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

High Detail Gaming and 3DMarks

With a 768p LCD and HD 5650, native gaming at high detail settings is potentially viable in some titles. We've got comparative results at 900p, with the 5551G 768p High settings also listed.

First off, let's get this out of the way: 900p isn't playable in most of the games. 900p is 37% more pixels than 768p, and that's often enough to push the 5650 from playable to stuttering—and realistically, medium detail settings make the most sense for this sort of mobile GPU. Out of the tested games, only DiRT 2, Left 4 Dead 2, and Mass Effect 2 break 30FPS at 900p "high". If we drop to the native 768p, STALKER joins the 30+ group and the other titles run a bit faster. Note that getting 30+ FPS in STALKER and DiRT 2 requires you to run without the DX11 effects—which is sort of interesting, as DiRT 2 actually runs faster in DX11 mode at Low and Medium settings. Anyway, about half of the games can run at our "high" settings and native res while the others require "medium" (or 720p and "minimum" for Metro 2033).

3DMark

As usual, we've got our 3DMark results tossed in here for those that want them. We're only showing 06 and Vantage charts, though the Entry Level Vantage run isn't really that useful. If you'd like the other scores, we measured 19942 in 3DMark03 and 12270 in 3DMark05. Connecting the 5551G to an external LCD and running at the standard resolutions, 3DMark06 (1280x1024) scores 6242 and Vantage Performance gets 3086.