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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StormyParis - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
It's an article of faith among tech reviewers that SSDs are where it's at nowadays. I have doubts:1- Size: especially on a laptop, I'd rather have a large HD on which I can stick a few games, 10+ hours of films for me and the kids. AN SSDs pretty much means you *have* to carry an external HD. Or read getting bored.
2- Reliability: the only reliability survey I ever saw says SSDs fail on average almost twice as much as HDDs.
3- limited use case: very few apps do a lot of disk I/O once launched, and 4GB systems mostly don't swap, so SSDs are mostly useful during boot and app launch. Also, many users now do sleep/hibernation with apps open, instead of a full reboot + apps relaunch. That makes for a scarce few seconds when the SSD will be felt.
I'm fairly sure reviewers aren't needing hours of videos during their reviews (they're at work, not snowed in with the kids ^^), do full startups (and few of those), and are given somewhat pre-tested units. Isn't there a big disconnected between reviews and users ?
Omoronovo - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
1. For a laptop, you're unlikely to have many games installed that are dedicated, hardcore games that take up 25GB of space each. Diablo 3 et al are all relatively large games, certainly, but you will know which ones will be playable on a machine like this and you will be clever enough to plan accordingly. As for movies, having anything higher than 720p on a machine with this resolution is pointless; and even at maximum quality (again, ruined on a panel of this quality, but for arguments sake), you're talking about 40GB of movies for 10 hours of potential playback. A 128GB ssd would be enough to cater to both of these with space to spare.2. Unless you can cite your source for this survey, we can't really comment on its validity. Solid state drives have come a long way; I have no doubt that drives like my first generation Indilinx-based SSD have higher failure rates, but that's the price for early adoption. They are far, far more reliable now, with Sandforce being able to de-dupe and compress data so that only a fraction of nand is physically written to (whereas early Indilinx based drives had insane write amplification, wearing nand far faster than necessary for the sake of performance).
3. SSD's make a tangible "snappiness" improvement to your machine. This is especially noticeable with Windows due to the way it prioritizes data in ram. Take a theoretical example: Opening control panel. On a standard disk based system, each and every file called needs to be accessed from disk; excluding those files already loaded (like the ui elements as those are shared with all standard explorer windows). If there are 30 files to access, with a standard disk you will have as much as 450ms latency to get all of those files loaded into ram and the panel opened, not to mention any processing time (ordering of icons and such). This is only half a second, that is true. Scale this up with all file and folder access on the machine (from all programs, devices, and services, bearing in mind that when multiple programs try to access the disk (HDD) at once, the latency is exacerbated), and you quickly realize why using an SSD makes such a huge improvement to the day to day usability of a machine.
In my case, personally, I noticed far more of an upgrade in my day to day use of my machine when I upgraded to a SSD, than I did upgrading to a core i7-920 from a Core 2 duo E7200.
One final point I'd like to make: Although this laptop doesn't, there is nothing preventing a manufacturer dropping optical storage and using the space for a hybrid disk drive and SSD setup. When Windows 8 ships and OEM's start tearing into the Storage Spaces feature, "normal" people won't even have to go out of their way to move bulk data onto the disk drive, as windows will do it automatically and merge the SSD and HDD space into one contiguous area. Just something to think about.
Rollo_Thomasi - Thursday, July 5, 2012 - link
Even if the OEM:s usualy favors an ODD over a SSD HDD combo you can simply replace the ODD yourself.Here is an article on that:
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/131697-ivy-br...
Christopher29 - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
1. Agreed, size still is not enough ...2. Completely untrue - see forum xtremesystems thread: SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm/page195 - where users intentionally try to wear out SSDs, most of them hold from 600TB - 800TB, and 256GB Samsung 830 holds 2,500TB Host writes. Everyone died after stating correct S.M.A.R.T warnings.
For your perspective, I have written 3,8TB of data on my SSD since 2009 and this is 1/200 (0,5%) of possible writes that this SSD will handle - in other words - this SSD will outlive two to three laptops in which it will be used.
3. You tottaly don't know (and probably used) anything what You've just written in this point.
piroroadkill - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
What are you even talking about? You can get 256GB SSDs for a very reasonable price these days, job done.Less power use, less likely to die in the manner that is MOST caused by use in laptops - knocking the heads around...
I would say maybe you can't afford an SSD, but really, very recently the prices have come right down to the point where there's no reason not to have one..
jabber - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
Yes I picked up a SATA2 120GB SSD for $100 a few weeks ago.Why SATA2 well as my laptop only runs SATA2 I felt it pointless to get a 500MBps capable SSD when it will only run at half that speed.
Oh and its cheaper. Anyway instead of the WD Black 320GB drive giving me 85MBps I now have an SSD giving me around 275MBps. Big improvement especially in access times.
zorxd - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
$780 is a high end laptop. Most people by laptops cheaper than that. This review sounds like the review of a BMW by a Ferrari owner, saying that the BMW is OK if don't care about cheap build quality and bad performance.zorxd - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
The average selling price of a windows laptop was $513 in the US in February 2012.JarredWalton - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
Where exactly does that stat come from, and what happens if you remove netbook class hardware from the list? Netbooks (and ultraportables like the 11.6" stuff with Brazos) are very inexpensive, but if people want to complain about this Acer's quality they should be even more harsh on such laptops. Regardless, $780 is hardly high-end for a laptop; it's at most lower-midrange pricing.zorxd - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
http://blog.laptopmag.com/the-average-pc-laptop-co...netbooks or not, $780 is still much more than the average price for a laptop.
And this is only in the US, a rich country. The average of the world is probably much lower.