Acer Aspire 5738DZG 3D review

The keyboard is a Scrabble-tile affair with flat, board keys offering a light and comfortable action – even if the wide gaps between buttons could make the base a haven for crumbs and other assorted detritus. The trackpad offers multi-touch zooming, rotating and two-fingered scrolling. We weren’t too keen on the pad, though, which felt laggy – the scrolling proved inconsistent and, often, the Acer took a split second to respond to our actions.

Acer has relied on modest components inside. The Intel Pentium Dual Core T4300 processor, running at 2.1GHz and built on a 45nm die, returned a score of precisely 1.00 in our application benchmarks – the same speed as our Pentium D control system. That's enough power to handle web browsing and other simplistic tasks, but the machine will struggle if tasked with any heavy-duty photo or video processing.

Gamers can extract limited fun from the Aspire thanks to the ATI Radeon HD 4570 chip. It’s a mid-range part but results of 42fps in our 1,024 x 768 low quality Crysis benchmark and 59fps in our low quality World in Conflict test show that it should handle modern titles at reduced quality settings. Don't expect anything stellar though – the 3D screen would be better suited to a laptop with a little more gaming potential.

The rest of the specification is good but hardly groundbreaking. 4GB of RAM ease multitasking, and the 500GB hard disk provides more than enough storage space. Draft-n wireless is included, too, but there’s no Blu-ray drive.

The Acer also delivered mediocre battery life. The 4,400mAh power pack lasted for 3hr 45mins in our light-use test but, when we ran our heavy use benchmark, the Aspire managed just an hour and a half – a poor result for a laptop designed for entertainment.

Unfortunately, the addition of the 3D screen also inflates the Acer’s price, with A-List rivals such as Acer's own £365 Aspire 5536 and the £406 Sony VAIO VGN-NS30E/S boasting similar performance and, in some cases, a broader range of features. Thankfully Acer is also offering an identical version of this laptop, without the polarised screen, for just £434 exc VAT.

As ever, the tantalising prospect of 3D brings with it a host of problems. The resolution-halving nature of the polarising technology means getting hold of 720p video clips is a little self-defeating, and the pseudo-3D DVD playback hardly blew us away. Genuine 3D movies may look decent, and we’ve found in the past that Nvidia’s competing active shutter technology works well with games, but the Acer’s polarised screen and on-the-fly 3D conversion do justice to neither form of entertainment. In this form it's a diverting gimmick that just isn't worth paying for.

Author: Mike Jennings