Acer's Aspire 5551G: AMD's Budget Gaming Laptop

Conclusion: A Great Price for a Laptop You Can't Buy

So throw out all the standard warnings regarding Acer laptops: they don't have the greatest build quality, consisting almost entirely of a plastic chassis; the keyboard is at best tolerable and at worst an object of pure hate; quality control and customer opinions on Acer usually fall on the "you get what you pay for" side of the fence. All of that is a given, and the 5551G-4591 doesn't do much to change those assumptions. I personally think it looks a lot better than the Aspire designs from the past couple of years, but that's not really saying much.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the 5551G-4591 is that you can't buy it right now. Maybe it will come back in stock, and maybe it won't, but after our experience with the 5740G I suspect that this was a limited run laptop. Now that we've seen an attractive Athlon II P520 CPU paired with a good midrange GPU in the form of HD 5650, all at an amazingly low price, we can't recommend it—not because we don't want to, but because it's not in stock. Ugh. Of course, I wish the 5740G with 5650 would make a comeback as well; then you could choose between a $630 AMD setup and a faster CPU (but generally similar gaming performance) Intel system for $750.

Given the availability problem, let's look instead at the AMD dual-core platform. In terms of CPU performance, the single-threaded speed is way up relative to the quad-core P920, and it actually looks to compete quite favorably with old Core 2 Duo CPUs on a clock-for-clock basis. Looking at the MacBook Pro 13 figures, the P520 wins some and loses some in the CPU benchmarks relative to the P8600. The problem is that P8600 launched a full two years ago, which means in the mobile market AMD remains way behind if we only look at their current products. Without apples-to-apples comparisons (i.e. Core 2 with 5650) we can't say for sure who leads in battery life, but really the comparison is pointless as Core i3/i5 has been shipping for almost a year with improved performance and similar battery life relative to Core 2 Duo.

At present, the AMD mobile CPUs have a tough time competing with Intel; there's not much else we can say. They're "fast enough" and will handle most tasks fine, but if you switch between even a basic Core i3 laptop and an AMD laptop you'll notice the Intel CPU is more responsive. For gaming, though, it doesn't matter as much. Outside of a few titles, the GPU is the far bigger concern, and here we can at least give AMD props: the HD 5650 continues to put out good numbers, often beating NVIDIA's new GT 425M (provided you're not CPU limited). So AMD's eight-month-old architecture gives NVIDIA's brand-new 400M a run for the money, particularly in the midrange. NVIDIA continues to play the Optimus card, and if you have any interest in battery life it's definitely a winning technology; it's unfortunate that Acer didn't enable switchable graphics with the 5551G, but HP at least provides the feature in their Pavilion dv6z line.

If you're looking for similar laptops you can actually find online, the HP is one of the easy to find alternatives; you'll pay an extra $70 or so once you add in the HD 5650. On the other hand, that $70 gets you 6GB RAM, the newer P540 processor (2.4GHz instead of 2.3GHz) and better battery life, so $700 (with the current instant rebate) is easy to recommend. Another option comes from Acer-owned Gateway, and the NV53A36u is going for an unbelievably low $550 right now. Personally, I give the 5551G the styling advantage, but if you don't mind the look of the Gateway NV lineup the price is amazingly affordable. You also get a 2.1GHz tri-core N830 and switchable graphics thrown in for good measure.

Looking to the future, AMD's Brazos should do fine competing against Atom/ION netbooks, and it might even encroach on ULV territory, but without (laptop) hardware in hand we can't provide any final determination of where AMD will stand in another six months. For now, AMD can't get an outright win in most mobile categories, but the one area where they do very well is pricing. For under $500, you can find many AMD-based laptops; sure, $50-$100 more gets you an Intel setup, but while CPU performance and battery life may improve the graphics side is still generally in favor of AMD—and let's be honest, a 15% or larger price increase can be significant if you're on a budget. We just wish we could get a bit more TLC from manufacturers for AMD's platforms: better build quality, use their switchable graphics, and give us something larger than a default 48Wh battery and we'll be a lot happier (provided the price doesn't climb into the $800+ range, though there's flexibility depending on what else you get).