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

Decent Mobile Gaming

Where the application performance of the 5551G is nothing special, the gaming prowess is far more pronounced. Yes, NVIDIA has some compelling options with their 400M Optimus enabled laptops, but if all you want is the ability to game at 768p and reasonable detail the HD 5650 will suffice. It typically goes up against the GeForce GT 420M/425M and wins in as many titles as it loses, but where you only find NVIDIA in Intel-based laptops costing upwards of $800 these days, AMD has partners like Acer and HP shipping HD 5650 in sub-$700 notebooks with AMD processors. In most cases, the P520 processor is enough to keep the 5650 fed with data, so this is a reasonable up-to-date look at how AMD's midrange GPU compares to the latest 400M NVIDIA chips; the exception to this is low detail gaming, where the CPU is often the bigger bottleneck, and that's where we start.

Bad Company 2 is clearly CPU limited, as you can see by comparing the low score with the medium result below. That's the only title where the 5551G clearly falls short of the competition, and with the HD 5650 there's really no need to run at minimum detail. Interestingly enough, BC2 is also the only title where the A660D surpasses the 5551G, so it's the rare game that manages to leverage quad-core processing. (We assume the latest Medal of Honor would also qualify, given it uses the same engine.)

Everywhere else the P520 + 5650 is right in the thick of the GeForce GT 330M/335M/420M/425M results, with a slight edge in DiRT 2, Left 4 Dead 2, and STALKER: Call of Pripyat. Even StarCraft II, a game known to be quite demanding of your CPU, runs quite well—the 2.3GHz CPU clock ends up putting the 5551G 47% ahead of the Toshiba A660D in that game (though it appears the GPU clocks are also a factor). Besides the above results, we also ran Mafia 2 and Metro 2033, both of which can kill midrange laptop GPUs. Mafia 2 manages 36FPS at minimum detail, but Metro 2033 is a demanding slug and checks in just shy of the 30FPS barrier with 28.6FPS; you'll have to drop to 720p to get Metro above 30FPS, but it's not that big of a loss considering any of the STALKER games rates as a superior experience in my book.

As we move the settings up to our "medium" standard, the 5551G stays about the same in BFBC2 with 33FPS, it holds a clear lead in DiRT 2, ekes ahead in Mass Effect 2, falls to GT 330/335M in STALKER, and splits the difference in L4D2. StarCraft II is the one title where 420M/425M hold a clear lead over the 330/335M, as well as the 5650. We're not sure how much of the lead is CPU and how much is GPU, but it looks like 400M is far more optimized for StarCraft II than 300M. Anyway, the important metric is that the 5551G is playable at medium detail in every title in the above list. Adding in our other two titles sans graphs, Mafia 2 also squeaks by at medium detail with a result of 31FPS but Metro continues to drop and is now at 26FPS.