Acer Aspire V5-572P Touch review

This gives the V5-572P Touch a big advantage over the VivoBook, but its 1.9GHz Intel Core i3-3227U processor isn’t that much faster when it comes to raw processing power. It’s still perfectly fast enough for word processing and surfing the internet, but with a score of 34 in our multimedia benchmarks, the laptop may struggle if you have lots of applications open simultaneously.

This isn’t too much of a problem if you’re only going to be using the laptop for simple office tasks, but the laptop’s integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000 chip isn’t cut out for playing 3D games. It only just passed our Dirt Showdown test with an average of 17.6fps on High quality at a 1,280×720 resolution, but we did see a more playable frame rate of 29.7fps when we set the quality to Low and disabled anti-aliasing. This is perfectly acceptable if you don’t mind playing games on the lowest detail settings, but you may be better off sticking with 2D titles for the smoothest frame rates.

The keyboard was great to work on. The keys were a little flat, but they still provided plenty of tactile feedback and were well-spaced alongside its numeric keypad. The large all-in-one touchpad was also one of the better touch pads we’ve seen on a laptop of this size, as its smooth surface made it easy to use multi-touch gestures and Windows 8 shortcuts. The clickable lower half was also precise and accurate when opening files on the desktop, as it didn’t make our cursor shoot up the page or drag files across the screen by accident.

The V5-572P Touch’s battery life was even more impressive. It lasted 7h 52m in our light use test with the screen set to half brightness, which is almost double what the Asus VivoBook X550CA managed under the same conditions. This is superb for an Ivy Bridge-based laptop, as we’d normally only expect to see this kind of battery life from a Haswell system, so you should be able to work almost all day on the V5-572P Touch on a single charge.

Our main concern is the price. At £550, the Acer Aspire V5-572P Touch is a good value touchscreen laptop, but the almost identical Asus VivoBook X550CA is a lot cheaper. The longer battery life and brighter screen may be worth the extra expense if you’re desperate for a touchscreen, but if all you want is a great value laptop to use at home, the non-touch Asus X552CL is a better buy. This touchscreen laptop has a great keyboard and superb battery life, but it’s a little expensive compared to the competition