Hardware Details of Acer Aspire F15 F5-573G-53V1
Posted by Klaus Eisentraut in review
In summer 2016 I decided to buy a new laptop. I chose the Acer Aspire F15 F5-573G-5371 for several reasons:
- USB 3.0
- modern and good WiFi
- DDR4 instead of DDR3-RAM
- GeForce GTX 950M which is a good-enough graphics card to play all modern games
- good price
- empty M.3 2280 SATA3 slot which I filled with Samsung MZ-N5E120BW 850 EVO
The notebook was delivered with a pre-installed "Acer Linux" which was utter crap. For example, it didn't even recognize the relatively new WiFi chip Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 which has been added to the Linux kernel not before version 4.4. Also, I cannot recommend to use the laptop without retrofitting a SSD. It feels quite slow with the HDD only.
After adding an additional M2 SSD, I installed ArchLinux and almost everything was working out-of-the-box.
The only annoying remaining issue is that the WiFi frequently disconnects when I use the 5GHz-Band, but that may be the fault of Unitymedia's router ("ConnectBox") as well. I didn't test it on any other routers yet and solved this by disabling 5GHz on my home router.
As I did a lot of googeling before, but couldn't find detailled information about the WiFi-chip before, here is the output of lspci and lsusb:
$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Skylake Host Bridge/DRAM Registers (rev 08)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 520 (rev 07)
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP USB 3.0 xHCI Controller (rev 21)
00:14.2 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP Thermal subsystem (rev 21)
00:15.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP Serial IO I2C Controller #0 (rev 21)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP CSME HECI #1 (rev 21)
00:17.0 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 21)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device 9d10 (rev f1)
00:1d.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP PCI Express Root Port #9 (rev f1)
00:1d.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device 9d1a (rev f1)
00:1d.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device 9d1b (rev f1)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP LPC Controller (rev 21)
00:1f.2 Memory controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP PMC (rev 21)
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP HD Audio (rev 21)
00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP SMBus (rev 21)
01:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GM107M [GeForce GTX 950M] (rev a2)
03:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 30)
04:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8411B PCI Express Card Reader (rev 01)
04:00.1 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 12)
$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0bda:57f2 Realtek Semiconductor Corp.
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 04ca:3015 Lite-On Technology Corp.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Hopefully this may help you, if you have been searching for the same information as I did.