Acer Aspire V3-571G-9435: The Value Proposition
by Jarred Walton on July 4, 2012 4:25 AM ESTAcer V3-571G Battery Life, Thermals, and Acoustics
I mentioned in the introduction that there were three areas where I feel Acer made some unnecessary compromises. One was the choice of LCD, the second was the choice of hard drive, and the third was their battery capacity. The V3-571G comes with a 6-cell 48Wh battery, and while it’s not the end of the world I still feel a 56Wh or 63Wh battery would have been easy enough to fit into the system without altering the price. Unfortunately, bean counters tend to look for every possible area of savings on budget laptops, and the drop in battery capacity probably shaved off dollar (give or take?) from the Bill of Materials. So how does that affect battery life?
Actually, considering the capacity the battery life isn’t so bad. Maximum possible battery life is 6.5 hours, and typical use battery life for surfing the Internet is still five hours. Anyone interested in using the laptop to watch movies on a longer flight will note that you get just under four hours of H.264 playback from the hard drive, which is only enough to make it through two medium length films. Looking at the normalized battery life results, the Acer V3 rates near the top of the pack, with only the M3 Ultrabook beating it in all three tests and AMD’s Trinity leading in two of the three tests (but losing in normalized H.264 playback). Had Acer equipped the V3 with a 56Wh battery like the M3 or Trinity, we’d be looking at another 30 to 60 minutes of battery life.
Looking at the thermal performance, it’s pretty clear that the V3 chassis provides sufficient cooling for the IVB and Kepler parts. During extended stress testing, the CPU did hit just under 90C on one core, but that was atypical—generally, under load we saw temperatures in the low to mid 80s. The GPU does even better, with a maximum temperature we recorded during stress testing of just 68C.
Noise levels are equally impressive, with idle noise near our testing floor of 30dB, coming in just slightly higher at 31dB. Under heavier CPU or GPU loads, noise creeps up to 33.5dB, with periodic increases to 34.5dB. With a maximum load on the CPU and GPU, we did manage to reach and stay at 35.6dB pretty much as long as we let the testing continue, but that's still pretty quiet for a laptop under full load. The only real concern I have with noise levels is that it appears we’re at maximum fan speed when we’re hitting ~36dB. Why is that a problem? It means that if the laptop happens to be in a more extreme environment (say, Arizona summer weather, with you sitting outside in 110F+ heat), there’s no room for the fan to try and compensate for added heat.
I actually covered the exhaust with my hand for a couple minutes to see if I could get a higher fan speed, with no success (and an uncomfortably hot hand). Interestingly, rather than getting hotter it appears both the CPU and GPU throttled a bit—or at least, I didn’t see core temperatures increase beyond the previously measured highs. This is worrisome as I have a friend with an older Gateway P-series FX notebook that behaves in a similar fashion, only now he’s getting to the point where the 3-year-old notebook occasionally overheats and crashes—something it didn’t do during the first couple years of use. Will the Acer V3 behave similarly in a couple years? Only time will tell, but I’d feel better if there was at least one or two more notches on the fan speed. I’d rather have a loud laptop that runs stably than a quiet laptop that crashes.
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bji - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
What is the difference? I thought they were the same thing?earthrace57 - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
They aren't, chicklet is far nicer to type on, it is where the keyboard is more of ingrained into the body of the laptop. Floating island keyboards are well....like floating over the body of the keyboard, one little part sticking down to support the entire key, its really bad for typing, especially if you type with the weight of a feather and don't always hit the center of the keys (I hope this is easy enough to read).JarredWalton - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
Some places have referred to some chiclet styles as "floating island". We have used the term to refer to the old-style Acer keyboards. There's some overlap, of course, but here's a couple closeups of what the old and new Acer keys look like:New Acer V3:
http://images.anandtech.com/galleries/2138/Acer%20...
Old Acer:
http://images.anandtech.com/galleries/2138/Acer%20...
Both keys "float" in one sense (the small connector in the middle), but the spacing between the keys is the real issue with the old style -- without looking, it's easy to lose track of where your fingers are on the keyboard. The feel is just... [shudder].
3dgeneralist - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
I love acer laptops. Bang for the buck! Owned several laptops. Last one I switched from an Asus core2duo laptop to an Acer i7 laptop. My Asus would reboot after 3 years of heavy use in 3d rendering so I sold it. Had a choice to buy a macpro or acer i7. Needless to say I bought the acer instead. The price for the macbook pro was double with only an old nvidia 9600 card and dualcore only. Ridiculous!Now my acer i7 is on its third year and no problems yet. Heavy use in 3d rendering and video editing on the go.
I actually bought a netbook n2600 from gateway knowing its a sister company from acer. Again its a good buy compared to other brands like toshiba, samsung with the same features. I'm not surprised this price point has the most sales for laptops. Only hardcore gamers really buy 1000USD plus laptops.
san1s - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
Some commenters here are ridiculously arrogant. I am part of the population that buys these laptops (I bought a similar one last year, $750 with i7 quad core and GT 540m). I am a college student, and can't afford Macbook Pros that cost twice as much (or more) while only offering the same amount of performance. This doesn't mean that I shouldn't be allowed to use my computer for purposes that usually requires lots of computing power. I use it as my desktop and connect it to an external monitor, and I can take it with me when I need to take notes. I would love a higher resolution matte IPS screen and a larger battery, but I understand that these are compromises required for the price.karasaj - Thursday, July 5, 2012 - link
I like the mid range priced laptops! Did you mention that you will be reviewing the TimelineU M5 as well soon? And hopefully other laptops in that area/range? I like reading about the 800-1k range, since that seems to be what I'll be spending next :PJarredWalton - Thursday, July 5, 2012 - link
We should have a Timeline M5 as well as the Aspire S5 (I think those are the right model names) in for review soon. I also have a Samsung Series 7 coming, should be some ASUS Ultrabooks, and Dell's new XPS 15 among others. For the gamers out there, we're also hoping to have GTX 680M vs. HD 7970M notebooks ready for testing in the near future. :-)karasaj - Thursday, July 5, 2012 - link
Awesome! I imagine it's too greedy of me to ask when these reviews will be up? :) I'm strongly considering the TimelineU m5 and I'm trying to decide if the cheaper cost is worth it over something like the Vizio notebook.JarredWalton - Friday, July 6, 2012 - link
They're supposed to be on their way right now, so hopefully we'll get them in the next few days. Once we have them, 1-2 weeks at most before the reviews are up.karasaj - Friday, July 6, 2012 - link
Awesome!