Acer Aspire 3 A315 - Nuclear Review

Originally published in mid-2024. Text review adapted from YouTube video script. Original video available at youtube.com/@NuclearNotebook.

After sitting on the shelf being neglected for almost a year, I’m pleased to finally say this is the Acer Aspire 3, and when I bought this unit it was one of the cheapest laptops on the Australian market at only $498.

Not that we’re going to go any easier on it just because it’s cheap.

This particular model includes a 1080p LCD display, Ryzen 3 7320U and 8GB of DDR5 RAM.

Anyway, more on all of that later.

Note that many points in this video will apply to other Acer laptops based on this design, most notably including Aspire Go, 3 and 5, and certain Nitro-branded machines.

Design-wise, you’re looking at a typical big square slab of a 15.6” laptop, clad in silver-painted ABS plastic with contrasting black trim.

I like the way Acer’s current design language extensively uses flat surfaces and sharp creases and angles, but unfortunately it also features one of the stupidest designs in the laptop industry – a pointed drop hinge that hits the surface the laptop is sitting on when it’s opened beyond 130 degrees, concentrating the majority of the weight on an obnoxiously sharp edge.

This hinge design ostensibly improves ergonomics and airflow on a desk, but in reality when the display is set to most angles it lifts the base up so little that it’s not helping at all for either of those purposes, and only serves to add a tonne of discomfort to laptop use and an extra shock load to the hinges every time it bonks the desk.

Stop it.

Dimensions are on the flabbier side for a basic machine like this, not helped by unusually thick bezels around the display.

Weight is a little higher than usual too, but in this case that’s actually a good sign.

In The Box

Included in the very recyclable double-boxed packaging are the laptop itself, a tiny 45-watt power adapter, and once again there’s the extra-fancy step of opening a sealed envelope to expose a basic setup guide and warranty information.

This laptop arrived with no visible manufacturing defects or functional issues, so this one gets full marks for quality control.

Ports

Connectivity is dead-on average for a lower end laptop.

HDMI version support is not specified by Acer but appears to be HDMI version 1.4, which doesn’t support 4K at 60Hz.

Thankfully, this one is free of an infestation of USB 2.0 ports, and the USB-C port supports charging & DisplayPort output.

The only ports that are somewhat modular on this machine are the right-hand side USB type-A & headphone jack which are both mounted to a separate board, and the DC-in jack – although this one requires the hinge to be unbolted before it can be removed.

If any other ports on the left hand side are broken it’s time to get out the soldering iron.

Input Devices

Input devices on this laptop are not disgusting.

The multi-touch diving-board-style clickpad fitted here works well. Tracking is accurate, the button is easy to press over the vast majority of the surface, and clicks are quiet and free of any rattling or phantom double-clicks.

To keep things feeling nice and firm, the trackpad is backed by a very thick plastic frame and the entire forward edge of the palmrest is backed with moulded-in reinforcement structure to stiffen the area as much as possible.

Sometimes this isn’t successful, but in this case, it works. Good stuff.

Keyboard

The keyboard is a mostly full-size unit but with a significantly squashed numpad.

This number pad is so narrow that it’s difficult to use from muscle memory, which diminishes the point of it being there in the first place.

The rest of the keycaps are all distinctly undersized and the function key row is absolutely tiny.

Nonetheless the typing experience is one that’s completely acceptable. Keys offer minimal feedback and are very light to press, but the keyboard deck feels like it’s fixed in place well and it doesn’t noticeably bend or rattle in any way while typing.

That above-average feeling of solidity is helped by a surprisingly large metal backplate underneath the keyboard, attached to the case by an enormous amount of plastic welds. Of course this does mean it’s close to impossible to replace just the keyboard if it wears out, but in this case it’s a pretty good compromise to get a distinctly solid feeling to the construction.

Thankfully, Acer have had the sense to use white print against black keys, so despite the annoying lack of a backlight, this keyboard is still very easy to see in most lighting conditions.

Hinges

Completely failing to pass the YouTuber standard one-hand opening test, the Aspire 3’s lid requires a very high 891 grams (8.73N) of force to lift from fully closed, which is enough to bend the entire display like a banana if it’s opened from a point in the centre.

Moving it from 90 degrees requires 338g (3.31), followed by a spike to 441g (4.32N) when the feet touch the desk and begin lifting the chassis.

When the display’s being held up by just the hinges, there is a noticeable amount of display wobble, but when it’s resting on it’s stupid little lid feet that wobble is reduced to almost nothing.

So we’ve found the positive to this otherwise silly design.

Hinge durability on this one is a little bit interesting.

The surface area of the hinge brackets in the lower case assembly is minimal, and there are disappointingly only three screws on each side. Nonetheless, the screw bosses are all braced by a stiff metal backplate, meaning they’ll be less likely to suffer fatigue from stress over time as they’re forced to share the load equally.

In fact if you look closely, you’ll see that almost all of the screw bosses in this area are braced by this metal plate. That is a very good design and it’s unusual to see this sort of attention to detail in such an otherwise cheaply manufactured machine.

Inside the display assembly behind the bezel, things are looking pretty good. In fact, Acer have gone above and beyond here, ticking off every single checkbox for good hinge design in a plastic laptop.

Four screws per side bolt the thick hinge bracket into thick screw bosses, which hook firmly into the bracket via a secondary metal brace, which itself then extends into full-height L-shaped-braces which are not only bolted into the lid above the display, helping to distribute loads vertically, but which then also run the full width of the display panel.

Putting this side-by-side with, for example, the same area in MSI’s GF63, the difference in engineering is night and day.

Will it still break? Well, probably. All plastic-framed laptops are likely to suffer from a hinge failure sooner or later, and bashing the lid against the desk all the time isn’t going to help this one.

Display

Throwing a bigger bucket of sewage over Acer’s victory parade, the LCD display that’s propped up by those nice hinges is another horrible TN panel from the dark ages.

Once again, there’s no contrast ratio to speak of, it doesn’t successfully cover any standard colour gamut, and peak brightness might have been impressive in 2006.

On the plus side, sort of, viewing angles on this display are significantly less unstable than on the panel fitted to HP’s 15S, making this one much easier to look at long-term.

Regardless, you should never buy a laptop with a TN panel in this day and age. IPS-type displays are now the bare-minimum acceptable standard, and this, then, is unaccceptable

Webcam & Microphones

Mounted above the appalling display is an appalling webcam & stereo microphones. You already know exactly what to expect from these so they don’t disappoint.

Internal Speakers & Audio Software/Settings

The sound system installed in the Aspire 3 is the usual basic two-channel, two-speaker setup, firing downwards at the front of the palmrest.

Speaker drivers themselves are the totally generic, cheap little oval units that are a plague everywhere from this sort of machine all the way up to high priced mid-range gaming laptops.

The enclosures are fairly small, and aren’t screwed or clipped in at all – instead they’re simply smooshed into place using strips of thin foam tape.

Speaker wires are clearly meant to be taped down using cutouts in the black backing tape, but the factory worker building this unit couldn’t be bothered.

Responsible for driving these is a tiny little Realtek ALC356 chip.

No datasheet is readily available for this one, so I was unable so get exact specifications, but subjectively audio from both the internal speakers & headphone output is extremely weak and tinny, and distinctly worse than most other laptops in this category.

Storage

The included storage is an M.2 2280-form factor, quarter-terabyte Micron MTFDKBA256TFK SSD.

This unit uses a Phison PS5019-E19 controller equipped with no DRAM cache, and a single chip of Micron TLC NAND flash.

This drive is small, slow and unimpressive.

No heatsink or thermal pad is provided for the SSD and there’s no slot for a second drive.

WiFi

Wireless connectivity is provided by a socketed Azurewave chip AW-XB552NF using a MediaTek chipset, which supports AX Wifi and Bluetooth 5.1.

Software – Power/Temp controls (Windows)

Just like HP, Acer seems to have jumped on the bandwagon of handing off power mode controls to the operating system, so the remaining functionality of the AcerSense software is minimal.

Really, there’s nothing more useful than battery charge limiting here, and even that is bizarrely gimped into an automatic system instead of a charge-stop preset.

On the subject of software, check out the size of the crapware loadout on this one. None of this benefits you and this is yet another laptop that would benefit from a drive wipe and clean OS install on day one.

Battery

The 41 watt-hour battery fitted to this unit is still reporting around 41 watt-hours of capacity after calibrating over a few charge cycles.

With the display set to its low maximum brightness and sitting idle on the Windows desktop, the Aspire 3 managed 9 hours and 53 minutes of runtime.

During my usual heavy Internet usage test which is wildly unscientific it quit after 6 hours and 55 minutes. Not bad, not great.

Charging from empty, the battery takes 39 minutes to hit 50%, 1 hour 15 minutes to hit 80%, and is full after 1 hour, 55 minutes.

When it finally wears out, the battery is extremely easy to replace – too easy, in fact. It’s held in by only two screws which allows it to flop about quite a bit inside the case. Truly next-level cost cutting.

Processor

The processor included here is the extremely tiny little AMD Ryzen 3 7320U. This microscopic chip is based on the ancient Zen 2 architecture from 2019, but is made on TSMC’s more recent 6-nanometer process and supports modern LPDDR5 memory.

The chip is fed by a two plus one phase power supply.

Memory

The RAM supplied with this unit is 8GB of LPDDR5-5500 in the form of a pair of 16 gigabit Micron chips soldered permanently to the motherboard in a dual-channel configuration.

Socketed memory is not supported by this CPU, so it’s stuck at 8GB forever, but at least this RAM is reasonably fast.

Graphics

The integrated GPU is AMD’s Radeon 610M, which is a tiny little 128-shader unit based on AMD’s excellent RDNA2 architecture.

With so few shaders and a fixed maximum clock speed of 1.9GHz, you shouldn’t expect much from this chip, but it does, technically, fully support DirectX 12 Ultimate, including ray tracing.

Cooling System

The system tasked with extracting heat from the CPU is a typical simple arrangement with a single heatpipe wicking heat away from the CPU to a heat spreader which uses one fan to exhaust heat out the back of the chassis toward the hinge.

That single fan is surprisingly large for this class of laptop, but since it only breathes from the vents on the bottom case, it’s quite easy to totally block the airflow.

Likewise the heat exchanger is fairly beefy, and on the other end of the heatpipe is an absolutely diminutive little copper coldplate.

This system has easily the smallest coldplate I’ve ever seen. Acer didn’t waste a cent on this one.

The contact surface is very well finished with only a few very shallow visible scuffs and no pitting.

VRM components are not contacted at all.

Without the fan, the cooler weighs a very low 26 grams. Less weight means less thermal mass, or less capacity for the cooler to absorb spikes in heat without ramping up the fan speed.

Stress Test - Cooling & Power Delivery

The Aspire 3 like all laptops in its class is probably not intended for heavy sustained workloads or gaming but that doesn’t mean we can’t be mildly abusive to it to see what happens.

Kicking things off, I’ve subjected it to a 30-minute stress test running Cinebench R23 on a loop while the laptop sits flat on a desk in its highest performance mode.

Since there’s no separate GPU, I haven’t run a GPU test at the same time, so 100% of the power budget will be aimed at the processor cores.

Look at that, an absolutely rock-solid and surprisingly high 25-watts to the CPU through the whole test. I should probably point out that you can ignore those big dips as those only happen when Cinebench is starting another run.

Core sensor readouts are kept secret on this machine so we’re using package temperature this time around, and it’s just as stable as the power delivery. The cooling system is aiming for 90 degrees and holds onto it like its life depends on it.

Given that we’re pumping a whole 25-watts into a tiny little chip, you won’t be surprised to learn that core frequencies are held nice and high, clinging onto the maximum boost of 4.1GHz the whole time.

After a long run at full load, VRM component temperatures are kept nice and low despite the lack of active cooling, with temperatures barely exceeding 60 degrees on the MOSFETs.

Likewise, external skin temperatures are kept well under control, barely deviating from ambient temperature for the most part with only small hotspots on both the top and bottom reaching over 35 degrees.

Performance

Despite being near the top of the charts here for power consumption, this chip completely fails to translate that power into something resembling high performance.

It’s near the top of this set of laptops for power consumption and frequently near the bottom for performance.

Under load this machine is pretty much throwing an electronic tantrum and forcefully ejecting all of the power efficiency out of its cot onto the floor, where it shatters into a million tiny pieces.

Naughty.

General Use

Nonetheless, it’s not bad to use for general tasks, and it’s even capable of playing back the FL Studio demo track without a single pause or stutter.

That’s close to all you can expect at this price point, but if you don’t load it up too heavily, performance is completely acceptable.

Gaming

As for gaming performance, well, despite the modern GPU architecture there’s only so much you can do with 128 shader cores.

In a modern context, that’s close to nothing, and scores in 3DMark’s Fire Strike and Time Spy benchmarks are almost impressively low, at somewhere around half what the already-slow Radeon Vega 7 scores in the same tests.

You aren’t going to be playing any modern games on this one.

On the flip side, in a game from 9 years ago – yes, Dying Light has accidentally become my default potato gaming benchmark – it’s almost surprisingly good, banging out a pretty-much playable 30 to 40FPS, albeit on the lowest settings at 720p resolution.

That’s still bad, but I expected worse.

Conclusion

So what have we learned here?

Well, coming as a bit of a surprise, the Aspire 3 is not completely horrible.

Input devices are entirely usable, build quality is up to an acceptable standard, and durability looks to have been more than just an afterthought in the design of this machine.

I could almost imagine this being a tolerable laptop if not for the presence of that god-awful TN display which does its best to make you hate every second you spend on this thing.

In spite of that display, I’m awarding this one an official NuclearNotebook rating of Less Shit Than I Expected.

It could have been worse, but it wasn’t.