Acer Aspire 8950G-9839
Rating
Pros
- Moderately good gaming performance
- Looks good, with a gorgeous LCD
Cons
- Audio quality could be better
- Terrible trackpad configuration
Bottom Line
Acer's digital media powerhouse delivers a bright screen, but makes a few too many compromises.
Acer Aspire 8950G Aspires to Multimedia Greatness
When I first hauled out the Acer Aspire 8950G from the backpack, I almost dropped it--not because it was that heavy, but because it was lighter than expected. This massive (I hesitate to say "notebook")desktop replacement system sports an 18.4-inch, true 1080p LCD panel. At 8 pounds, 5 ounces without the power brick, it's lighter than some smaller systems that have been through the lab here. Even with the 120-watt power supply, the weight falls just a little short of 10 pounds.
It's still too big to carry around, but it could make for a useful living room PC. The system includes an Intel Core i7 2630M quad-core CPU clocking in at 2GHz and maxing out at a Turbo Boost clock of 2.9GHz. The CPU is complemented by 8GB of DDR3 DRAM and 64-bit Windows Home Premium. Driving that big, bright LCD panel is an AMD Radeon HD Mobility 6850M discrete GPU with 2GB of GDDR5 video RAM. Given the GPU's pedigree, I expected greatness when it comes to gaming performance as well as reasonably good video playback quality.
The game tests brought me back to earth, however. The Aspire 8950G is a cut above many laptops when it comes to overall gaming performance, but you'll still need to dial back graphics settings to about "medium" to get good frame rates in current-generation games. Far Cry 2 ran at 44 frames per second (DX10, "optimal" settings), while the recently released DiRT3 mustered 20 fps, and Total War: Shogun 2 eked out only 16 fps. (These tests were run with all graphics settings maxed out, but antialiasing disabled.)
Performance in desktop applications proved robust, however, with the unit earning a strong WorldBench 6 score of 128. The battery life of this massive unit was a surprisingly good at 4 hours, 41 minutes. The 750GB, 5400-rpm Toshiba hard drive is capacious, but seems a little slow on bootup. A system like this deserves a Blu-ray drive, and Acer delivers one, in the form of a Panasonic unit that doesn't generate a lot of distracting seek noise.
The keyboard has a good feel, with nicely done tactile feedback, but the layout could be better. The arrow navigation keys are tiny and clustered tightly together. The dedicated numeric keypad, however, offers widely separated keys, making its use as a 10-key pad easy.
While the keyboard is mostly good, the trackpad is mostly bad. It's extremely sensitive, and you'll often see the mouse cursor flying wildly across the screen. That's partially curable via some control-panel settings. However, someone at Acer decided that building media control keys into the glass surface of the trackpad is a good idea.
It's not. Really, it's not.
You can use the trackpad either as a pointing device or as a set of media-control touch-sensitive buttons, but not at the same time. This feature is toggled via a gigantic button placed between the two main mouse buttons. That means you can accidentally enable the media control keys all too easily, and suddenly your mouse isn't responsive. Unless you're looking at the trackpad, you won't know why. Luckily, the big volume-control wheel directly beneath the trackpad works whether or not the media-control feature is enabled.
The handling of standard-definition video scaled up to the full 1080p resolution of the screen is a mixed bag. DVD playback seems noisy, though edge enhancement is thankfully minimal. Blu-ray high-definition playback looks much better, but overall video quality is still a touch soft.
Audio sounds fairly good through the built-in speakers. Acer ships this model with Dolby audio-enhancement software, which helps movie playback substantially--the virtual surround sound works fairly well, though the surround "speakers" are still more front than rear. You still don't get much bass, though, so low-frequency effects are often missing. Music playback is less robust. In stereo mode, vocals take on a dirty, edgy quality, though the speakers sound fairly good in pop and rock.
The Acer 8950G is a capable digital media system that can handle current-generation DirectX 11 games if you're willing to dial down detail settings a bit. High-definition playback is generally pretty good, but not exceptional. At roughly $1500 as configured (price as of June 7, 2011), it's a balanced set of compromises that falls short of perfection, but gets the job done.
Asus G74SX
Rating
Pros
- Simple, elegant design
- Excellent touchpad and comfortable wrist rest
Cons
- Not enough ports
- Review model had faulty LED backlight
Bottom Line
The Asus G74SX is huge, but its elegant design and excellent performance may be worth the lack of mobility.
Asus G74SX: A Monstrous Gaming Powerhouse
The Asus G74SX is designed for gamers. Though its simple appearance might not tip you off, its size certainly will. In spite of a few flaws--such as a noisy keyboard and not-noisy-enough speakers--the Asus G74SX packs excellent performance into an attractive chassis. It's worth checking out if you're looking for a "mobile" gaming powerhouse.
Our review model, priced at $1979 (as of August 17 2011), sports a second-generation Intel Core i7 processor (the i7-2630QM) and offers 16GB of RAM plus 910GB of storage space spread over a 750GB hard drive and a 160GB solid-state drive. The G74SX is also one of the first laptops to come preloaded with Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 560M graphics card. Additional features include built-in Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth connectivity, and a Blu-ray Disc player. The G74SX runs the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium.
In PCWorld's WorldBench 6 benchmark tests, the Asus G74SX earned an impressive score of 150, which is quite good even for the desktop replacement laptops category. That result is just one point behind the mark of the Dell XPS 17 3D. The G74SX also did well in our graphics tests, with frame rates of 48.8 frames per second and 46.3 fps on our Dirt 2 and Far Cry 2 tests, respectively (both at high quality settings and 1920 by 1080 resolution). Those numbers surpass the XPS 17 3D's frame rates, which were 32.5 fps (Dirt 2) and 30.8 fps (Far Cry 2).
At nearly 10 pounds, with a 2-pound power brick, the G74SX isn't really portable, unless you define that as merely meaning "possible to move." This whopper measures 16.5 inches wide by 12.7 inches long, and is 2.4 inches at its thickest (the computer tapers off near the front).
The G74SX may be gigantic, but its design is elegantly simple. The laptop's lid is plain and black save for a silver Asus logo, and it has a soft, slightly rubbery feel. Inside, the wrist rest features the same rubbery black material, while the Chiclet-style keyboard is backed with slate-gray brushed aluminum. The interior is thankfully free of bright, flashing lights--it sports just the power button and a few tiny notifiers, plus the optionally backlit keyboard. You'll find just one dedicated button beside the power button, for switching between battery-saving and performance modes.
The wedge-shaped computer is thicker at the back, which is where the fan vents are located. The G74SX's cooling system pulls air from under the laptop and pushes it out the rear. This arrangement is useful, according to Asus, for "keeping hot air away from the user and reducing ambient noise for prolonged gaming."
Despite being enormous, the G74SX is a bit skimpy on ports. On the left side, the computer has only two USB 2.0 ports, as well as a Kensington lock slot, the Blu-ray drive, and headphone and microphone jacks. On the right side are two more USB ports (one 2.0 and the other 3.0), along with HDMI and VGA-out ports, a gigabit ethernet port, and a multiformat card reader.
The G74SX's keyboard is full-size and backlit, and it features big keys. Asus has also put the keyboard at a 5-degree incline for better ergonomics. The keyboard is generally comfortable to type on, and the keys give good tactile feedback. I have only a couple of complaints: The keys are a little slippery for fast typists, and the keyboard is quite loud. (The latter issue is unfortunate, because the machine itself is otherwise very quiet.) The laptop has a number pad, too, and the machine's generous width leaves enough room for that number pad to sit about 1.5 inches away from the keyboard.
Below the keyboard, and slightly off-center, is the roomy touchpad. The touchpad's smooth black surface is very responsive and supports multitouch gestures. Below the touchpad sit two rubbery soft-touch mouse buttons, which are large, easy to press, and quiet. If you're not a touchpad kind of person, Asus also supplies an ergonomic Republic of Gamers gaming mouse; the USB-wired optical mouse uses the same soft rubbery material as the laptops' cover does, and it has six buttons, including the scrollwheel.
The G74SX sports a glossy 17.3-inch screen with a native full HD resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels. This is one of the best laptop screens I've seen in a while: It's bright but not too much so, it has good off-axis viewing angles (both vertical and horizontal), and its images look extremely crisp. However, on our test machine, in certain power-saving modes (Quiet Office, for example) a bit of shimmering appeared in the lower half of the screen--it looked like a faulty LED backlight. This is regrettable, because aside from that shimmering the screen is fantastic.
Video playback looks good on the G74SX's full HD screen, but audio playback is a little disappointing. Don't get me wrong--the built-in stereo speakers located above the keyboard produce clear, crisp sound. But remember how Asus claimed that it specifically engineered the G74SX's cooling system to keep noise away from the user? Well, the speakers may be located just a little too close to the cooling system, because audio is much louder from behind the screen than from in front of it. Sure, it's a little troubling, unless you plan on using the laptop to broadcast music or audio to people sitting in front of you.
The G74SX comes with a bunch of preinstalled software, but most of it is useful; among other items, you get Asus's 122-page eManual, Live Update, and Splendid Utility, as well as CyberLink's Blu-ray disc suite and Nvidia's 3D Vision.
This "mobile" gaming machine really does have everything you need for on-the-go power-computing, even though it weighs almost as much as a lightweight desktop. Asus packs a lot of power into the G74SX, and the system has a fairly svelte body to boot. Now, if only we can get a review model that doesn't have a faulty LED backlight.
Toshiba Satellite L675D-S7106
Rating
Pros
- Light for the size
- Lots of screen real estate
Cons
- Short battery life
- Mediocre performance, especially in 3D graphics
Bottom Line
The L675D-S7106 is an affordable desktop replacement with a nice display and adequate performance.
Toshiba Satellite L675D-S7106: Large and Affordable, but Slow for Its Class
If you were to go hands-on with the $700 (as of March 30, 2011) Toshiba Satellite L675D-S7106 before you looked at its test scores, you'd never guess that it was one of the slower desktop replacement laptops we've tried. Subjectively, its performance is agile in standard desktop applications, and its large, 17.3-inch, 1600-by-900-pixel display gives you plenty of screen real estate. The machine even has a Blu-ray drive on board, so you can watch high-def moves. For the price, it's a lot of laptop.
The L670 series is available with a ridiculous number of CPU options--everything from an Intel Pentium or AMD Turion II to an Intel Core i3 to the AMD Phenom II P860 Triple-Core on the L675D-S7106. Joining the Phenom on our test configuration were an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250 graphics processor, 4GB of memory, a 5400-rpm 500GB hard drive, and the aforementioned Blu-ray player/DVD burner. Just looking at the branding, you might think that it had a discrete graphics card, but you'd be wrong: The HD 4250 is a two-generations-old Radeon graphics offering built into the chipset, sharing RAM with the main system.
The L675D-S7106's WorldBench score of 78 is rather low for a desktop replacement laptop, but subjectively the unit feels very nimble. It also plays 1080p video smoothly, though gaming frame rates don't cut the mustard; it generated only 29.3 frames per second in Unreal Tournament 3 at 800 by 600 with medium detail (the least demanding resolution we test at). Daily desktop tasks such as Web browsing and word processing zip along nicely, but demanding work such as editing or encoding video will be slow for a system of this class.
The keyboard is large, and the feel is decent, if not Lenovo-like. However, the layout could use a little work. Hitting the Caps Lock key accidentally is easy if you're not careful, and the Delete key could be larger. The touchpad is nicely adjusted, but since it isn't recessed into the keyboard deck, unintentionally hitting it with your thumbs or palm and moving the cursor is a bit too easy--another thing you'll have to be careful of.
For its size (16.2 by 10.6 by 1.49 inches), the L657D-S7106 is rather light at 6.6 pounds sans power adapter. You certainly don't feel like you're carrying a brick. With a battery life of only 2 hours, 38 minutes, however, this laptop is really designed for sitting tethered to a wall, removed only for the occasional short foray.
Aside from one possible surprise, the Satellite L675D-S7106 has the usual array of ports for a desktop replacement, including three USB 2.0 ports (one of which also accepts eSATA) and VGA, gigabit ethernet, microphone, headphone, and power connections. The surprise is a phone jack for the modem, something that's fast disappearing from many vendors' laptops. You'll find no Bluetooth on board, but the laptop does have an SD memory card slot.
The bundled software on the L675D-S7106 is plentiful, and the laptop ships with the Windows 7 Home Premium operating system. Toshiba includes a number of "value-added" utilities such as the ReelTime document/media browser and the Google toolbar, but the collection also offers essentials such as the Webcam capture utility and Skype. Microsoft Office 2010 Starter is present, as is a trial of Norton Internet Security; Google's Chrome browser is on hand as a lightweight alternative to Internet Explorer.
Forget the performance numbers: The Toshiba Satellite L675D-S7106 is a great bargain for a desktop replacement, and unless you're a gamer or you perform demanding video- or photo-editing work, you could spend twice as much and not be any happier. You can even get a lesser-configured L675 for about $500 if all you're looking for is a large display. Toshiba could do a tad better with the input ergonomics, but that's a minor complaint--everything else is up to snuff.
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