop, including some on the spine, where Acer’s also included an “Acer Converter Port”.
An unusual, and somewhat irksome, side-effect of the slim design is that the battery is in-built and can’t be conveniently swapped out. Also, reaching behind the laptop to access the HDMI and USB3.0 ports can be a bit of an inconvenience, but that’s something you’ll need to decide for yourself.
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Features and specifications
In terms of specs, this is a fairly average laptop with a 3rd generation i3 CPU and 4GB of RAM, not to mention the 500GB HDD. You get a very decent 14” screen with a resolution of 1366×768 and, as mentioned earlier, the standard set of USB and HDMI ports along the sides and rear of the device.
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Performance
While the actual performance of the laptop is at par with any other i3 powered device that you’ll find, the battery life of the device does stand out. With 4 hours of battery life in our tests, this laptop might easily last you six hours with judicious use of power-saving features.
Of course, a Haswell chip and an SSD would have further boosted battery life, but one can’t have everything in a budget laptop now can he?
The screen is actually quite bright for a laptop, but the contrast ratio is only average at 61:1. The audio quality was also strictly average, nothing to write home about.
The keyboard on this laptop is something special though. It’s easily among the best keyboards we’ve used in this segment, with the keys being well-spaced, responsive and providing adequate feedback. That said, this laptop also has the worst touchpad we’ve used in a long time. For whatever reason, the V5’s touchpad was too hypersensitive to be user friendly, with even simple tasks such as copy-pasting and drag-and-drop seeming like chores. Now we don’t know if this was a problem specific to our review sample, but no amount of adjustment and reinstalling drivers on our part did anything to ease the situation.
| Acer Aspire V5-123 | Score |
| PCMark 8 Score – Home score | 2507 |
| PCMark 8 Creative score | 2040 |
| Ice Storm | 36025 |
| Cloud Gate | 3153 |
| Fire Strike | 447 |
| Peacekeeper | 1639 |
| Cinebench R11.5 | 161 |
| Battery life | 238 minutes |
| Brightness | 135 cd/m^2 |
| Contrast Ratio | 61:1 |
| Temperature | 63 |
Conclusion
The Acer Aspire V5-472 deserves to be a great device, and it almost is. It’s a slim, well-built laptop with a great design, a lovely keyboard and great battery life. Sadly, the awful touchpad completely ruined the experience for us, almost rendering the laptop unusable. Whether that’s a deal-breaker for you or not is something only you can decide.