Let Me Entertain You
Strangely though, even with its abilities predominantly planted in the entertainment division, the Radeon HD4650 seems to be somewhat anaemic in the 5940G. Benchmarks from FarCry 2 also confirmed the HD4650’s lack of grunt, managing to average only 23fps on medium settings, without anti-aliasing, at the maximum screen resolution of 1366 x 768. On the high settings, only an average of only 16fps was achieved with significant frame-tearing.
A bit on the large side considering the screen size
Graphics performance aside, the Aspire 5940G packs some nifty features. To the right of the keyboard is the media control touchpad that provides backlit controls for your media player of choice along with a rotating volume control. Also, as a bonus, the mouse touchpad has some basic multi-touch features such as pinch-to-zoom and the option of two finger scrolling even though there is a scrollbar on the side of the pad.
The multimedia functionality is further boosted by the largest subwoofer I have ever seen fitted to a laptop. Nicknamed TUBA, this is the major contributor to the larger than expected footprint. Still, it does deliver fairly impressive sound reproduction with its Dolby Home Theatre Virtual Surround Sound capability. Overall, the sound output from the 5940G puts most other laptops to shame, but is still no match for a decent pair of portable speakers.
Verdict
Due to the sub-optimal use of available space for a bigger and higher resolution screen, along with the poor battery life and somewhat lousy graphics performance this isn't likely to appeal to more demanding users. However, Acer has managed to produce a responsive machine for day-to-day tasks and would likely suit the home user very well. There are plenty of others in the price and spec range, even more from Acer itself, that are certainly worth a look, but you may want to keep the Aspire 5940G in mind – it does what it says on the tin. ®
Thanks to SaveOnLaptops for the loan of the review sample.
More Notebooks Reviews |
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 Back-to-college
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 Apple
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 HP Pavilion
dv6 |
Acer Aspire 5940G 15.6in notebook
COMMENTS
Re: ACER - forget them - warranty not honoured
Rubber feet fall off hot laptops. There are plenty of replacements you can buy in kitchen shops and the like without needing to trouble manufacturers for official parts.
ACER - forget them - warranty not honoured
ACER cannot be trusted to honour it's warranty, by personal experience, and even for a commercial customer. And we were dealing with a countries corporate office not through a dealer.
Their 'extended' warranty - something most laptop users should have - has so many exclusions to make it nigh on worthless.
A rubber foot fell off, my country typically has summer days reaching 35-40C. Do they have spares? NO! You have to buy a whole new base cover - hardly a reasonable thing to do. (Rubber feet are excluded from any warranty coverage).
Given that they glue aircraft together you would have thought ACER could make feet permanent attachments.
ASUS, however, do replace feet which is why the corporate office now has 163 ASUS computers.
Because regular chips aren't much higher
Compared to the 840 (the only one likely to ever reach 45W) the 860S isn't really much higher. And if you lock it to a certain maximum, either in the BIOS or with one of a number of multiplier-tweaking tools for Windows or Linux, you get the same power output. By locking a 970 even lower, you get even more out of it at the same TDP, but those are insanely expensive and the power savings will never add up to the cost difference. Once the 32nm parts come downlevel just a little more, they would make much more sense for servers than mobile parts.
iirc, the boards for Dothan or Merom were only being made up until Conroe was widely available, since Conroe could likewise be equivalently clocked down.
Here. have some fecking letters and/or digits
"mobile CPU with a TDP of 45W comes at a great cost"
This is true, but it is a great TDP for a low to midrange server though. Why is it so hard to find a motherboard with a mobile cpu these days? You used to be able to get them a few years back but they seem to have dried up. All I want is a box with a lowish thermal footprint that I can run 24/7 without creating an excitingly high power bill at the end of the month. It doesn't need to be super grunty but does need to have VT extensions and support more than 2G RAM
I currently run an Atom 330 box but it doesn't have VT and is artificially limited to 2GB by those knob ends at intel. Honestly, why bother adding 64Bit instructions to a CPU which you won't allow to be paired with any more than 2Gb RAM anyway?
WTF is the point of that?
A job for trading standards
You have an automatic right to assume that electronic equipment will work for at least 6 months from getting it, and in some cases your reasonable expectation that equipment will work extends for about 5 years after purchase; a year is probably reasonable for a laptop. If anything fails in this period you have a prettty automatic right to a repair or replacement, and if not given you should be talking to Trading Standards.
