The Acer Aspire V5-171 is a thin and light notebook that proves you don’t have to pay top dollar to get an ultraportable computer that offers decent performance. It has an 11.6 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel display, a 1.7 GHz Intel Core i5-3317u dual core Ivy Bridge processor, 6GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard drive.

Acer’s latest ultraportable has a suggested retail price of $550, but Acer will be offering a $50 coupon through its Facebook page for a limited time.

While chip maker Intel is pushing its ultrabook platform pretty hard this year, ultrabooks aren’t the only game in town when it comes to thin and light laptops. In order to qualify as an ultrabook, a notebook needs to meet certain criteria — and the Aspire V5 misses out on two of those.

It doesn’t have a solid state disk for cache or storage, and it measures 1.1 inches at its thickest point, while ultrabooks are typically no thicker than 0.8 inches.

But you’d be forgiven for mistaking the Acer Aspire V5 for an ultrabook. In most respects, it performs just about as well as any ultrabook I’ve tested, and the laptop may not be the thinnest around, but it’s pretty light. The Aspire V5-171 weighs just about 3 pounds.

Acer loaned me a model with 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, and Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit for the purposes of this review.

Design

The Aspire V5-171 isn’t the first 11.6 inch notebook from Acer. The company is treating it as a follow-up to the Aspire TimelineX 1830T. But I reviewed earlier 11.6 inch Acer notebooks in 2009 and 2010.

While the keyboard and touchpad layout have undergone some changes in the past few years, for the most part the Aspire V5-171 looks a lot like its predecessors.

It’s about the same size, about the same weight, and has some of the characteristics I’ve come to expect from an Acer thin and light notebook.

Above the 11.6 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel display is a 1.3MP webcam. The screen itself has a glossy finish and looks pretty good when viewed from the front. But the viewing angles are pretty horrific.

When you try to look at a picture from the side, the colors look washed out. And when I tilted the screen back, the bright green desktop background started to look black pretty quickly.

What makes that strange, is the fact that the Aspire V5-171 has a hinge that almost lets you tilt the screen back to a 180 degree angle. So you can push the display back further on this notebook than on most other laptops — but unless you’re standing over the notebook and staring straight down at the screen, I’m not sure why you’d want to.

Acer says the laptop weighs 3.05 pounds, but my scale says it’s actually a little lighter, at about 2 pounds, 15.5 ounces. That makes it a little heavier than a typical 10 inch netbook, but lighter than many of the 13 inch and larger ultrabooks I’ve tested recently.

It has a plastic case with the lid and keyboard area painted a metallic gray color. The bottom of the laptop and the screen bezel are black, as are the keys on the keyboard.

The lid has a fake brushed-metal finish to it, which seems a bit tacky. But while the palm rest area is a metallic gray, it doesn’t feel like Acer’s trying to fool anybody into thinking it’s actually made of metal. It’s just a solid sheet of gray which actually looks pretty nice.

The speakers are on the bottom of the laptop, near the front edge. This means they point down at your lap, table, or other surface, and the sound isn’t particularly loud or clear. That’s true of many small-sized laptops, but the speakers on the Acer Aspire V5-171 seemed particularly weak.

Also on the bottom, you’ll find a single large access panel which covers the hard drive and memory. The panel is fastened to the case by a single screw. Once you remove it, you can slide the cover forward to reveal the RAM, hard drive, wireless card, and other internal components.

The user replaceable battery slides into the back of the laptop — which is a little thicker than the front, to accommodate the battery. The front of the laptop is also tapered a little to make the front edge look even thinner than it is.

There’s an unusual latch holding the battery in place. In order to remove the battery, you need to flip over the laptop and stick a pen, paperclip, or other item into a small hole and slide the latch while pulling the battery. You may also be able to do this with a fingertip, but it’s a little trickier to remove the battery on the Aspire V5-171 than it is on most laptops.

You’ll find an SDHC card slot beneath the front left corner of the palm rest.

The left side of the laptop features a Gigabit Ethernet port, VGA and HDMI ports, and a USB 3.0 port.

On the right side there are 2 USB 2.0 ports, a headphone jack, power port, and a lock adapter.

Keyboard and TouchPad

Acer has outfitted the laptop with an island-style keyboard, which means that each key floats in a little space apart from its neighbors. Earlier Acer portable notebooks such as the Aspire One 721 featured larger keys with less space between them.

Both layouts are reasonably comfortable, but I think I prefer the new layout, which makes it easy to detect the edges of the keys with your fingers.

If you press down hard enough toward the center of the keyboard, you’ll notice a little bit of flex — but not as much as I’ve on many other laptops, including some that have much higher price tags. There’s a single molded piece of plastic covering the palm rest and keyboard area, and it seems to be very sturdy.

The keyboard suffers from one perennial problem on Acer 11.6 inch laptops — the arrow keys are ridiculously small. Even if you don’t use arrow keys very often, that’s a problem, because these are also the keys you need to press to adjust the volume or display brightness, or access the PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End functions.

Acer crams these 6 tiny keys into the space below the right shift key. If these were normal-sized keys, you’d only be able to fit 2 of them in that space.

It’s possible to press the correct arrow key without looking down at your fingers — but it’s not easy.

Otherwise, the keyboard is a pleasure to use (if you’re the sort of person that takes pleasure from typing).

Below the keyboard is a touchpad with support for multitouch gestures. There are no touchpad buttons — instead, you can click the lower right corner to right-click, and click nearly anywhere else on the lower half of the touch surface to left-click.

Since the Acer Aspire V5-171 is a little smaller than most notebooks, there’s not room for an enormous touchpad, and the touch surface is substantially wider than it is tall. This gives you more room to move a cursor from side-to-side than up and down, but that’s not a huge problem on a notebook with a widescreen display.

Personally I’d rather have distinct left and right buttons — or at least lines differentiating the left and right click areas. I’m always a little worried that I’ll left-click when I meant to open a context menu or save-as dialog.

But I find myself making fewer click errors on the Aspire V5-171 than on the much-more expensive Toshiba Satellite U845W ultrabook.

Performance

While the Acer Aspire V5 isn’t an ultrabook, you’d never know that by looking at the benchmarks I ran on the laptop. Its scores in my aging raft of performance tests and a few third party benchmarks were nearly identical to the scores for the last two ultrabooks I tested, the Toshiba Satellite U845W and Lenovo IdeaPad U310.

That’s not surprising, since all three laptops have the same Intel Core i5-3317U Ivy Bridge processor and Intel HD 4000 graphics. All three laptops scored better than the Asus Zenbook UX31 I tested earlier this year, which is also unsurprising, since that ultrabook had an older Core i5 Sandy Bridge CPU.

The Liliputing benchmarks look at how long it takes to create a large ZIP archive and transcore an audio and video file.

I also ran the 3DMark06 and Street Fighter IV benchmarks to look at graphics performance. While the Acer Aspire V5-171 has integrated Intel graphics rather than a discrete graphics card, it performs reasonably well in these tests.

In terms of day to day performance, when you combine the Ivy Bridge CPU with 6GB of RAM, there’s not much you can’t do with this laptop.

I had no problems surfing the web with a dozen or more tabs open while listening to music. HD video playback is no problem. And while I use Virtualdub to transcode video in my benchmarks (since that’s what I’ve been using to test laptops for the past few years), a newer video transcoding tool like MediaEspresso handles video compression jobs even more quickly.

Technically the Core i5-3317U is a ULV, or Ultra Low Voltage processor which prioritizes low power consumption and long battery life over performance. But it’s the fastest processor you’re likely to find in an 11.6 inch notebook that costs $500 this year. You’ll probably be suitably impressed if you’re upgrading from anything more than a few years old.

The notebook gets a Windows Experience Index of 4.8. It would be much higher if it had a better graphics card. The CPU portion of the score is a healthy 6.9.

There’s one area where the ultrabooks I’ve tested clearly have the edge though. Ultrabooks typically boot Windows 7 in about 30 seconds or less. But takes a good 58 seconds from the time you press the power button on the Acer Aspire V5-171 until you get to a usable desktop.

There’s a good reason for the slow boot speed: the Acer laptop has a 5400 RPM spinning hard drive, while ultrabooks either have a faster solid state disk, or a combination of a hard drive and a solid state cache disk. Acer also loads the laptop with a substantial amount of software, some of which loads at boot. Uninstalling some of these apps might help speed things up a bit.

If you don’t actually shut down your computer very often, instead relying on sleep mode, there’s good news. The Acer Aspire V5-171 resumes from sleep in less than 3 seconds. That’s about as fast as any ultrabook I’ve tested so far.

In order to save power, if the laptop is in sleep mode for more than a few hours, it automatically switches into hibernate mode. This means that instead of saving your current session data in RAM (which requires a constant low level of power to hold data), your data is saved to the hard drive.

This prolongs your battery life, but it also means that if you close the lid on the computer before bed and go to turn it on again the next morning, it’ll probably take 10 to 15 seconds to resume instead of 3. This also happens on ultrabooks that have hard drives.

Battery and Power Supply

Acer ships the Aspire V5-171 with a 4 cell, 2500mAh, 37Whr battery. The company claims that you should be able to get up to 5 hours of run time from the battery.

In my testing, I got closer to 4.5 hours. That’s not exactly all-day computing, but the small battery does help keep the price low and the laptop thin.

Unfortunately Acer has no plans to offer an extended battery option. I’m sure some readers would be happy to pay a little extra for a 6 cell battery that provides 6 to 7 hours of run time, but unless a third party battery maker creates one, it looks like you’re out of luck.

Fortunately since the battery is user replaceable, if you do manage to find an extended battery or just an extra battery, it should be relatively easy to swap batteries on the go.

Most laptops come with bulky power bricks and adapter cables. The Acer Aspire V5 11.6 inch notebook comes with a 1-piece charger.

It’s not quite as small as the charger for a cellphone or other handheld device, but its small size makes it easier to carry around than most laptop power bricks. It also weighs just 6.5 ounces, so it won’t exactly weigh you down.

The one downside to this sort of charger is that it’s a bit tougher to fit on a power strip that’s choc full of plugs from other deices.

Software

The Aspire V5 ships with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit… and much, much more. Acer loads this laptop up with an awful lot of software including free trials of some apps, full versions of others, and a few apps that Acer designed in-house.

Some of those apps are more useful than others.

One program I really want to like is Acer’s Clear.fi media software. The Clear.fi Media and Photo apps act as alternatives to Windows Media Player and Windows Photo Gallery, letting you organized and access your music, movies and pictures.

But what really makes Clear.fi cool is the way it lets you share media with other devices on your home network just by checking a box. Once that’d done, you can fire up the Clear.fi app on an Android device or another PC and stream music, movies, or photos from your PC.

Unfortunately I couldn’t for the life of me get the Android app to work — which means that the Clear.fi software on the Aspire V5 really just duplicates the functionality of Microsoft’s apps.

There’s also an Acer Backup Manager, which helps you backup files, create a disk image from your hard drive, or transfer files to another computer. Acer is hardly the only company to offer this sort of backup software, but it’s a nice to get this sort of software with a new PC.

I was also pleasantly surprised to see that the computer came with a free version of Cyberlink MediaEspresso 6.5, a video transcoding tool that normally costs $40.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Here’s a partial list of other software that comes preloaded on the Aspire V5-171:

  • Acer Games – game center with access to dozens of casual games
  • Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR
  • Bing Bar – browser toolbar for Internet Explorer
  • Evernote – note taking app with online sync
  • Fooz Kids – kid-friendly user interface with tools that let parents lock kids out of some apps
  • McAfee Internet Security trial
  • Microsoft Office 2010 Starter
  • newsXpresso – rather hideous app for reading the latest headlines
  • NOOK for PC – eBook reader
  • Norton Online Backup trial
  • Skype
  • Windows Live Essentials 2011

While I suppose Office 2010 Starter is nice to have, I could live without most of the other software. Fortunately, it’s easy to uninstall any of the apps you don’t need.

The laptop ships with Windows 7, but it should be able to handle Windows 8 just as well. Since it has a 1366 x 768 pixel display, you should have no problem running Windows 8 full-screen apps. But the laptop doesn’t have a touchscreen, so you won’t get to take advantage of the new tablet-friendly features in Microsoft’s upcoming operating system.

If you’re interested in upgrading to Windows 8, you may be able to take advantage of a Microsoft promotion that lets new PC buyers upgrade for just $14.99.

Verdict

The Acer Aspire V5 proves that there’s room in 2012 for ultraportable laptops that aren’t technically ultrabooks. Priced between $500 and $550, Acer’s new laptop is a few hundred dollars cheaper than most comparable ultrabooks, but it’s just as light and portable, if not quite as thin.

Honestly, I’ve never understood why Intel sets limits on how thick a laptop can be to wear the ultrabook label, but there’s no limit on weight, which is much more important.

Anyway, the Acer Aspire V5-171 doesn’t boot as quickly as an ultrabook, and unfortunately it doesn’t have quite as much battery life as I’ve come to expect from an ultrabook. But it has a user replaceable battery, which almost makes up for that deficit.

The laptop also lacks some of the premium features you’ll find in some pricier notebooks such as a high resolution display or backlight keyboard.

But, slow boot speed aside, the Acer Aspire V5-171 performs just about as well in most tests as an ultrabook that costs twice as much money. Acer’s new laptop is just cheaper.

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34 replies on “Acer Aspire V5 11.6″ Ivy Bridge notebook review”

  1. Anyone tried running The Sims 2 or 3 on this? Want a lap pie that cat support The Sims (with several extensions) and the Office 2010 or later. Will the V5 be able to handle that?
    If not, do you have any suggestions on a comp that is within the same price-range that can?

    1. myself i have the Aspire V5-171-6860. with an i5, 6gb of ram. you can run the sims no problem

  2. Just went to look to buy one from the UK and couldn’t find it, a million choices of model but none seemed to match this one. So I go to their site and only way to ask was to sign up for their forum.

    Have to say this reminds me of when I’ve tried to buy their products in the past, they should really concentrate on having at least a few consistent models through Europe/US etc. Apart from anything else it makes it far easier for people like me who read US review sites before buying.

  3. I have one of these laptops and for the price it is very good.

  4. I’m late to the party as usual, but I’ve decided this laptop hits the sweet spot I’m looking for – pretty good performance, decently portable, cheap. It will be interesting to compare it with the all the windows-8 hardware coming out, but waiting is not my strong suit – my Acer should get here on Friday.

    I like that Acer prices its accessories reasonably. They list compatible charger and battery for $20 and $40 each. That helps me not care about the battery life. That $20 charger doesn’t look as cute as the one in your picture, but it can be the one I leave parked at my desk. I am hoping there are good linux drivers for its trackpad and other bits.

    Thanks for the reviews Brad, they’re great.

  5. I just bought the Aspire V5-171-6869 as my first laptop for trips. (Normally I’m using a desktop 8 hours a day.)
    Windows 8 gave these Windows Experience Numbers:
    Processor: 6.9
    Memory: 7.3
    Graphics: 5.5
    Gaming Graphics: 6.2
    Primary Hard Disk: 5.9
    And a dual boot time from power-on to desktop of 35 seconds.

      1. Yes, I’m still happy I bought this computer.
        I fixed the boot speed by installing Windows 8 preview, and I’ll get the official version for $15 at the end of October.
        The battery life has not impacted me much as all, but then I tend to be working in places with electricity. A couple of car trips for two hours worked ok. (And I had to drive for half the trip anyhow. )
        Sure, a higher resolution might be nice but the 1366 by 768 works ok. I don’t work in the dark too much, but once I did just tilt the screen over to get a little extra light on the keys.
        The biggest drawback for me is that the small arrow keys and Page Up/Down Home-End keys are not in the same configuration as my desktop keyboard. I did take a keyboard along once on a trip to see if I would use it instead. I preferred the larger keyboard for serious typing. But I was able to adapt to the laptop keyboard too.
        The best part is that I still have $500 left in my budget for a touch screen tablet for Windows 8 early next year. I’m going on a two week trip on Friday, and it will be very useful then. If you can hold out for a touchscreen laptop/tablet then I would do so. But I needed something this month.

  6. Are you sure that they will launch a 11.6 inches S7 ? It will be super over expensive maybe ?

  7. Acer is really the best brand for me, using their computer for 10 years without even 1 problem.

    1. You can certainly hear the fan, but it’s not as loud as the fan on some notebooks (I’m looking at you, Toshiba U845W). It gets a little warm on the bottom, especially when watching videos or performing other CPU-intensive tasks. The keyboard doesn’t get particularly hot.

  8. good stuff! too bad it s sold with windows. this machine with linux would be great

    1. It’ll probably be cheaper with Windows than Linux anyway. The bloatware discount on Windows PCs really does make a difference in the price.

      Besides, most of manufacturers I’ve seen pre-installing Linux mostly just slaps the default distro install on it with minimal tweaking. So suspend may/may not work, Fn keys may/may not work or they remove those keys from the Linux version. I doubt they’ll fix the long standing 802.11n instabilities with Intel and some other WiFi chips. Battery life is often less with the default install when compared to Windows.

      Even if the manufacturer does make a customized Linux distro (ie. Sputnik), how long will they support it? So in the end, Linux users are better off buying a Windows PC, installing Linux and configuring it yourself.

      1. You pay around 50$ for the WIndows Tax. if the linux market grows, the machine will be cheaper.

        1. what Jeff is saying is that companies subsidize the “Windows tax” by offering preinstalled trial software on the computers. I really hope one day, all computer manufacturers will have a Linux (or blank, unformatted hard drive) option alongside a windows version.

          1. But I guess the preinstalled Crap cannot pay more than 10% of the Windows licence. you can see it by comparing Win and NoOS machines

    2. why not just simply install Linux I’m sure it isn’t hard to install

      1. Because I want a preinstalled Linux Market where everything is supported by the manufacturer. Just like any OS

        1. Linux Market? I’ve never heard of that. You are probably either referring to the Android Market (which is Linux, but not installable on the V5) or a distro-specific software collection program (i.e. Ubuntu Software Center)

          1. I’ve installed ubuntu now, it’s running real smooth. just the brightness of the display need a fix.

  9. the bottom panel slides once the screw is removed.
    I have the $250 version, looks exactly the same the most part, but with celeron 877 chip.

  10. It’d be nice if the lid was the same color as the palm rest. No need to pretend it’s metal. They could have gone with a matte screen and bezel too for a less cheap look.

    I was hoping for an official extended battery option but that was thrown out the window. Good thing the 5 hour claimed battery life translated to 4.5 hours in real life. That’s good, to me, because that could mean that the 9 hour claim of the 11.6″ S7 may not be too optimistic but we’ll see.

    I’m currently eyeing the 11.6″ Acer S7 but if its claimed battery life is just a pure idle test then I’ll go with the V5. I haven’t checked but hopefully there are other color options that make the V5 less cheap looking and without that fake metal lid.

    Is the hard drive replaceable?

      1. hey WANg, have you made the SSD replacement on this machine? where did you read that a 7mm z-height is required? i’ve got a samsung 840 ssd already that i’d happily plop in if it will fit. you’re the only person i’ve seen so far to comment on the drive height. thanks!

        1. That’s because I actually tried to swap a 9mm z-height drive into the chassis…and it doesn’t fit. The Intel 520 is a 9.5mm drive with a 2.5mm removable spacer…and I had to pull it to make it fit.

  11. I’ve got an earlier 11.6″ Acer laptop and I’ve gotten so used to the tiny arrow keys – and, more importantly, having page up and page down keys right there – that I’ve started to miss them on other laptops.

    Also, I think you meant to say that the charger weights 6.5 ounces, not pounds.

    1. How do you know it’s not a really heavy charger? Oh right, because I said it was light.

      Fixed the article to say ounces. 🙂

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