Acer Aspire V3-571G-9435: The Value Proposition
by Jarred Walton on July 4, 2012 4:25 AM ESTConclusion: Compromises, Yes, but It’s Fast and Cheap
If you’re looking for something that will wow like the MacBook Pro Retina, and a sexy Ultrabook, obviously Acer’s C3-571G isn’t for you. Many elements of the industrial design (like the black glossy black plastic finish) feel like a throwback to several years ago. Acer has also definitely cut some corners in order to hit the price target. It’s too bad we have to accept compromises, but unfortunately that’s how companies make money. If you’re more interested in getting a decent budget laptop that can do everything you might want, however, the sub-$800 price makes up for a lot of the omissions.
Back when AMD launched their Trinity laptops, they commented that Trinity was designed to hit price points that we just wouldn’t see from Ivy Bridge any time soon. I expressed concern at the time that $700 was too much for what was otherwise a fairly budget oriented design, and Acer has now brought my concerns front and center. Given that Trinity is designed to hit lower price points, I don’t expect build quality or features to be any better than what Acer has put together with the V3-751G, but performance in most areas is going to be substantially better than AMD’s A10 APU with the quad-core Ivy Bridge CPU and Kepler GPU. The question is, how much more are you willing to spend to make such an upgrade, and what compromises will you make in the process?
The Acer V3-751G-6435 certainly has its fair share of compromises. A 5400RPM hard drive in today’s SSD-equipped Ultrabook world feels painfully slow at best, and untenable at worst. The USB ports on the Acer are a bit of a joke as well—how is it that we have a chipset that supports up to four USB 3.0 ports natively, and yet the V3 only includes one USB 3.0 port and two USB 2.0 ports? The battery capacity is also mediocre, and the plastic chassis isn’t going to win any design awards. As for the display, low contrast low resolution LCDs are everywhere, sadly, so at least that doesn’t stand out as a major flaw compared to competing offerings. There are other compromises as well: the use of DDR3-1333 memory instead of DDR3-1600 for the system may not matter much, but going with DDR3-1800 RAM on the GPU instead of GDDR5-4000 certainly cuts into the performance potential. On the bright side, Acer has a great keyboard layout and has ditched their old flat floating island keys, and the performance is best in class for the price.
From the competition, looking at Ivy Bridge i7-3610QM laptops you can get an ASUS R500VM for $800 (8GB RAM, 750GB HDD, and 15.6” LCD but with a GT 630M GPU). Toshiba has their Satellite S855-S5266 for the same $780 price as the V3-571G, but they use an AMD HD 7670M GPU (with 6GB RAM, 640GB HDD, and the same 1366x768 15.6” LCD spec). Acer also has a larger version of the V3-571G, the V3-771G-9875 for $830 (6GB, 750GB HDD, GT 650M, 1600x900 17.3” LCD). Beyond those laptops, prices on quad-core Ivy Bridge go up from there, often giving you integrated-only HD 4000 graphics until you get into the $1000+ range.
If you prefer the AMD Trinity route, sticking with the top A10-4600M, you can get the Toshiba S855D-S5253 for $660 that we mentioned earlier (6GB, 750GB HDD, 1366x768 15.6” LCD, and HD 7660G—Amazon lists incorrect GPU information, incidentally), or there’s a similar Toshiba S855D-S5256 that adds Blu-Ray support for $700—or there’s the S875D-S7239, a 17.3” notebook with a 1600x900 display for $750. Lenovo has a notebook with virtually identical specs (but obviously a different chassis) with the IdeaPad Z585 starting at $722. And last but not least (expensive) is the HP Pavilion dv7-7010us, a 17.3” 1600x900 notebook again with the same 6GB RAM + 750GB HDD starting at $750 online. Unless the aesthetics or design of one of the other models really suits your fancy, I’d recommend either sticking with the least expensive Toshiba S855D models, or go for the Acer V3-571G.
What about those who are looking for something higher quality than this Acer? You need to determine your priorities first, naturally, as well as how much you're willing to spend. Just as a high water mark, if you want the same performance but with great build quality and a "real" LCD, Lenovo's T530 will set you back $1700 or more (with i7-3720QM, NVIDIA NVS 5400M, 4GB RAM, and 500GB HDD it's around $1700; upgrade to 8GB RAM and a 32GB SSD cache and you're looking at $2000+). Dell's Latitude E5530 is more reasonably priced but drops support for quad-core CPU and only has integrated graphics: $1250 will get you i5-3320M, 8GB RAM, 500GB HDD (no SSD caching option for now), and a 1080p display. There's also Dell's new XPS 15, with a 1080p display, SSD caching, i7-3612QM (35W quad-core), and GT 640 GDDR5, all in an attractive aluminum finish; it will set you back $1700 for such a configuration. More affordable options (e.g. Dell's Inspiron 15R Special Edition) drop the price back down into $1000 range, but build quality tends to drop along with the pricing.
Acer doesn’t hit a homerun with their V3 line, but they do hit a very enticing price point. I’d still prefer spending more money to get a laptop with a better display and a chassis that isn’t so glossy, but I can certainly understand how back-to-school shoppers will be swayed by the low price tag and the performance. Can you find higher quality laptops? Certainly. You can also find faster laptops, or laptops with better displays, improved battery life, or even lower prices. What you won’t find are laptops that deliver quad-core Ivy Bridge with an Optimus-enabled Kepler GPU for less money (at least not right now). It may not be the sexiest notebook on the block, but the Acer V3-571G will certainly crunch numbers, encode videos, and even play games as well as laptops that cost hundreds of dollars more.
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rwei - Thursday, July 5, 2012 - link
I'm in favor of the "repeatedly beat the manufacturers with a stick for using crappy screens" approach. Better to complain loudly than to suffer in silence.Though, I've noticed that these days most of the Anandtech reviews spend less time lamenting the screens - more like a line or two saying "meh, ANOTHER crappy screen", rather than the old reviews where it was not uncommon to see a 500+ word diatribe on how bad screens were the root of all sin.
When I switch from my Envy 4t (14", 1366x768, sigh) to my Envy 17 (1080p upgraded LCD), it always startles me. That the 17's screen is so much bigger and yet STILL has a denser screen never fails to impress on me how bad the 4t's screen is. And that's not even discussing the colors and contrast...
Such a shame, because the 4t and so many other laptops would be fantastic machines they didn't have such awful screens.
kmmatney - Thursday, July 5, 2012 - link
90% of people I know would be fine with a Core i3 laptop, priced around $400. I just bought an HP laptop (for someone else) at Microcenter at that price, and it's not bad for the price.I feel this Acer laptop is in a funny place - it has the screen of a $400 laptop, and the processor of a more expensive one. It is too expensive for me to want to buy for personal use, and yet too cheap for a business - my laptop budget for my job is around $1200.
jmunjr - Thursday, July 5, 2012 - link
Keep reviewing as many laptops as you can, but make it clear to readers how poor the screen is, make it very clear.cknobman - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
I may not be in the majority (of the masses at least) but I refuse to buy a laptop with a screen resolution below 1600x900.Heck last laptop I purchased was in 2010 and even then I refused to go lower than 1600x900.
CSMR - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
Could be good for someone wanting a laptop to connect to different external displays (e.g. work, home office setups), who would just use the internal screen on occasion.benoitlevesque - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
720P IS GREAT for cheap gaming laptop. At this resolution its fairly easy to get decent FPS even with high details. If the resolution was 1080p the GPU would struggle way too much and you would be stuck with mediocre FPS even at low details. If the only thing you want is web browsing and office work, this is not a good laptop for you IMO.whatthehey - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
Try telling this to older people that can't read text on 720p displays. Or try explaining to someone why they need to spend an extra $200+ for a laptop with a better display when "It looks fine to me. What did you say was wrong with it?"You techno snobs (aka "enthusiasts") are delusional when it comes to what makes for a good laptop or desktop in most people's eyes. They want it to be fast enough, but more importantly they want it to be affordable.
If you want a high quality laptop with an excellent display, go buy a MacBook Pro Retina for $2100+. Meanwhile, the average consumer will buy this $800 laptop that apparently doesn't deserve a review, and in a couple years they'll be another $800 laptop to replace it, and they'll be perfectly content not knowing how awful their system is.
You probably also tell everyone you know that they shouldn't but Dell or HP desktops and should just build their own. Then they can get a GTX 680/HD 7970 graphics card instead of the horrible GT 630/HD 7570 most prebuilt systems ship with (or God forbid, the integrated HD 2500/4000 graphics). Except, for the hundreds of millions of adults that never play games, having that extra graphics horsepower means diddly.
CSMR - Thursday, July 5, 2012 - link
Ridiculous, the better the quality of screen (higher resolution, better contrast, better viewing angles etc.) the easier it is to read text. You can measure this by speed of reading, and fatigue. Ordinary consumers buy poor quality displays because mainly they are not informed. I am not saying everyone should buy a high end display, but producing a reasonable quality display in 2012 is not expensive.JarredWalton - Friday, July 6, 2012 - link
I'd disagree with this, at least for older users. I have encountered so many >40 people that can't handle even using native resolution on a 24+ 1080p display. I helped set up a dental office for example where all of the secretaries and receptionists (40-60 years old) complained like crazy until I dropped the display settings down to 1366x768 -- yup, even on a 24" display, and even with them wearing their glasses.I'm not saying there's no point in good displays, but I would definitely agree that there's a large number of users that apparently can't tell a good LCD if it walks up an bites them in the rear. I'd wager the number of computer users that actually know (and recognize) a display with good contrast without having it explained over a five minute period (with a demonstration) is a lot smaller than most of our readers think.
Bottom line is that we'll still continue to call out bad displays in our reviews, but clearly there are a ton of people buying laptops with bad displays and they apparently don't notice and/or don't care. I call it the "Best Buy Phenomenon".
aliasfox - Monday, July 9, 2012 - link
I can never forget when an ex once pointed to the screen on her budget, bottom-of-barrel HP laptop and told me 'this is how pictures are supposed to look' and prefered the washed out low-contrast light bleeding screen to the IPS on my iPad.It's gotten to the point where some people simply can't even tell when they're experiencing quality:
- Prefering low light P&S pictures to an SLR
- MP3s from a blackberry speaker to a CD from my (very nice) sound system, just to name a few more examples
I'm all for trying to show people the difference, I just get the feeling I'll be branded elitist if I try.