Product Reviews

This is one of the first laptops to use Intel's Santa Rosa platform. Santa Rosa is based on the new 965 Express mobile chipset, along with several other optional components: the X3100 integrated graphics chip offers improved performance for lower-end notebooks, while built-in 802.11n wireless looks to the future. The official name for the platform is Centrino Duo, and it's bringing in a plethora of new laptops, but only a few manufacturers are taking the opportunity to do something really innovative.

One of those is Acer, as shown by the unique retro styling of the Aspire 5920. Acer's name for the design is Gemstone, and it does look a little like an oyster shell, although with the pearly gloss finish on the outside rather than the precious interior. And it's the interior that divided opinion here at Computer Buyer. Depending on your point of view, the off-white colouring is either beautifully understated contrast to the black shell or a step back in time to the days when PCs were beige. Strips of glowing blue light help to keep things in the present. The rounded shape makes the Aspire 5920 look bigger than it is; for a laptop with a 15.4in screen, it's reasonably portable at a weight of 3.2kg.

Built to entertain

Regardless of its looks, this machine has impressive credentials as a consumer laptop. The glossy screen is vivid, sharp and even, so you'll enjoy watching films on it, and this experience is greatly enhanced by the built-in Dolby Home Theatre Virtual Surround speakers. Sure, they can't compete with a proper external set, but they do a marvellous job of throwing the audio around you, and they're certainly a step above most of the notebook speakers we've heard.

The Acer also has a new graphics card, nVidia's GeForce Go 8600M, which is ready for DirectX 10 and comes with 256MB of memory to give it a fair amount

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of oomph. Admittedly, in our Call of Duty 2 3D game test it didn't quite achieve playable frame rates at the screen's full 1,280x800-pixel resolution, but that test is very memory-intensive and we reckon the Vista drivers still need some work. Lower the texture settings and you'll be fine with most games, which is not bad going for an affordable laptop.

Whatever you choose to use it for, the 5920's layout will give you no problems. The keyboard is large and has a nice firm travel, while all the ports - including four USB connectors - are intelligently positioned around the base. Most are on the left side, where the chief attraction is the HDMI port. To partner this you also get blue-lit playback controls alongside the keyboard and a volume dial on the front, so using the Acer as a jukebox is simple.

Powering ahead

For everyday processing muscle, Intel's 2GHz T7300 is one of the brand new Centrino Duo units that boast lower power consumption and higher efficiency, along with the Core 2 Duo's usual impressive performance. Assisted by a generous 2GB of memory, the Acer raced its way through our benchmarks with no problems. The 160GB hard disk will store a fair amount of stuff, although you can never have enough for music and video files.

The focus on efficiency should have a positive effect on the life of the battery, and sure enough it lasted a decent four-and-a-half hours of light use in our tests, so it'll get you through a substantial journey or a fair chunk of the working day. Even with a disc spinning and speakers booming it lasted three-and-a-quarter hours, long enough for all but the most epic of DVDs, and we were also delighted to see it charge fully from dead in just over 90 minutes.

Elsewhere, you'll find a memory card slot as well as mini-FireWire and the usual network and modem sockets. Headphone and microphone connectors are sensibly positioned on the front edge, along with an infra-red receiver, and as previously mentioned the Acer features built-in support for the new draft-n wireless standard to ensure future compatibility with your home network.

All things considered, for £881 the Acer Aspire 5920 is a very well specified and intelligently designed notebook, with no small amount of power and plenty of useful features. You'll either love or hate the styling, but if two-tone is your thing you'll be getting a top-notch entertainment machine that offers a lot for your money.