Product Reviews

Since the official unveiling of Intel's new Centrino Pro platform last month, Santa Rosa press releases have dominated PC Pro's inbox. But while many manufacturers have simply shoved one of the new CPU models into an existing chassis, others have tried to be a little more innovative. One of the latter is Acer, with its Aspire 5920 featuring a new clamshell-style "Gemstone" design.

While not quite as groundbreaking as Acer's website might have you believe, it's nonetheless an interesting chassis and contains some notable features. The first is a set of impressive speakers, with Dolby Home Theatre Virtual Surround Sound doing a respectable job of sending audio whooshing around your ears. It still can't beat a basic set of 2.1 external speakers in that respect, but the Acer is among the best we've yet heard for notebook sound.

Despite the presence of an HDMI port, there's no confirmation of whether an HD DVD or Blu-ray drive will be offered as an option, although the glossy 1,280 x 800 display would limit you to 720p video anyway. But even with a normal DVD drive the Aspire is a decent entertainment system, with blue-lit playback controls by the keyboard and a volume dial on the front edge. We have to admit we're not hugely enamoured with the dull, off-white plastic of the inside surfaces, though, especially given the slick black of the lid.

Looks may be a point of contention, but the components certainly aren't. The Aspire 5920 is based around the new Core 2 Duo T7300 processor, which runs at 2GHz and brings with it improvements to the FSB and power management. This is backed by 2GB of 667MHz memory, which resulted in a decent benchmark score of 1.06 - much as we'd expect

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and very impressive for a notebook. You also get 160GB of storage and a DVD writer, so you're getting a solid package for your money.

We've been keen to find out whether the improvements in Santa Rosa translate to significantly longer battery life, and in the case of the Acer Aspire 5920 the answer appears to be yes. We squeezed a very credible 5hrs 31mins out of it when idle and 1hr 20mins when pushed intensively, and with a weight of 3.2kg it's still relatively portable.

You also get some gaming capability, courtesy of Nvidia's brand-new DirectX 10 mobile chip - the GeForce 8600M. It has 256MB of dedicated memory, but can borrow system memory to increase this to 768MB. While there are plenty more powerful chips around in desktops these days, the GeForce 8600M is still more than ready to run the impending swarm of DirectX 10 games, such as Crysis, with all the advanced effects that the new framework offers.

However, in terms of performance it's more of a slight progression than a giant leap up from the old GeForce Go 7600, at least for now. We ran Call of Duty 2 at 1,024 x 768 and it was comfortably playable at 33fps. More notable was the tremendous atmosphere produced by the speakers and the superbly crisp screen, again emphasising the Acer's entertainment credentials. Bumping it up to the native resolution dropped the frame rate to 28fps, just below the ideal playable level; enabling 4x AA and 8x AF pushed it further down to 23fps.

The rest of the chassis is reasonably standard fare, with four USB ports, VGA and TV-out connections, and a tiltable 0.3-megapixel webcam above the screen. There's a memory card slot for SD, MMC, Memory Stick and xD-Picture formats on the front, and Acer's "Empowering E" button to launch the manufacturer's utilities suite, which is actually quite useful - it brings power management, security, recovery and other everyday tasks into one place. And it's easy to use too.

The Acer Aspire 5920 is priced at £681, but that's sure to be lower when it hits retailers. With the superb speakers, HDMI port and the state-of-the-art internals, it's a good deal, although a lot will depend on your opinion of the styling. If it does catch your eye you can rest assured you're getting an impressive notebook for a good price.