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Acer TravelMate 5720

David Murphy — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:14:57 -0500

With a 15.4-inch screen, Acer’s TravelMate 5720 skirts the edge of what qualifies as a mainstream notebook. But at 7.5 lbs. of carry weight, it’s still pleasantly portable for a device that offers respectable multimedia and gaming functionality with a good-size battery.

The TravelMate didn’t ace our benchmark tests across the board, but it put up a strong showing. You won’t be able to max out next-generation games, but the rig holds its own in older titles. The laptop’s 15 frames per second in our FEAR test makes for a “playable” experience, but we shudder at the thought of playing newer titles on this machine.

On the flip side, we saw excellent performance in our application benchmarks. ProShow and MainConcept encodes sped by, both coming within minutes of faster mainstream models we’ve reviewed. For this you can thank the 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo processor: That’s a speedy clock for the laptop’s size, and the CPU’s 4MB of L2 cache helps the TravelMate nail these two encoding benchmarks.

Also aiding the laptop’s performance are two gigabytes of DDR2 RAM. They pushed the TravelMate to peak performance on our Premiere and Photoshop tests. On the former, encoding ran smoothly and quickly, but it was in our intensive Photoshop script that the memory proved its mettle. The Acer sailed through both tasks, pushing out times that were twice as fast as those of a comparable laptop sporting just one gig of RAM.

The TravelMate’s battery isn’t the best we’ve seen, but we appreciate its performance-to-battery-life ratio. With a two-and-a-half-hour time in our rundown test, this laptop should make it through a typical feature-length film before dying out—more, if you reduce the display to its lowest brightness setting.

We love the responsiveness of this laptop’s keyboard. Pressing the keys feels almost like using a desktop keyboard. Function-key hotkeys allow you to pull up your laptop specs and power-management settings at the touch of a button, and you can launch full applications with the laptop’s seven hotkeys.

It’s not a perfect experience, but the laptop’s screen holds its own in outdoor use. Even with the sun beating down on the TravelMate, we were able to see a decent picture with no reflections or annoyances—aside from the glare. Just don’t expect to store much on this machine. While acceptable for this class, we’d prefer a hard drive a bit bigger than 160GB.

The TravelMate’s external connection options are numerous. You get five USB ports and a single mini-FireWire out, as well as a trifecta of video output options: VGA, DVI, and S-Video. The laptop even comes with a built-in SD card reader.

We question Acer’s OS choice though. Since the TravelMate comes with Vista Business, not Home Premium, it lacks multimedia functionality like Windows Media Center and DVD Maker as well as the ability to create high-definition movies in Windows Movie Maker. In place of that, you get Windows Complete PC Backup and Restore—a program that’s rendered irrelevant by Acer’s inclusion of the NTI Shadow backup application.

Minus this lapse, the TravelMate is a strong laptop choice. It presents the best mix of gaming and application performance without suffering critical flaws in either, and its usability and battery life help sweeten the deal.

Next: The Final Word on Mainstream Notebooks

Asus F8Sn

David Murphy — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:37:48 -0500

Asus has gambled the farm that the fancy graphics offering—an Nvidia 9500M GS videocard with 512MB of onboard memory—in its F8Sn notebook will be enough to eclipse the machine’s myriad shortcomings. Sadly, it isn’t.

While the notebook’s Quake 4 performance knocked our socks off, the Asus F8Sn returns frame rates that are just borderline playable in FEAR. This still puts the F8Sn ahead of the other notebooks in its class for gaming, but its lackluster 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo processor was no match for our other benchmarks. And the battery life on the F8Sn won’t even get you through most of today’s feature films.

The laptop comes with a bevy of connection options, including five USB ports, a mini-FireWire port, and outputs for VGA, DVI, and S-Video. But this doesn’t represent anything above and beyond the norm. We hate the layout of the laptop’s keys, as we kept inadvertently hitting a poorly placed function key in the lower-left corner instead of the usual Control key. The notebook’s crisp display works in the summer sun, but the reflection can be a bit too much to bear at times.

In the end, this notebook lacks anything that sets it apart from the other offerings. Don’t let the gaming performance fool you: The F8Sn is a poor choice for users of all shapes and sizes.

Next: Acer TravelMate 5720

Apple MacBook

David Murphy — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:55:50 -0500

Apple’s little white wonder of a MacBook excels against its PC counterparts, but it’s no Gandalf. As expected, gaming is this laptop’s weakest link. And even complex multimedia tasks can cause the MacBook’s magic to wither.

Still, in most applications, the Vista-booting MacBook performed admirably. But as speedy as the MacBook’s 2.1GHz Penryn processor may be, the notebook’s fatal flaw—beyond the gameplay-breaking integrated graphics—is a paltry 1GB of DDR2 RAM. This was most evident in our Photoshop test, where the once-mighty MacBook lurched to a crawl.

The MacBook’s 13.3-inch glossy screen presents a perceptibly higher quality picture than the other laptops in its class, but not outdoors—you can’t see jack in the sunlight. We enjoyed running our fingers across the spacious keyboard, although many of the strokes we take for granted on a PC have to be relearned on Apple hardware. Bringing up a context menu isn’t a simple right-click affair but rather a three-button ordeal.