Acer Aspire 5 - Ryzen 5 5500U, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD

Six cores for twenty-seven thousand. The Ryzen 5 5500U in this Aspire 5 has six cores and twelve threads, which puts it ahead of most of the Intel i5 machines on this page for anything that can use them, and it runs cooler and quieter than the thin Intel units under sustained load. It carries 8GB and a 512GB SSD behind the same slim aluminium-lidded 15.6-inch body as the unit above. What separates the two is condition and price. Here there are scuffs on the lid, a small dent on the front edge, a faint mark low on the left of the panel and mild shine on the letter keys. Battery backup is fair rather than good. Everything works, the card reader included, and all of it was tested. The one real trade against Intel is that a few older applications and some accounting software are still tuned for Intel chips, so if you depend on something unusual, come and try it here before buying. Memory is socketed on this model rather than soldered to the board, so doubling it later is straightforward, and it is the single change that would do most for how this machine feels.