'Aspiring' to the Games
Acer's Olympics-themed notebook impresses with its powerful processor and multitasking capabilities
Launched as part of its new Olympic series, the Acer Aspire v3571G-53214G notebook computer looks sleek and sexy with its silver aluminium body. It features a powerful Intel Core i5-3210M processor 2.50 GHz and 4 Gigabytes DDR3 memory and comes with 750 GB hard drive. It runs on Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.
It uses very sharp and bright 15-inch CineCrystal LED-backlit LCD monitor with 1366 x 768 pixel resolution, which is terrific for watching high-definition movies.
I particularly like the large keyboard, which is easy to type on, and the adjacent number pad.
With Acer serving as a worldwide partner for the 2012 Olympic games, the notebook series has the Olympic logo on its front cover. The notebook also comes with an Olympic theme, displaying an Olympic athlete on the desktop and many more as the screensaver.
The Aspire v3571G has good performance in both business and graphic applications, and is equally impressive for games and multimedia.
Business applications like Microsoft Office performed fast and smooth during the test.
I tried CAPCOM’s Street Fighter IV benchmark tool and found that the notebook could achieve a very high refresh rate of more than 60 frames per second.
It uses dual graphic engine system – integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000 for saving the battery on the go and NVIDIA high-performance graphics processor GeForce GT640M with 2 GB of dedicated video memory.
To ensure that you will get the best performance for your game or multimedia applications, you must select the NVIDIA graphics engine for the applications.
Benchmarked with Windows 7’s internal benchmark tool, the Acer notebook scored high.
On the scale of 1.0 to 7.9, it got 7.1 points for its processor’s performance of calculations per second.
It got 6.6 points for 3D business and gaming graphics. The score for graphic desktop performance for Windows Aero, which is transitional effects of Windows, was lower at to 4.7.
I am not sure when the graphics performance was measured, whether the results were based on the integrated Intel graphics engine or NVIDIA’s powerful graphic processor, as I couldn’t separately select the graphic processor for the benchmarking tool.
The notebook scored 5.9 points for both memory operations per second and disk data transfer rate.
The Acer v3571G is good for playing games, watching movies and playing music files thanks to its Dolby Home Theatre system and you can customise several equalizer settings according to use.
The notebook is preinstalled with several useful applications, including Acer Crystal Eye Webcam, Acer Updater and Acer clear.fiMedia for playing and sharing multimedia files to other gadgets such as a TV with DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) Wi-Fi connection.
You can also use the notebook as a HD video player for your TV because it comes with an HDMI port.
The Acer Aspire v3571G-53214G retails for Bt27,900, VAT included.
Key specs:
_ OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
_ CPU: Intel Core i5-3210M processor 2.5 GHz
_ Core logic chipset: Mobile Intel HM77 Express
_ Memory: 4GB DDR3 RAM (Max 8GB)
_ Hard disk: 750GB
_ Display: 15.6-inch HD LED 1366x768 CineCrystal
_ Graphics engine: NVIDIA GeForce GT640M with 2GB dedicated video memory
_ Optical drive: DVD Super multi
_ Connectivity: Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, 10/100/1000 Mbps LAN, Bluetooth, HDMI
_ Dimension (H x W x D): 33.2 x 382.0 x 253.0 mm
_ Weight: 2.6 kg
