Acer Aspire Go review: Very cheap, reasonably cheerful

The new Acer Aspire Go 15 is the first laptop released in the UK to run on Qualcomm's new Snapdragon C chip. We've used the word 'new' twice in that last sentence, and in both cases it's doing a fair bit of heavy lifting.

First, the Aspire Go 15 has been around for a while, running on a selection of low-power processors like the Intel Core 5 120U and AMD Ryzen 7 5825U; second, the Snapdragon C is, to all intents and purposes, a rebadged Dragonwing QCS6490, a processor that's been knocking about since 2021.

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The Snapdragon C is a 7W TDP chip that features 8 cores, but they are the standard ARM-pattern Kryo cores rather than the custom Oryon cores found in the X1 and X2 processors. Graphics are handled by an Adreno 643 GPU, and there's a 12 TOPS Hexagon NPU in the mix.

Given that information about the chipset, and the fact that this is a laptop with a £449 price tag, which makes it the cheapest model in the budget Aspire Go range by some margin, it should be clear that we are here looking at the very entry level of the laptop market. Ladies and gentlemen, please limit your expectations.

Acer Aspire Go 15: Design

For a 15.6in laptop, the Aspire Go 15 is relatively light and compact, weighing 1.21kg and measuring 356 x 235 x 20mm. That makes it easy to slip into a backpack and carry around for the day, even with the small bundled 65W USB-C charger. The body is made entirely from plastic, but it feels reasonably solid and looks rather more expensive than it actually is. In the absence of any metal, the lid is rather bendy, though not excessively so. The silver paint finish does an excellent job of not showing fingerprints.

Wide screen bezels usually give the game away with budget laptops, but the Aspire Go does well here with plastic strips just 6mm wide at the sides, 10mm deep at the top and 15mm at the bottom. On the left side of the Go 15, you'll find two 5Gbps USB-C ports and an HDMI 1.4 video output. On the right is a single 5Gbps USB-A port and a 3.5mm audio jack.

Traditionally, Acer's Aspire Go machines use a barrel DC-in jack, but this new model can be charged via either of the Type-C ports, both of which also support DisplayPort video output.

Remove the plastic base plate and the first thing that strikes is the vast amount of space: the entire upper left quadrant is unoccupied save for a single small fan. Next to the Serengeti-esque void is the motherboard, while below sits a 52Wh battery that's easy enough to remove. Everything of interest is fixed in place, so there's no opportunity to add or change the RAM or storage or swap the WLAN card.

The Qualcomm C6700 WLAN card supports 6 GHz Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.4, which is absolutely the most you can expect at this sort of price.

Acer Aspire Go 15: Keyboard, touchpad, and webcam.

The keyboard benefits from an expansive layout with a handy numeric keypad and full-sized left/right arrow keys. The keyboard deck could be rather more solid; there's quite a bit of sag when you press down hard in the middle, but the keys have a positive action, albeit over a somewhat short travel. The keyboard lacks anything in the way of a backlight, but given the MacBook Neo is in the same boat, we can't mark the Acer down on this score.

The 125 x 80mm plastic touchpad beneath it is not too bad either: It's smooth and responsive with a well-damped and quiet click action. The webcam may be a 1080p rather than 720p unit, but it lacks support for Windows Hello facial recognition, and the images it produces, while bright, are also colorless and a little hazy. At least Acer has seen fit to install a manual privacy slider.

Acer Aspire Go 15: Display

We were happy to discover that the 60Hz 1,920 x 1,080 display is indeed an IPS panel rather than some bargain-basement TN affair with all the visual refinement of an Etch A Sketch. The viewing angles are wide, and the anti-reflection matte finish does a very good job keeping reflections in check.

In the debit column, the maximum brightness is a somewhat Stygian 268cd/m2 while color gamut coverage is meagre to say the least, with volumes of just 55.2% of sRGB and 39.1% of DCI-P3. With so little color, measuring the accuracy was a waste of time, but we did it anyway. The Delta E variance against the sRGB profile came back at a woeful 6.8.

Ignoring the fact that Lenovo can sell its Chromebook 14 Plus with an OLED screen for the same price, we expected little more on the display front, and in the cold light of day the Acer's display is entirely suitable for basic PC duties. Watching some shows on Netflix wasn't as dreary an experience as the colourimeter numbers suggested it would be.

Acer Aspire Go 15: Specs and performance

The 'new' Snapdragon C processor contains one high-performance core running at 3 GHz, three more performance cores running at 2.4 GHz, and four low-power cores running at 1.9 GHz. There's also 8GB of single-channel RAM.

If you're expecting performance to match the new £700-£800 budget laptops that are arriving on the market pell-mell at the moment, you'll be disappointed. There's a good reason for that £250-plus price difference.

The gulf in performance between the Snapdragon C-powered Aspire Go 15 and the likes of the Wildcat Lake-powered Acer Swift 14 Air, the A18 Pro-powered MacBook Neo, and the Snapdragon X1 Asus Zenbook 14 is considerable.

Starting with the results of our trusty old Hanbrake-based 4K multi-media benchmark, the Aspire Go 15 scored a lowly 38 points compared to the Swift Air's 167, the MacBook Neo's 120 and the Zenbook 14's 190. That's a gap so large you could fill it with water and reenact the Battle of Trafalgar.

Looking at the Geekbench 6 multi-core CPU benchmark results, the Aspire Go's score of 3,213 isn't great, less than half the 7,992 scored by the Swift Air, but it is better than the quad-core Intel N150 processors in the Beelink Mini S13 and Acemagic V1, which scored 3,023 and 2,750, respectively.

For reference, other CPU benchmark scores include a Geekbench 6 single-core result of 1,181 and Cinebench R24 scores of 212 multi-core and 57 single-core.

Overall performance was indeed similar to the Intel N150-based Beelink Mini PC, which scored 50 points in our 4K multimedia benchmark; in other words, fine for the most basic of web-based SaaS duties and media consumption but little beyond.

Drilling down into the Aspire's performance, it's clear that what really lets the side down isn't so much the CPU's performance as it is the GPU's capability, or lack thereof.

The Geekbench 6 benchmark ran so slowly that after 90 minutes we gave up on it, but the 3DMark Night Raid test returned a score of 4,980. Compare that to 18,140 from the Swift Air's Intel Graphics iGPU.

When we undertook some basic creative work on the Aspire Go 15 using Gimp and HandBrake, rendering proved to be very slow, it did at least run all the jobs we tried without any hiccups or crashes.

The 12 TOPS Hexagon NPU is of little value in the Windows scheme of things: the only part of the Copilot+ panoply that's supported is Live Captions. Everything else, including webcam Studio Effects, Generative Fill in Paint, and Recall, is missing.

Storage comes in the form of a 128GB UFS 3.1 card made by Biwin. Average sequential read and write speeds came back at 1,678MB/s and 1,295MB/s respectively, which is not at all bad and certainly faster than the rest of the chipset can make any real use of.

It would have been nice if Acer had started the storage capacity at 256GB. With just half that, users will constantly be having to housekeep Windows to remove any unnecessary bloat just to keep a usable amount of free storage space.

While Windows 11 runs perfectly well on Snapdragon C, we couldn't help but think that a lightweight Linux distro like Manjaro would be more suited to such a low-power platform. Sadly, we weren't able to boot the Aspire Go from a USB stick, no matter what we tried.

Qualcomm boasts that the QCS6490 offers "Long-term support for Android OS upgrades, Linux, Ubuntu..." so assuming you can get past the boot issues we experienced, Linux should run.

Qualcomm's media pack makes much fuss about the efficiency of the Snapdragon C platform, and here it does indeed do well. In our standard video rundown test, the Aspire Go ran for 18 hours and 2 minutes.

That's a thoroughly good showing for a super-budget laptop and more than double what you can expect from any of the Intel- or AMD-driven Aspire Go 15 laptops.

An obvious benefit of having a 7W CPU is that heat generation is simply not a problem. Even the tiny fan barely has to do any work to keep things cool. In the vast majority of user scenarios, the Aspire Go 15 may as well be passively cooled.

Acer Aspire Go 15: Is it worth it?

It's hard to get overly excited about the Aspire Go 15, given its utilitarian ambitions. After all, for £450, all you can reasonably expect is a laptop that can handle the most basic computer tasks. And while the Aspire Go 15 can absolutely do that, it can't do much more.

If we temper our expectations, the Aspire Go 15 shines more brightly. The IPS display is arguably the weakest component, but it's perfectly usable and suffers from none of the problems that bedevil cheap TFT panels, while the sound system is surprisingly competent.

It also bears remembering that even such basic functionality as charging over USB-C, 6GHz Wi-Fi and a decent battery runtime are by no means given on super-budget laptops in this sort of price bracket.

Performance isn't desperately awful either, despite the less-than-impressive benchmark scores. If all you want a laptop for is basic productivity, web browsing and media consumption, the Aspire Go 15 won't give you any reasons to regret parting with £450.

Acer Aspire Go 15: Specs