Acer Spin 5 Review 2021
Acer Spin 2-in-1 series was outperformed by the Hp Spectre 2-in-1s and Lenovo Yoga series until the launch of the Acer Spin 5 in mid-2020, this laptop literally turned the tide and was marked as the bestseller on many e-commerce stores.
Beating the champions of the 2-in-1 laptop lineup, Acer Spin 5 became the king providing true value for money to people.
Is this laptop worth buying in 2021? Find out all of your answers in our detailed review below.
Why Trust Us:
All of our reviews are based on real-time testing and market research. We only recommend products that are worth buying for the prices.
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Acer Spin 5 SP513-54n Review Hours Tested = 19 hours | Market Researched = 5 hours  |
Let's have a look at the spec sheet, Spin 5 comes with two variants the Intel i5 10th Gen and the Intel i7 10th Gen.
We are reviewing the one which has 13.5 inches 2k Touch two-in-one display, 10th Gen Intel i7 Processor with Intel Iris Plus Graphics.
16GB of LPDDR4x RAM, 512GB NVMe SSD, and a rechargeable active stylus.
External Review
UNBOXING:
Spin 5 comes inside a typical Acer cardboard box, The box is beautiful with the Acer logo on the front.
Inside, on the right section, we have got a 65Watt power brick, on the left section there is our friend sitting comfortably within a plastic sheet.
At last, we have got some standard user manuals (Acer thinks we don't know what a 2-in-1 laptop is, lol).
DESIGN AND BUILD QUALITY:
This laptop is more like a digital A4-sized paper actually, it is thinner and more lightweight than the prior Spin models.
The build quality is sturdy and compact, the classy metallic finish design looks and feels beautiful, however, sometimes it does feel like the design is plastic.
The weight is around 2.65 lbs or 1.2 kilos which makes this notebook extremely easy to carry around.
The hinges are pretty accurate and silent, the laptop can be easily turned into tent mode or tablet mode without applying much effort.
There is a little build flex but it won't bother most of the consumers.
The overall build quality is great and feels premium.
KEYBOARD:
The keyboard of this notebook is backlit and provides decent feedback, the keys are a bit smaller but feel okay.
There is no Numpad due to the smaller size but the overall keyboard quality is good.
TOUCHPAD:
Spin 5 features a normal-sized touchpad with a fingerprint reader on the top left corner.
It is smooth and provides clicky feedback, however, its quality does not match the competition at the same price.
The touchpad does support windows precision, which means special gestures like pinch and zoom, three-finger scroll, etc are enabled.
PORTS:
The port selection on this laptop is pretty accurate, on the left we have got a charging port, two USB-C (Thunderbolt 3) ports, an HDMI port, a USB Type-A port, and at last, we have got an SD card reader.
WEBCAM:
The webcam on Spin 5 captures the same traditional 720p videos and images found on other laptops.
However, we do found that the webcam is a little bit wide which is great for zoom video chats.
Internal Review
DISPLAY:
Acer Spin 5 comes with a 13.5 inches 2k (2256x1504) display, the screen ratio is square (3:2) unlike other two-in-ones.
The display is quite bright, we measured the brightness to be about 420 nits max, this is great for office workers and students as this laptop's screen won't suffer even in a brightly lit environment.
The touchscreen is responsive and supports multi-touch. It is also quite ideal for photo editors and graphic designers.
The touch pen is decent, it charges automatically while staying in its place and works smoothly with the display of this notebook.
The screen shows bright, punchy, and true to life colors, the viewing area is great with thinner bezels than the last year's model.
Secondary Displays:
You can connect this laptop to a secondary display via HDMI port or Thunderbolt 3 ports, we would recommend you to use thunderbolt 3 ports for making a fascinating 4k/5k dual or triple screen setup with this laptop.
And there won't be any lag or stutter thanks to the thunderbolt compatibility of Spin 5.
RAM AND SSD:
The notebook features 16GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 512GB of NVMe SSD.
There isn't any upgrade option for RAM and SSD, but we think 16GB is enough, this is what most people want, right, a laptop that does the job.
For more storage, we would recommend you to connect an external hard drive via Thunderbolt 3 port. The read and write speed will be super fast (a 4GB movie in 15 seconds)
Buy Samsung T7 Portable SSD for Spin 5 here.
CPU AND GPU:
The laptop features an Intel Core i7 10th Gen processor paired with Intel Iris Plus integrated graphics.
The CPU combined with 16GB RAM makes this laptop quite powerful and ideal for multitasking and heavy loads.
The Integrated GPU is good for small games like Minecraft, Sims, etc, however, if you are planning to do heavy gaming we would recommend you to connect an External Graphics Enclosure (eGPU) setup on Acer Spin 5.
An external graphics enclosure will help you connect a powerful gaming graphics card to your laptop via Thunderbolt 3 port.
Recommended (eGPU) and (Graphics Card):
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PERFORMANCE:
Web Performance:
25 different web pages were opened to test the web surfing strength of Spin 5.
The i7 processor breezed through all of those tabs easily without any lag or performance stutter.
Gaming Performance:
This laptop is not gaming based, however, we were able to run GTA V, Fortnite, Far Cry 3, and CS: GO on low settings.
GTA V ran on the lowest settings giving an average playable fps of 50.
Fortnite was playable at 55 fps on low settings while on medium settings the fps lowered down to 25 to 30.
CS: GO is another CPU consuming game, on low settings we were able to play a smooth session of CS: GO at 60fps.
Far Cry 3 ran on medium settings smoothly, it felt great to see those lush green scenes on this laptop.
The overall performance of Acer Spin 5 is above average, you won't find it lagging under heavy loads of multitasking.
THERMALS AND FAN NOISE:
The thermals on this notebook are impressive, you won't find this laptop heating up under heavy loads, the cooling system is decent.
The fan noise is minimal which is awesome to see in a powerful laptop like this.
BATTERY:
The battery life of Acer Spin 5 is about 10 hours on basic usage like word processing, web browsing, and video playback.
however, if you turn the brightness to max, the battery life will be shorter, well this is the only downside of having a bright display, it drains more battery.
The laptop charges pretty fast with the USB Type-C thunderbolt ports, while the charging speed is slow on the standard charger.
COMPETITORS:
There are only two direct competitors of Acer Spin 5, the Lenovo Yoga c940 (14 inches) and the HP Spectre x360.
Both of the laptops share the same CPU as this laptop but were lagged behind by the performance of Spin 5.
Yoga c940 won in the bootup and read and write performance while Hp Spectre won on the battery life (13 hours and 20 minutes).
BOTTOM LINE:
The build quality is decent, the screen is bright and colorful with better viewing angles than the last year's model.
We were really impressed to see thunderbolt connectivity on this laptop, Acer has really hit the ball out of the park when selecting the ports of Spin 5.
It is really great to see such a lightweight laptop with incredible performance.
Keeping in mind its productivity and mobile performance we would surely recommend Acer Spin 5 SP513-54n-74v2 to our readers.
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