**A Surprisingly Capable Laptop: Putting the Aspire 3 to the Test**

I've been testing the Acer Aspire 3 laptop, and I have to say, it's been a pleasant surprise. With its price tag of $199, I wasn't expecting much, but this machine has proven itself to be a capable and versatile device.

**Benchmarking Results**

First things first, let's take a look at some benchmarking results. I ran the 3DMark Ice Storm Extreme test, which is a popular benchmark for graphics cards. The laptop scored 23,033, with a graphics score of 21,743 and a physics score of 18,171. Not bad, but not spectacular either. However, when it comes to real-world usage, I've found that this laptop can handle everyday tasks with ease.

**Gaming Performance**

Now, let's talk about gaming performance. The Aspire 3 is not a gaming laptop by any means, but it can still handle some games at lower settings. I tested Left 4 Dead 2, CSGO (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive) in low settings at 720p, and Minecraft, which ran smoothly even on Java version or the Windows Store version. My kids also tested Roblox, which they played for a few days without any complaints.

**Emulation**

Another area where I was pleasantly surprised is with PSP emulation using PPSSPP. The laptop's Vulcan back-end handled Ridge Racer 3 at 60 FPS in 3x resolution, and even God of War: Chains of Olympus with some minor glitches on DirectX 11. However, it struggled with the Dolphin emulator for GameCube games, but most of the library should still be playable.

**Web Browsing, Video Streaming, and Image Editing**

In addition to its gaming performance, the Aspire 3 also handles web browsing, video streaming, and even light image editing surprisingly well. The laptop's free software, such as LibreOffice and GIMP, ran smoothly without any issues. The webcam is also decent, with a resolution of 720p.

**Real-World Usage**

Overall, I've been enjoying my time with the Aspire 3. It may not be the best laptop for gaming or heavy usage, but it's perfect for basic everyday tasks. If you're in the market for a new laptop, I would recommend this one, especially at its current sale price of $199. Just keep an eye out for deals and discounts, as they can happen frequently.

**Using Linux**

Another idea I had was to install Linux on the Aspire 3. I considered using Manjaro or Ubuntu, which both run well with the laptop's chipset. This would open up a whole new world of possibilities, including a custom-built distribution and more advanced hardware customization. If you're interested in exploring this option, let me know in the comments below.

**Conclusion**

The Acer Aspire 3 may not be the most powerful laptop on the market, but it has proven itself to be a capable and versatile device. With its low price tag and surprising performance capabilities, I would definitely recommend considering this laptop for basic everyday tasks or even as a budget-friendly option for gaming. Thanks for watching, and don't forget to hit that like button or subscribe to my channel for more content!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's going on guys the CTA Prime back here again today I'm gonna be taking a look at a very affordable laptop now I actually picked this up about a month and a half ago for 199 dollars from my local Best Buy these go on sale all the time right now on Amazon they're 228 but if you wait a couple days or maybe a week it will come down in price now this is the Lenovo IdeaPad s1 45 there's several different models but I have one of the lower ends here hence the price $1.99 and for a $200 entry-level laptop it's actually really really nice whether you need an extra laptop or you don't already own one I think this is a great option and this is something you should look at so aspects ago this is very entry-level but I expected it for a $200 price tag this is the Lenovo IdeaPad s1 45 it's powered by an Intel Pentium Gold 5405 u dual core processor with four threads at 2.3 gigahertz the GPU is the built-in Intel 610 UHD 4k bytes of ddr4 at 21 33 megahertz and unfortunately this only has a single slot inside of it it can be upgraded to 16 gigabytes of RAM but if they would have added an extra slot we could have got much better performance out of this built-in GPU unfortunately this is just what we get for the price in my opinion the only downside to this laptop is the included hard drive it's a 500 gigabyte 5400 rpm hard drive and it does slow things down a bit so what I did was remove the old mechanical drive and replaced it with a cheaper 240 gigabyte SSD I upgraded the speed and downgraded the storage and that's totally fine with me I only spent $25 on the SSD so in total I'm sitting at 225 dollars on this laptop and with the added speed from the SSD it does make it a whole different machine it's got a 15.6 inch 1366 by 768 screen it's four pounds and it measures 0.78 inches thin with a to sell 30 watt hour battery good up to about 6 hours of battery life with the screen at around 30% on the right-hand side of the unit we have a 3.5 millimeter microphone / headphone jack plus a full size SD card reader over on the left hand side we have our charger port status LED full-sized HDMI two USB 3.0 ports and one USB 2.0 port it does have dual stereo speakers 802 DUT 11 ABG and an AC dual band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2 built-in so in this video I really want to show you how this little thing performs so we're gonna be testing some video playback some web browsing some image editing we'll get into some PC gaming and even some emulation alright so let's go ahead and get right into it first things first this laptop does ship with Windows 10 in ass mode and this will only allow us to install Microsoft apps but we can go to the Microsoft Store and upgrade to Windows 10 home for free so now I'm running Windows 10 home 64-bit as you can see we have the Intel 5405 you at 2.3 gigahertz dual-core four threads four gigabytes of ddr4 memory and the built in Intel UHD 610 GPU first thing I did was run a few benchmarks so here's Geekbench for a single core 2575 multi-core 5054 i was actually expecting to get a little less in the multi-core being this is a low-end dual-core cpu but 5000 is pretty decent for the price I paid for this thing next up quick JavaScript browser benchmark and I'm using the edge browser 14,000 623 and this is something you can run on any of your PC's it runs right in the browser so you can see how it stacks up against the machine like this remember using a different browser will net different results I also ran a few 3dmark benchmarks ice storm extreme total score twenty thousand eight hundred and thirty three graphics score twenty one thousand seven hundred and forty four physics eighteen thousand 171 Cloud Gate 1.1 total score three thousand nine hundred and fifty-five now if we go down here you can see that it's only better than 15% of all other results on their website but like I mentioned and the price reflects this is definitely not a gaming laptop the list is some gaming so first up we have left 4 dead 2 now I completely understand that this is an older game it's something I still enjoy playing on Steam but this is a low-end laptop so I wanted to test some games I knew would run pretty well and as you see here at 720p we're getting a decent frame rate here csgo low settings 720p in an average of around 34 fps it's definitely not ideal but if you're playing with friends you could get by with something like this minecraft is another one that's gonna perform really well on this laptop whether using the Java version or the Windows Store version another one that my kids tested a few weeks ago was roblox and they were able to play it they used it for a few days they had their little editor going and everything like that they never had any complaints so this will do minecraft and roblox here's another steam game this is bully unfortunately in the last three games that I was doing some recording with I lost audio through my game capture so I didn't capture the audio and I really didn't want to go back through it but audio is working in these games this is bully scholarship edition next up we have the original version of Skyrim getting an average of around 40 to 240 FPS 720p low settings it's not bad for such a low-end chip and finally fortnight 720p low setting 60% resolution scale getting an average of around 30 fps it's definitely not ideal because you really can't see into the distance in my opinion it's not competitively playable on this unit but if you want to have fun and creative mode and things like that you could definitely get by moving over to my favorite part of these videos emulation this is the PSP emulator ppsspp running Ridge Racer 3x resolution 60fps really good PSP emulation in my opinion now I'm using the Vulcan back-end for this game but when we move over to God of War Chains of Olympus I did have to switch to DirectX 11 because there's some glitches with Vulcan but we're getting 60fps 3x resolution even with God of War Chains of Olympus so you really shouldn't have any trouble with PSP emulation on a setup like this but what about the dolphin emulator with GameCube games well to my surprise it actually works really well this is auto mode released on one of the harder games to emulate and is handling it fine I also tested Rogue Squadron 2 and we're getting an average of about 40 FPS on any of the back ends at the lowest resolution so it's not going to be able to handle that game but most of the GameCube library should be fully playable on a system like this and real quick just because I'm here retreat the Dreamcast emulator is going to perform excellent on this machine so overall I've actually been enjoying this little laptop it's able to play older games really well a lot of my favorite emulators web browsing is fast video streaming and even some light image editing using free software like is possible on a machine like this it's great for basic everyday tasks and if you're in the market for a new laptop not a used laptop I could recommend this I personally don't like purchasing use laptops on ebay because when the manufacturer or the seller on eBay or Amazon says refurbish the screen and the keyboards probably been wiped down the hard drives either been wiped or replaced and you really never know where that laptop has been and how much use it's gone through so that's pretty much it for this video guys I really appreciate you watching I will leave links in the description on where you can pick one of these up definitely keep an eye out for sales because they happen all the time like I mentioned I got this for $199 and I think it's well worth the $200 price tag another thing you could actually do with this is just install Linux on it I was actually thinking about doing that in the future I'd put Manjaro or even Ubuntu on here and it would run pretty well with the chipset like this if you have any questions or you want to see anything else running on this laptop just let me know in the comments below it also be really cool if you could hit that like button or maybe subscribe to the channel but like always thanks for watching youwhat's going on guys the CTA Prime back here again today I'm gonna be taking a look at a very affordable laptop now I actually picked this up about a month and a half ago for 199 dollars from my local Best Buy these go on sale all the time right now on Amazon they're 228 but if you wait a couple days or maybe a week it will come down in price now this is the Lenovo IdeaPad s1 45 there's several different models but I have one of the lower ends here hence the price $1.99 and for a $200 entry-level laptop it's actually really really nice whether you need an extra laptop or you don't already own one I think this is a great option and this is something you should look at so aspects ago this is very entry-level but I expected it for a $200 price tag this is the Lenovo IdeaPad s1 45 it's powered by an Intel Pentium Gold 5405 u dual core processor with four threads at 2.3 gigahertz the GPU is the built-in Intel 610 UHD 4k bytes of ddr4 at 21 33 megahertz and unfortunately this only has a single slot inside of it it can be upgraded to 16 gigabytes of RAM but if they would have added an extra slot we could have got much better performance out of this built-in GPU unfortunately this is just what we get for the price in my opinion the only downside to this laptop is the included hard drive it's a 500 gigabyte 5400 rpm hard drive and it does slow things down a bit so what I did was remove the old mechanical drive and replaced it with a cheaper 240 gigabyte SSD I upgraded the speed and downgraded the storage and that's totally fine with me I only spent $25 on the SSD so in total I'm sitting at 225 dollars on this laptop and with the added speed from the SSD it does make it a whole different machine it's got a 15.6 inch 1366 by 768 screen it's four pounds and it measures 0.78 inches thin with a to sell 30 watt hour battery good up to about 6 hours of battery life with the screen at around 30% on the right-hand side of the unit we have a 3.5 millimeter microphone / headphone jack plus a full size SD card reader over on the left hand side we have our charger port status LED full-sized HDMI two USB 3.0 ports and one USB 2.0 port it does have dual stereo speakers 802 DUT 11 ABG and an AC dual band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2 built-in so in this video I really want to show you how this little thing performs so we're gonna be testing some video playback some web browsing some image editing we'll get into some PC gaming and even some emulation alright so let's go ahead and get right into it first things first this laptop does ship with Windows 10 in ass mode and this will only allow us to install Microsoft apps but we can go to the Microsoft Store and upgrade to Windows 10 home for free so now I'm running Windows 10 home 64-bit as you can see we have the Intel 5405 you at 2.3 gigahertz dual-core four threads four gigabytes of ddr4 memory and the built in Intel UHD 610 GPU first thing I did was run a few benchmarks so here's Geekbench for a single core 2575 multi-core 5054 i was actually expecting to get a little less in the multi-core being this is a low-end dual-core cpu but 5000 is pretty decent for the price I paid for this thing next up quick JavaScript browser benchmark and I'm using the edge browser 14,000 623 and this is something you can run on any of your PC's it runs right in the browser so you can see how it stacks up against the machine like this remember using a different browser will net different results I also ran a few 3dmark benchmarks ice storm extreme total score twenty thousand eight hundred and thirty three graphics score twenty one thousand seven hundred and forty four physics eighteen thousand 171 Cloud Gate 1.1 total score three thousand nine hundred and fifty-five now if we go down here you can see that it's only better than 15% of all other results on their website but like I mentioned and the price reflects this is definitely not a gaming laptop the list is some gaming so first up we have left 4 dead 2 now I completely understand that this is an older game it's something I still enjoy playing on Steam but this is a low-end laptop so I wanted to test some games I knew would run pretty well and as you see here at 720p we're getting a decent frame rate here csgo low settings 720p in an average of around 34 fps it's definitely not ideal but if you're playing with friends you could get by with something like this minecraft is another one that's gonna perform really well on this laptop whether using the Java version or the Windows Store version another one that my kids tested a few weeks ago was roblox and they were able to play it they used it for a few days they had their little editor going and everything like that they never had any complaints so this will do minecraft and roblox here's another steam game this is bully unfortunately in the last three games that I was doing some recording with I lost audio through my game capture so I didn't capture the audio and I really didn't want to go back through it but audio is working in these games this is bully scholarship edition next up we have the original version of Skyrim getting an average of around 40 to 240 FPS 720p low settings it's not bad for such a low-end chip and finally fortnight 720p low setting 60% resolution scale getting an average of around 30 fps it's definitely not ideal because you really can't see into the distance in my opinion it's not competitively playable on this unit but if you want to have fun and creative mode and things like that you could definitely get by moving over to my favorite part of these videos emulation this is the PSP emulator ppsspp running Ridge Racer 3x resolution 60fps really good PSP emulation in my opinion now I'm using the Vulcan back-end for this game but when we move over to God of War Chains of Olympus I did have to switch to DirectX 11 because there's some glitches with Vulcan but we're getting 60fps 3x resolution even with God of War Chains of Olympus so you really shouldn't have any trouble with PSP emulation on a setup like this but what about the dolphin emulator with GameCube games well to my surprise it actually works really well this is auto mode released on one of the harder games to emulate and is handling it fine I also tested Rogue Squadron 2 and we're getting an average of about 40 FPS on any of the back ends at the lowest resolution so it's not going to be able to handle that game but most of the GameCube library should be fully playable on a system like this and real quick just because I'm here retreat the Dreamcast emulator is going to perform excellent on this machine so overall I've actually been enjoying this little laptop it's able to play older games really well a lot of my favorite emulators web browsing is fast video streaming and even some light image editing using free software like is possible on a machine like this it's great for basic everyday tasks and if you're in the market for a new laptop not a used laptop I could recommend this I personally don't like purchasing use laptops on ebay because when the manufacturer or the seller on eBay or Amazon says refurbish the screen and the keyboards probably been wiped down the hard drives either been wiped or replaced and you really never know where that laptop has been and how much use it's gone through so that's pretty much it for this video guys I really appreciate you watching I will leave links in the description on where you can pick one of these up definitely keep an eye out for sales because they happen all the time like I mentioned I got this for $199 and I think it's well worth the $200 price tag another thing you could actually do with this is just install Linux on it I was actually thinking about doing that in the future I'd put Manjaro or even Ubuntu on here and it would run pretty well with the chipset like this if you have any questions or you want to see anything else running on this laptop just let me know in the comments below it also be really cool if you could hit that like button or maybe subscribe to the channel but like always thanks for watching you\n"