New Sort-Of Gaming Laptop!

Until very recently I was running this very modest setup

With this computer being the heart and brains of it.

Now, it wasn't a bad computer by any stretch of the imagination. Even if outdated, it could still handle quite a few good recent games with its i3 3220 and GTX 680, which beats the RX 560 by a good 51% according to UserBenchmark (using this as a point of reference as that is the card some of my friends have).

But I wanted something more portable, something that would allow me to use my computer bed and just generally allow for greater mobility. So I put my computer up for sale on Facebook, with an addendum: "I also accept trades for laptops".

And someone showed up with a laptop, quite a decent one.
When I saw where they lived I was a little discouraged as it's at least 45 to 50kms from here, but they were willing to do the trade anyway and to let me test the laptop out, and so we did it.

I think I got a good deal.

This is my new Acer Aspire 5 515-51G!

Just seeing Geforce Experience on a laptop is sort of exciting

As you can see, it's a got a sort of beefy CPU for something like this, barely losing out to the Ryzen 3 2200G but with the added benefit of being 8 threaded, which should really help on newer games or multithreaded workloads. This is my first CPU with more than 4 threads. It's still 4 physical cores, but I'm sure this'll help.
The GPU is an MX130, which isn't the best out there, being 50% worse than a GTX 650Ti, but it does have a few things which the 650Ti doesn't, such as newer drivers.
Overall, I think it's still worth losing a little graphical horsepower in exchange for a better CPU and portability, not to mention this bad boy came with a 450GB SSD, and that's not bad at all.

Don't worry, I'll clean the screen

Now, the screen isn't anything out of the ordinary but it gets the job done and far outperforms my older laptop, not to mention I'll be using this on my 32inch TV that sits on my desk a lot.
It's only 720p and the colours look a little too cold, but the viewing angles are great and it's serviceable enough to watch Youtube videos or some non-4K movies or any kind of anime.
Being 720p works as an advantage when it comes to gaming as I have to worry less about resolution, this being one of the reasons why the Steam Deck is so competent when compared to the current generation consoles... I can't wait for mine to be honest.

The port selection is fairly decent, with a USB 3 port, 2 USB 2.0 ports, a audio combo jack, HDMI out, full-sized SD card and a tiny collapsible ethernet port. This is also the first laptop I own that has a USB-C port, I honestly don't know what use I'll have for it, but it's great that it's there.

The camera, much like the screen, isn't much to write home about, but I guess for Discord calls with friends, it's more than good enough as I honestly don't care much about how well they see me as long as I don't look like a blob of pixels (something that used to happen years ago back when we didn't have fibre internet anyway).

The sound on this thing is pretty good, my last laptop was very low on volume, this one is pretty good on that end and doesn't sound off at all. Not something I'll be using for music, but it works really well for everything else.

Overall, this laptop was quite a surprise. I definitely need more storage for it as my Steam library is huge, or maybe I'll just stick to smaller titles. However either way, it'll be a very decent work companion. Nice job Acer.