Monday 21 January 2013

Acer Aspire V5 review: beauty and no brains

The Acer Aspire V5 isn?t a bad-looking machine, considering its price point. It?s heavier than it looks, but that heaviness translates into denseness, which translates into the machine feeling sturdy and stable. It almost looks like an Ultrabook ? it?s relatively slim, it has a simple, sleek overall design, and an edge-to-edge glass display. But does this laptop?s performance live up to its prettiness? Read on to find out.

Our review model, which costs $729.99 as configured, sports a third-generation Intel Core i5-3317U mobile processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard drive. This V5 also has a 15-inch touchscreen, built-in Wi-Fi 802.11a/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, and a DVD-RW optical drive. The V5 runs Windows 8.

Performance

In PCWorld?s WorldBench 8 benchmark tests, the Aspire V5 scores just 42 out of 100. This means that the V5 is 58 percent slower than our testing model, which sports a third-generation i5 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 1TB hard drive. This is quite a low score, and even similarly-equipped laptops, such as the HP Envy TouchSmart 4-1102xx (which has the same processor as the V5), perform better. The Envy TouchSmart scored 57 on our WB8 tests.

The V5 doesn?t do much better in individual performance tests. It?s not an Ultrabook, and it has no SSD boot drive, so it takes a good 21.3 seconds to start up. In the PCMark 7 office productivity test, the V5 scores 751 ? only the half laptop, half tablet Samsung Xe500T1C-A01 performed worse on that test, with a score of 608.

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