Four stars, great performance budget laptop. The i5 5200U is speedy enough, 8GB is enough for pretty much any thing that doesn’t involve a lot of virtual machines, and is adequate even for that. The 1TB hard drive is slow compared to an SSD, but a 1TB SSD goes for $400+ all by itself, so that’s understandable.

The screen is good, not great – it suffers from the expected "head in the right spot or colors wash out" issue, but that’s to be expected at this price point. It’s a bit matte, so it’s not as glossy "reflection happy" as many, but pointing a desk lamp at it will obviously result in glare. IT’s not terrible and again, for a FULL HD 1920 resolution screen, it’s still a good deal. The silly Acer "blue light reduction" (turns color temperature down) is actually not bad. I turned it on before uninstalling the quick access app.

As listed, no optical drive, nor touchscreen on this model (nor does it claim to be) so factor that in if you want one of the other Acer’s instead. If you are, well, old, get the 1360 resolution one instead and save a Ben Franklin, or try the opposite of "pinch to zoom" and it scales the icon sizes up on the touchpad. Speaking of which…

The touchpad doesn’t feel super solid, but it’s actually a giant (5") clickable button as well as a lightly tappable surface, which is not something I’m used to, so that’s to be expected. The keyboard itself seems pretty good and, like the touchpad is mac-like/chiclet style. A 2-3 mm travel or so, so just enough for most people. The function keys are NOT obnoxiously set to be vendor buttons by default, which is nice – so you’ve got your usual soft key functions when you hit fn-F(X).

The "Ah Zeus" sounding brand has a similar machine with a couple of steps up in gear, but even with the doubled 950gpu on it, the diminishing returns for the extra cash prevented me from getting that – partially because that does NOT have a standard ethernet port like this one does. To be fair, the Zeus does have a dedicated ethernet port, but there’s a latch/dongle for it that will be yet another headache when I’m working at 3am somewhere, so I’ll skip that straw for my camel’s back. Real gaming is done on a desktop card anyway, so I have that covered.

Cosmetic looks are nice. The top is very/finely texture so no worries about fingerprints. The laptop is very sleek overall, especially considering the geforce 940m. HD is single main partition, with a 15GB slice at the end for a recovery partition, and the usual OS slices. No obnoxiously bright LED either, just tiny/subtle ones on the front edge under your left palm.

Bloatware: Not as bad as I expected. They have the "WT" crapware game thing, Drop box Spotify and a few other things that, really, anyone who wants can install themselves, and the "Mac Cafe" AV, ebay and a few others (Office trial), but half the bloatware was just Acer’s AB "Acer Bring your own cloud" app stuff. I want nothing to do with that stuff – I’ll use rsync/git for that – but some people may actually appreciate it. Clearing it all off took about an hour.

It needs just under a gig of windows updates, despite having had the Acer apps installed on 5/25, so Windows update is NOT being run before the machine ships (not that anyone does).

MINUS a star because they make it difficult to upgrade the memory/hard drive. I knew that going in but its still worth keeping in mind if you haven’t researched it and though it would be 4 screws and two access panels and done. Not an issue for most people, but if you plan on tossing in a 1TB SSD and using the HD as a backup or whatever, keep that in mind.

If you don’t want the higher GPU (game) performance, and don’t use heavy Pshop/Premiere acceleration features, then the intel only one should be available for a nice step down in price. Make sure to get the full HD one since there’s also a 1360 res model.

Packaging was fine. Good packing by acer, then some airpacks in a bigger box from amazon.

Temperature – modest heat running Windows updates under the right palm rest, maybe 100/110F and inaudible fan, if it even spun up, I didn’t notice it while typing this. I’ll toss Steam on there and exercise the GPU later, but it should be reasonable in line with the hardware. I’ll edit if it seems amazingly cool or obnoxiously hot. In general, if you are using a fast machine to play games, make sure to have a cooling pad under it. This one won’t need a fan, but a bit of mesh for convective airflow or a slab of aluminum goes a long way to keeping gear running longer.

I won’t go into the benchmarking stuff since that’s the same pretty much no matter who brands the Intel/Nvidia Chips. Again, I’ll run some GPU heavy stuff and report back (aka whine) if it seems bad, but it’s a Geforce 940m. It’s not going to be great vs my 300 watt desktop card, but it should be capable enough if you manage your expectations. Compared to an Intel Integrated HD4000/5500 though, this is going to curb stomp it.

However, there are some cons:

The screen is not an IPS display, which means that the viewing angles wont be as great.
The battery is not easily accessible/swappable.
The whole display assembly of the laptop is a little bit flimsy, except for the hinges. So be careful not to put anything on top of the laptop when its closed because it does flex a bit.

Keep in mind that these cons are trivial. If Acer had went with an IPS display, Integrated a removable battery, and used more robust materials in the display assembly, they wouldn’t have been able to sell this product at this price-point anyway.

there are videos on YouTube on how to do this.I upgraded the RAM to 2x4GB 9CAS GSkill Ripsaw Series & ADATA SP 900 128GB SSD

got the windows 10 upgrade and this thing is very much alive a capable as a Gaming Laptop!

I wasn’t aware that you can use to different video cards to save battery power. Spent the entire day figuring this out, with thanks to Tyler over at Computer Upgrade King Support. Fast response via email from them.