When I played Battlefield 1, I could clearly hear the thud of cannonballs landing on a sandy beach as my fellow soldiers shouted over the chaos. The drums on White Rabbits' 'Percussion Gun' practically reached out and punched me in the face. It easily filled our small conference room with sound. The song's namesake percussion is loud and strong, while the vocals, keys and rhythmic hand claps were equally clear and loud. The speakers are surprisingly powerful and well-balanced. When I listened to White Rabbits' "Percussion Gun" on the VX 15, the drummers practically reached out and punched me in the face. Besides pinching-to-zoom and two-finger scrolling, I switched between apps with three finger side swipes and opened the Action Center with a four-finger tap.
The 4.1 x 3-inch touchpad is smooth and responsive, and it works with Windows 10's precision gestures. I reached 115 words per minute (the high end of my average range) on the typing test with my usual error rate of 2 percent. With its 1.6 millimeters of travel and 65 grams of force required to press the keys, I found that the backlit keys (just red, no RGB here) struck a solid balance that made sure I rarely bottomed out. The VX 15's keyboard is responsive and comfortable. That's lower than the average (271 nits), the Inspiron (253 nits) and the Strix (269 nits). To top it all off, the Aspire's screen is relatively dim, measuring just 247 nits on our light meter. While the Inspiron was much less precise (12), the Aspire scored much worse than the category average (2.4) and the Strix (1.6).
The Aspire got a Delta-E score of 6.8 in our testing (0 is ideal). The screen's colors are not accurate, either. That's a worse range than on the Inspiron's dull display (67 percent), but the Strix was far superior (122 percent). The Aspire's panel reproduces just 65 percent of the sRGB color gamut, falling far behind the 96-percent sRGB average. When I stormed a beach in Battlefield 1, the craggy rocks were sharp, and I could see the sparks emanating from fires and pistols, but the scene was slightly darker than it should have been.