The Acer Aspire V5-551 comes with a chassis that’s nearly unchanged from the earlier model. While the display is glossy, the rest of the surface is covered in matte black. Aluminum or other higher-end materials are nowhere to be found as Acer puts plastic throughout. There are full-sized VGA and Ethernet ports on the sides, as well as a SD card reader.
The chiclet-style keyboard has no backlight, the click-point is well defined and main keys are reasonably smooth. On closer inspection, the keyboard flexes slightly during heavy typing, but this shouldn’t be a big issue. The 15.6” HD glossy display is somewhat usable outdoors, thanks to the high contrast ratio.
With its AMD A6 4455M Trinity APU, the Acer Aspire V5-551 looks like a rather straightforward business laptop. The dual-core processor can go as high as 2.6GHz on peak load. The Seagate Momentus 5400.6 500GB hard drive is decent, but far from being impressive. The built-in Radeon HD 7500G GPU supports DirectX 11 and offers reasonably smooth gaming experience when playing latest games at low-medium detail settings.