Product Reviews

Dual-core processors have been appearing in desktop PCs for nine months, but this is the first notebook we've seen with one. Acer's Aspire 5670WLMi uses Intel's Core Duo technology, which we'll see in many notebooks and desktops in future.

The Intel Core Duo T2300 processor has a clock speed of 1.66GHz, around the same as that of the Pentium M 730. The T2300 has two cores running at this speed, which improves performance when running multiple or multi-threaded applications. The frontside bus has risen from 533MHz to 667MHz, increasing the speed of memory access.

Our multi-threaded video-encoding test demonstrated the benefit of a dual-core chip. The Acer 5670WLMi managed a stunning benchmark score of 158. We ran an extra test, encoding a DVD scene while running our full benchmark suite. It completed 42 per cent of the clip, compared with the 15 per cent of an average single-core processor. If you

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run intensive applications simultaneously, or multi-threaded ones, you'll notice the difference. It also scored a fast 105 in the single-threaded image manipulation test, thanks to increased FSB speed.

The notebook has a healthy 1GB of RAM and a massive 120GB hard disk. The new X1400 graphics chipset is equivalent to the old X700 in performance. It plays most games with the detail levels reduced, and will suit the occasional gamer.

There are all the ports and slots you'd expect from an expensive notebook. The optical drive is a stylish slot-loading model and there's a memory card reader with support for popular formats. There are four USB2 ports, plus S-video and DVI outputs.

The display is gloss coated, making colours more vivid and blacks darker. It has a resolution of 1,280x800, which may be insufficient for complex applications such as 3D modelling. Image quality is excellent, though. There's a built-in webcam above the screen for internet chat and video conferencing.

At just under 3kg, it's very portable for a PC with this much power. Battery life is good, lasting more than three hours in our low usage test. Using full processing power will reduce this figure, though.

So how useful is dual-core processing in a notebook? Serious power users want larger displays with higher resolutions. Casual home users don't need dual-core processors to run a browser and an email program. Still, if you need more processing power from your notebook, this is a great choice.