forum thread Posted by TealSparrow520 • Last Wednesday
Jun 18, 2025 4:30 PM
Item 1 of 3
Item 1 of 3
forum thread Posted by TealSparrow520 • Last Wednesday
Jun 18, 2025 4:30 PM
Acer Aspire 3 15.6" Touchscreen Laptop - AMD Ryzen 5 7520U - FHD (1920x1080) - Windows 11 $399.99
$400
$500
20% offCostco Wholesale
Get Deal at RetailerGood Deal
Bad Deal
Save
Share
Leave a Comment
11 Comments
Sign up for a Slickdeals account to remove this ad.
Our community has rated this post as helpful. If you agree, why not thank Luigis3rdcousin
Is that a great deal? I mean it's $125 less, but it's refurb and but doesn't buying this thru Costco offer a long warranty?
Sign up for a Slickdeals account to remove this ad.
The 7520u core ccd is indeed on tsmc 6nm as opposed to 7nm, but this is accomplished through a node shrink (adapting the same architecture to a newer node), rather than actually improving the architecture. While this does increase power efficiency and allow for a slightly higher boost clock, ipc (instructions per clock) is hardly affected, with primary compute improvements coming from said minor clockspeed bump and using (slow) lpddr5 ram instead of ddr4. Having 4 cores and 8 threads is firmly bottom tier for 2025. The 7520u only supports pcie gen 3 (two generations old), and while the rdna2 based 2cu (compute units) 610m igpu is somewhat more modern than the vega igpus in previous chips, the older vega 6 igpu from previous generation low end cpus is actually more powerful, due to having triple the compute units (6 instead of 2). There is some improved usb support as well compared to original zen 2, but ultimately nothing exceptional.
The 7520u is somewhere in the same ballpark as the low tier r3 5400u from early 2021, since the ipc improvements of zen 3 (particularly having twice as much l3 cache as zen 2) make up for most of the benefits of the improved memory support and higher clock speed of the 7520u. Meanwhile, compared to intel, the low end i3-1215u (found in $200-$250 laptops for the past 3 years) is superior in just about every metric excluding power efficiency. Compared to the 3 generations newer zen 5, or arrow/lunar lake cpus, the zen 2 architecture is downright pathetic. Even it's primary saving grace against the 2 gen old zen 3, better power efficiency, is a massive loss against the substantially more efficient current gen architectures on much newer nodes.
In conclusion, the 7520u is a firmly bottom tier processor that has no place in a laptop this expensive. It gets meaningfully outperformed by cpus you can regularly find in laptops $250 and under, and would have been considered low tier even 4 years ago.
The Intel Celeron N4500 and AMD Ryzen 5 7520U are in completely different performance classes. Here's a detailed comparison to help you understand the differences:
I get that the ones I'm seeing are probably garbage, but that is what is in many laptops in the price point close to this laptop. So how is this so bad??
Leave a Comment