Acer Aspire E14 (E5-471-59RT) Review

Acer Aspire E14 (E5-471-59RT) Review
Welcome to a laptop battery specialist of the Acer Laptop Battery
With its eye-catching raspberry-red paint job, the $500 Aspire E5-471-59RT stands out in a sea of drab black and gray budget laptops. You also get pretty beefy specs for the price, including a Core i5 processor and 500GB hard drive, though you're limited to 4GB of RAM out of the box. Overall, this Acer is an attractive value for those who don't need a touch screen.
The first thing you notice about the Acer Aspire E5-471-59RT is its raspberry-red paint job enhanced by a subtle silver pattern. While the shiny clear coat doesn't really resist fingerprints, they are much less noticeable on top of the metallic patterning. The display bezel and bottom of the unit are made of a matte black plastic, giving the whole system an attractive two-tone appearance.
At 13.6 x 9.8 x 1.2 inches, the Aspire E5-471-59RT is similar in size to other 14-inch with batetry suhc as Acer 916-3060 Battery, Acer SQU-405 Battery, Acer Aspire 3935 Battery, Acer Aspire 4220 Battery, Acer AL10A31 Battery, Acer Aspire One D260 Battery, Acer LC.BTP00.002 Battery, Acer Asprie 5580 Battery, Acer AL10D56 Battery, Acer Aspire 1430 Battery, Acer AS09D36 Battery, Acer AS09D56 Batterysystems such as the Dell Inspiron 14 5000 (13.5 x 9.7 x 0.9) and the ASUS VivoBook V451LA (13.7 x 9.5 x 1). Weighing 4.6 pounds, the Acer is a bit heavier than the 4.4-pound Dell Inspiron 14 5000, but lighter than the 4.8-pound ASUS VivoBook V451LA.
The layout of the Acer Aspire E5-471-59RT's keyboard felt right at home. Its key travel of 1.6mm (1 to 2mm is typical) combined with an actuation weight of 60g made typing a pleasure. After just a few minutes of using the keyboard, I nailed my normal 70 words per minute average.
For mouse control and scrolling, the Aspire E5-471-59RT features a 4.1 x 2.5-inch clickpad. The clickpad has a smooth matte surface and generally responded well to both mouse movements and gestures like pinch-to-zoom and two-finger scrolling.
Colors on the Aspire E5-471-59RT's 14-inch 1366 x 768 display aren't the greatest. I watched part of 2013's Art of the Steal and found colors to be muted and slightly washed out. While side-to-side viewing angles were generally fine, I found that moving it just 20 degrees up or down could completely blow out images or black them out.
My impressions were backed up by our lab tests, as the Acer could only display 55.3 percent of the sRGB spectrum, barely better than the Dell Inspiron 14 5000 (52 percent) but behind the ASUS VivoBook V451LA (63 percent) and the thin-and-light average of 77 percent.
The E5-471-59RT also didn't fare very well on color accuracy with a Delta-E rating of 10.4. (Closer to zero is better.) This score is slightly worse than the Dell Inspiron 14 5000 (9.8) and inferior to the ASUS VivoBook V451LA (0.7). The thin-and-light-average is 7.2.
At least the screen is decently bright. The panel registered 207 nits on our light meter, which is higher than the ASUS VivoBook V451LA (173 nits) and on a par with the Dell Inspiron 14 5000 (209 nits).
The Aspire E5-471-59RT features stereo speakers located on the two front bottom corners of the laptop. The laptop produces plenty of volume, but it comes somewhat at the expense of quality. When I listened to Cut Copy's "Hearts on Fire," highs had a metallic sound and the bass lacked oomph.
The E5-471-59RT produced 93 decibels of sound measured from 23 inches away. This is better than the Dell Inspiron 14 5000 (84 dB), ASUS VivoBook V451LA (74 dB) and the thin-and-light category average (82 dB).
On the Laptop Mag heat test (15 minutes of streaming video from Hulu), the top of the Acer Aspire E14 stayed relatively cool with the touchpad measuring just 80 degrees Fahrenheit. The space between the G and H keys was slightly cooler at 79.5 degrees. The bottom of the laptop reached 95.5 degrees F, which just barely exceeds our 95-degree comfort threshold.
Acer equips the E5-471-59RT with a 720p camera, which produces photos that are grainy and a little soft, but it's hard to expect too much from a budget laptop.
Ports are also pretty standard, with two USB 2.0 ports on the right side, and an SD Card reader up front. The left side holds the majority of ports and connections starting with a headset jack, lone USB 3.0 port, HDMI, Ethernet and VGA jacks.