Acer Aspire 3 Ryzen 5 3500U laptop

Purchased this today. Had pretty good reasons, but even so, thought about it carefully. What decided me is the specs for the price. Outlining the specs:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3500U
GPU: Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx
RAM: 16GB
SSD: PCIe NVME 1TB

Got it for AU$797 (about 540 US Dollars) from these guys:

https://www.harveynorman.com.au/acer-aspire-3-15-6-inch-r5-3500u-16gb-1tb-ssd-laptop.html

One reason for buying it is to use for OpenEmbedded builds, so as not to tie up my main workhorse computer. Builds are taking over 24 hours, so I can just leave this running, as long as it takes.

OK, the Ryzen 5 is not the latest AMD CPU, but it is no slouch either. Speed comes in similar to an Intel i5, shown in this link:

https://laptopmedia.com/laptop-specs/acer-aspire-3-558/

Another reason for buying it is to test EasyOS. All of my other computers are Intel-based. Except for one that has an Intel GPU on the motherboard and a Radeon card plugged in.

I was half-hoping that there might be some issues with the hardware, that I could work-on, but EasyOS 4.5.3 runs fine, no issues whatsoever. Video works nice, automatically using the Xorg amdgpu driver.

For OE, a 1TB SSD is required, and being builtin, it should compile faster, compared with the USB SSDs that I have been using so far. Also, 16GB RAM is essential, 8GB just doesn't cut it, not even with a swap partition -- well that would be OK, except now compiling Chromium and that really does need the 16GB RAM.

Using Windows Partition Manager, shrunk the C: drive down to 72GB, leaving 882GB free. Then booted Easy from USB and created a 32MB fat16 esp partition and the rest a ext4 partition. Then installed Easy to the ext4 partition, with Limine boot-loader in the fat16 partition.  

Tags: tech