Acer R7 Review: Something Different

I’m going to stuff all of the benchmarks onto one page for this review; there’s really nothing noteworthy about the performance of the R7, at least on the CPU and graphics side of things. Battery life and display quality are a bit more important, but given the timeliness of this review (or the lack thereof), most of what we wanted to say was covered on the previous pages. So, here are the benchmarks, using our updated 2013 mobility suite. I’ll save a bit of short commentary for after the break.

First, here’s a quick overview of the laptops we’re including in our graphs. With the update to our 2013 mobile test suite, we’re somewhat at the mercy of our results database. Most of our comparisons that are meaningful are going to be with Ultrabooks, and given that were dealing with basically Ultrabook hardware the Acer R7 posts similar performance. We tossed in the MSI GX60 Richland APU notebook as a comparison, not because the notebooks are similar but because the A10-5750 APU more or less competes with Ivy Bridge ULV processors. Note that we did not run every benchmark on every laptop, so some charts might be missing certain laptops.

Whew! That’s a lot of benchmarks, and there are even more results in Mobile Bench – like if you really want to know how the R7 handles our gaming suite, for example, it’s there! If you don’t want to look but want a short summary, only one game gets above 10FPS at the Enthusiast settings, and just barely; with Mainstream most of the games fall in the 10-20FPS range, so basically unplayable. Even our Value gaming settings are mostly too much for the HD 4000, though most of the Windows 8 games in the Store are far less demanding and will run just fine – no surprise given most of those are targeting Windows RT, which means GPUs that are often less than half as fast as the HD 4000.

Elsewhere, CPU performance is about where you’d expect it: lower than Core i7 ULV/ULT, and similar to other Core i5 ULV parts. The hybrid storage solution means that PCMark7 doesn’t score quite as well as pure SSDs, but it’s still a huge step up from what you’d get from a pure HDD setup (e.g. GX60). Since I just mentioned the GX60, it’s also interesting to note that Core i5 ULV generally posts better CPU performance than AMD’s Richland APUs – though the second pass of x264 HD at least put AMD slightly ahead. GPU performance is nothing to write home about; it’s more than sufficient for running most Windows tasks, but anything graphically intensive is best off served by a dedicated GPU (or at the very least Intel’s Iris HD Graphics Iris Pro).

Battery life isn’t particularly stellar, but we’ve also seen worse – sometimes much worse. Realistically, four hours of light use is possible off a single charge, while heavier workloads will bring you closer to 2.5 hours. That puts the R7 slightly ahead of the Lenovo X1 Carbon in most tests, but only thanks to its higher battery capacity. In terms of normalized battery life, the R7 places fourth from last of the tested notebooks, and given that Clevo typically doesn’t optimized very well for power use and the MSI GX60 is classified as a gaming notebook, only the win over the HP Spectre XT TouchSmart is really worth mentioning. When we start to look at Haswell-based notebooks, even though Ivy Bridge was pretty good it looks pretty poor in light of what’s now available. Apple’s MacBook Air 13 runs at different OS, but the MSI GE40 has a quad-core Haswell CPU and a slightly larger battery, with about 50% more battery life than the Acer R7.

Wrapping up the benchmarks, as I mentioned before, the one standout item in the R7 is the display. Contrast is excellent, and color quality is at least decent – the 85% color gamut is actually a bit overblown, however, as some of the colors are actually outside of the Adobe RGB 1998 color space while others fall far short (green in particular is lacking). Still, the great viewing angles offered by AHVA combined with good overall performance definitely deserve commendation.