Acer 5738PG initial thoughts.

[Rifter]

I bought my first laptop and it arrived yesterday, thought i would post some thoguhts for anyone considering this unit or a similer unit. A few things, i have never owned or operated a laptop in my life, and i am a the type of guy who likes to get every ounce of power from my computers, look at my rig in sig i overclock the balls off every computer i have ever owned.

As far as looks/build quality i think it looks great, its not super big or heavy IMO. Keyboard is great, large keys and a full number pad, good click and feedback from keys. Optical drive seems solid not flimsy like some i have seen. Trackpad i cant comment on as i never owned a laptop before this one, i hate it, it sucks bad, i use a mouse. Speakers are ok, i would say as good as a average $30 pair of computer speakers, good enough for a laptop.

Speed/Heat. Boots fast, i replaced the stock 250GB 5400rpm drive with the WD Blue 500GB 5400rpm drive. Its responive and seems to do fine for all tasks i have tried, i was not expecting this level of performance from a laptop. I love this CPU, it seems to do a great job of ramping up and down when needed, stays running at 1200mhz till it hits 50-60% load then ramps up to 1800 or the full 2200 depending on load. I have never seen it over 68C even running CPU benches looping for 30 min. I use one of those laptop matts that moves the heat into the table its on, it works, lowered my CPU and GPU temps while gaming 3-5c. Fan is quiet, can hear it but its not even as loud as my PSU fan on my desktop.

Gaming. Does great, the 4570 is alot better than i thought, i was going into this thinking i could run pong and maybe 5-6 year old games. It runs L4D at 720p even with 4xAA fine. Also runs tourchlight, Mass effect, Quake 3, Doom 3 all fine. Im going to try GTA 4 just for the hell of it when i have time to DL the 15GB from steam.

Touchscreen. This i thoguht was going to be a total 100% gimmik and i would not use it. This is not the case, while i still think MS should have hired the Iphone guys for there touchscreen programming it does work. Its accurate but you need small fingers, i use my little finger alot. The boxes to close windows are WAY TO SMALL!!!!!!!! but if you can hit them it works, icons are large enough to hit np. The menues are a little small too but manageable.

Network. The Wifi works fine, i have not tested the N band as i only have G but it holds a 54Mbps connection fine, even faster than my PS3. The wired ethernet works fine at Gigabit speeds.

Any questions feel free to ask.

 

[Rifter]

Update:

Now after watching a few movies on it i can comment that it is a very good screen, better viewing angle than i expected, better than my Desktop monitor. Very crisp and great brightness.

Also installed Mint 8 64bit(ubuntu 9.10 based) and it went flawless. Did not need to provide drivers for anything it picked it all up even the wireless. Just installed the restricted ATI drivers and downloaded my software and it all runs fine, less than one hour from clean install to fully installed and updated with 30-40 apps installed. Runs really fast feels just as fast as my desktop for most normal desktop tasks once the program is running, a bit of lag loading due to the slower laptop drive. Browsing, E-mail, Office, even Gimp is more than fast enough for some minor photo work. It lacks for encoding obviously but i did rip a DVD to H.264 720P on it and it wasnt super slow by any means but it did take 5-6 times as long as my desktop. Also no touchsceen support for linux, not out of the box anyways im searching for some software and will update if i find any.

Tried some more games as well, GTA 4 will run, it seems about as fast as my PS3 will play it but with better draw distance and as good to slightly worse graphics. I have to play at lower setting to keep FPS above 25-30.

Portal runs fine, as does HL2, both can be played at higher settings, generally dont try AA and you seem to be able to do ok with the 4570, i mean 720P is not that high res so it does ok. I will update as i try more games. Also wanted to mention the GPU stays under 65C in all games i have played so far.

Network. Wifi works great on G band, can pull steam downloads as fast as my desktop, 1.5 - 2 MB/s. Have not had it cut out ounce, always gets great signal up to 100ft from router which is as far as i can go in my apartment. I have a cheap router but seems to be working great(WRT54GL). The wifi gets slow network transfers it will will pull 5-6MB/s from my server which is more than fine for smaller files but for large transfers the onboard gigabit works fine(will pull 40-60MB/s)

 

[Inspector Jihad]

where vendor did you get this from?

 

[Rifter]

NCIX Canada. Picked up from local store, boxing day sale for $650 CDN.

Edited to add, was the 6555 configuration. This does not have the blu-ray drive or bluetooth. And had the 250GB HDD not the 320 the other configurations had. And if anyone is interested the drive was a Hitachi, and it was a fair bit slower than the WD i replaced it with.