A515-56 vs A515-45 - help me choose!

AMacd
AMacd Member Posts: 6 New User
edited March 2022 in Aspire Laptops
Hi Folks, This is an offshoot of a pervious thread. Can anyone help me choose between these laptops? Other than the obvious price difference, they differ in CPU (i5 vs Ryzen 5) and WIFI (wifi 6 vs wifi 5). I prioritize screen, speaker quality, fan noise, keyboard, and battery, in roughly that order. 

My usage will be primarily video conferencing and web applications. 

A515-56-53J0

I5-1135g7, 12GB RAM, 512GB SSD, WIFI 6, $650 CAD (Canada Computers) 

A515-45-R5LN

Ryzen 5 5500U, 12GB RAM, 512GB SSD, WIFI 5, $770 CAD (Best Buy) 

Feedback welcome 🙂

Answers

  • JackE
    JackE ACE Posts: 44,869 Trailblazer
    You might be better informed by google searching the part nos. NX.A1FAA.007 & NX.A82AA.00E. If all the other things were just about equal between the two, I'd probably choose the Ryzen machine. But they aren't. So I'd hafta choose the Intel machine. :)



    Jack E/NJ

  • AMacd
    AMacd Member Posts: 6 New User
    Thanks Jack!
  • padgett
    padgett ACE Posts: 4,532 Pathfinder
    Do you have a Wifi 6 router ? If no, max nix.
  • AMacd
    AMacd Member Posts: 6 New User
    padgett said:
    Do you have a Wifi 6 router ? If no, max nix.
    Yes, we have WIFI 6 router
  • StevenGen
    StevenGen ACE Posts: 12,065 Trailblazer
    edited March 2022
    AMacd said:
    Hi Folks, This is an offshoot of a pervious thread. Can anyone help me choose between these laptops? Other than the obvious price difference, they differ in CPU (i5 vs Ryzen 5) and WIFI (wifi 6 vs wifi 5). I prioritize screen, speaker quality, fan noise, keyboard, and battery, in roughly that order. 

    My usage will be primarily video conferencing and web applications. 

    A515-56-53J0

    I5-1135g7, 12GB RAM, 512GB SSD, WIFI 6, $650 CAD (Canada Computers) 

    A515-45-R5LN

    Ryzen 5 5500U, 12GB RAM, 512GB SSD, WIFI 5, $770 CAD (Best Buy) 

    Feedback welcome 🙂
    AMacd for what you will be using your laptop I suggest the A515-45-R5LN and its also a cheaper laptop, I've got the AN515-56 Intel Core i7-11370H, 512GB WD NS550 M.2 NVMe drive and the GeForce GTX 1650 4GB Graphics, I've replaced the WD NS550 512GB OEM M.2 NVMe drive to the WD NS850 1TB NVMe M.2, upgraded to 32GB RAM (2x 16GB DDR4-3200MHz) and also added a 2TB slave Seagate BarraCuda drive as a slave and I've been using this laptop for about 9 weeks now, I've also updated it to Win-11 from Win-10 but this laptop needs allot of sorting out and needs an experience user as its got some very niggly problems, which are not impossible to fix, so its just a warning :D  its up to you as the AN515-56 is great laptop and better spec than the A515-45-R5LN as the problems I've encountered so far are as follows and they are very annoying but fixable:

    No 1. If you intend using a USB hub or any old USB hardware this laptops is very sensitive to USB incompatibilities and old software (btw all the hardware that I'm mentioning worked perfectly with a 10 year old Aspire V3-571G running Win-10 Pro for years perfectly and without any hassles) as whenever I pugged in an old 10 years old USB stand alone Canon scanner this laptop would turn off prematurely and this also happened with a 3 years old Zalamn NS2000 Notebook Cooler that also has a 3x USB hub that kept shortening the USB port out and turning off the laptop but, once I disconnected all these components the laptop works perfectly as frustratingly as all this is as it took me a while to sort this out.

    No 2. This laptops Intel Killer 6 AX1650i 160MHz Wi-Fi/BT card with its new Intel Wi-Fi/BT driver v22.110.2.1 (that installs OEM with Win-11) will not pair with any of my JBL headphones to Bluetooth but its fine with the Wi-Fi as that works perfectly. As I've discovered after allot of frustrations and testing and though, as the old Acer driver worked perfectly in Win-10 which was the Intel Killer v22.40.0.2 driver so I looked at both drivers and the new driver in its registry at Current Version its got a setting of 6.3 instead of 6.2 that the other driver has that works, so I changed that setting in the registry (which when I did, it worked perfectly) but, I don't know if this tweak will work or is the same with other headphones but with my JBL's it worked.

    So all in all the above is what I've found out problematic with the Acer Nitro 5 AN515-56 otherwise it works perfectly and its a great laptop to use, also the GTX-1650 GPU is great for gaming but could have been much better with the RTX3060 or 3080 NVIDIA cards. Hope this helps you out.


  • AnhEZ28
    AnhEZ28 ACE, Member Posts: 4,277 Pathfinder
    @AMacd both should have Wifi 6 card and AMD performs better so I would choose the A515-45 model in my opinion.
    Please remember to include @AnhEZ28 when you want to reply back to my comment so that I can check your response.
    Thank you and have a nice day!
  • batmalin
    batmalin Member Posts: 4,231 Guru
    And the iGPU is way better than the intel one, so I would choose AMD as well.
    Please click "Yes" if I have answered your question.
    Userbench: https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/31177158