Great value laptop for a super price! This Acer for 12 thousand has an above-average processor and an aluminum body

Black Friday brings a discount on the Acer Aspire 15 laptop, which on Alza.cz dropped from 14,990 CZK in July to 11,990 CZK. This is a 20% drop, which is solid, but certainly not dramatic. The main question is: do you get a fair laptop for twelve thousand, or just an average one with a better price?

What do you get for 11,990 CZK?

The Acer Aspire 15 (A15-61M-R59C) is a 15.6″ laptop with an aluminum lid and a thickness of 17.9 mm. This is decent build quality for this price range – most competitors in this segment rely on plastic. Its weight of 1.62 kg places it among lighter 15-inch models, which you’ll appreciate when carrying it.

The display is a Full HD IPS panel with 300 nits brightness. This is standard, nothing extraordinary – it will be weaker for outdoor use, but it’s usable indoors. The 45% NTSC color coverage indicates that this is not a laptop for professional photo or video editing. However, it’s sufficient for office work, studying, and general use.

Important: the laptop comes without an operating system. You have to install it yourself, which saves a few hundred, but requires basic technical knowledge.

Processor for work and multitasking

At the heart of the laptop is the AMD Ryzen 5 8640HS processor – a six-core chip with a maximum frequency of 4.9 GHz. It belongs to the Zen 4 series and offers solid performance for common tasks: office applications, a browser with dozens of tabs, video conferences, document editing, and can also handle light video editing or photo adjustments.

The combination with 16 GB DDR5 RAM is already standard today, but it’s still sufficient for multitasking. The drive has a capacity of 512 GB and is an SSD M.2 PCIe NVMe type.

The processor has an integrated AMD Ryzen AI accelerator with 16 TOPs of performance. That sounds interesting, but in practice? Unless you’re a developer or use specific AI applications, this feature won’t bring you anything extra. It’s more of a marketing point than a real advantage for the average user for now.

Graphics: reality vs. expectations

The laptop has integrated AMD Radeon 760M graphics, which is an RDNA 3 architecture with 512 shader units.

Let’s look at reality: In the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark, the Radeon 760M achieves around 2300 points. This performance is comparable to the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, a card almost 10 years old. Modern AAA games either won’t run at all, or only on minimal details with 15-20 fps. Cyberpunk 2077? 35 fps on low, 25 fps on high. Stalker 2? 15 fps on low. Black Myth Wukong? 20 fps on low. That’s not playable.

What the Radeon 760M can handle: older or less demanding titles like Dota 2, Counter-Strike 2, GTA V (on high), The Witcher 3 (on medium). If you play esports titles or older games, it will work. But if you expect to play the latest AAA titles with decent graphics, you will be disappointed.

Who this laptop makes sense for

The Acer Aspire 15 for 11,990 CZK is a laptop for:

• Students – sufficient performance for writing, presentations, online learning
• Office work – Office, browser, video conferences without problems
• Lighter gaming – older games or esports titles, not modern AAA
• Travelers – 1.62 kg is fine, battery lasts 7-10 hours
• People who want to save money – without OS, you’ll reduce the price by a few hundred more

Price vs. performance ratio

For 11,990 CZK, you get a laptop with an aluminum lid, a decent processor, 16 GB RAM, and a lightweight design. That’s a fair deal. It’s not a miracle, but for this price, it’s hard to find anything significantly better with similar specifications.

What do you think of this discount?