Acer Aspire 8920G

A word to the wise though, move more than a metre or two away and, even if you are blessed with 20/20 vision, the human eye will struggle to tell the difference between high-definition and standard-definition movie material. If you want to get all the benefits of HD in a lounge, you'll just have to use the 8920G's HDMI port to connect to a substantially larger HDTV or projector.

Even on its own, watching movies on the Aspire 8920G is still a sensible proposition. Unlike many laptops, which make do with a couple of tinny built-in speakers, the Acer crams in five and a subwoofer. There's no real sense of surround-sound per se, but the multiple speakers manage to create a far more involving spread of sound than most laptops we've encountered. The only real problem is volume; music fares alright, but the huge dynamic swings in movie audio often reduced speech to a barely audible murmur. An option to crush the dynamic range of movie soundtracks would be a welcome one.

The pre-production nature of our unit means that retail models dropping off the production line will have some notable differences in specification. Nonetheless, the 8920G we tested bore quite a few important similarities to the mid-range specification, which will come in at £936.

The processor in question is one of the new Penryn-based Intel Core 2 Duos, the T8300 to be precise. And thanks to its two cores running at 2.4GHz and 3GB of RAM backing them up, the 8920G flew through the Pro benchmarks with a mighty result of 1.26. As the memory complement will swell to 4GB when the 8920G finally hits the market, performance may improve further. Storage will eventually comprise of a single 320GB hard disk, and a Blu-ray writer which writes to both single and double layer Blu-ray media, in addition to every type of DVD media.

Unfortunately we couldn't test the 8920G's graphical capabilities as it had an Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT on-board rather than the new mid-range chipset, the GeForce 9500M GS production units will eventually ship with. Going by its performance in Asus's M50SV-AS030G, though, its primary purpose will be for helping to decode Blu-ray video streams, not high resolution gaming. If that's important to you, then you'll just have to opt for one of the pricier configurations equipped with the GeForce 9650M GS instead.

What Acer's Aspire 8920G does offer, however, is a hell of a lot of laptop for a very reasonable price. We'll have to reserve final judgment until one of the final retail units arrive but, going by what we've seen so far, we can't wait.

Author: Sasha Muller