Acer Aspire V5-171 Notebook Review: The Death and Rebirth of the Netbook
by Dustin Sklavos on November 21, 2012 3:01 PM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- Acer
- Ivy Bridge
- Aspire V5
- Ultraportable
- Notebooks
Conclusion: A Killer Bargain
While I try to approach my reviews without much bias, or at the very least leave that bias checked at the door, I'll admit I haven't had the best impressions of Acer's products when I've reviewed them, and I certainly never imagined I'd ever buy one for myself. When I read about the Acer Aspire V5-171, I approached it with a heady mix of skepticism and optimism: I was pretty sure there would be some dealbreaking problem with it (I'm incredibly picky when it comes to the computers I personally use), but I was hoping that it would be a diamond in the rough.
The V5-171 is not without its faults, many of which undoubtedly stem from Acer's push to get it to market at the remarkably low price tag it's currently at. The chassis is plastic, and at the outermost corners it's not the firmest build in the world. While the chiclet keyboard is a huge improvement over the old floating island keyboards Acer used to employ, it's still a bit on the mushy side. Relative battery life is at least competitive, but absolute battery life is pretty poor. In an era where we can get five to six hours of running time out of most notebooks, just barely scraping four useful hours surfing the internet is brutal. Finally, I still remain absolutely perplexed by manufacturers who smartly eschew glossy plastic for the majority of the build...and then put it on the screen bezel, the number one place where fingerprints are going to be picked up.
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With all that said, there's a hell of a lot you can forgive if the price is right. Just like I'd happily take home an AMD E2-1800-based netbook if they were priced appropriate to their performance (read $300-$350), I'm willing to put up with some of the V5's problems simply because of the stellar price-performance ratio. If you take the questionable battery life out of the equation and uninstall most of Acer's bloatware from the hard drive, you're left with a bargain notebook that really doesn't have any major usability issues. The keyboard, clickpad, and display aren't great, but they aren't awful either. The distance between the user and the metal isn't painful to cover.
The V5 hits almost the exact notes for my usage patterns. I do videography semi-professionally on the side, and the ability to take a three pound notebook with me to a show, shoot a performance, then convert the footage to a YouTube-ready format with QuickSync in under two minutes and copy it to the performer's flash drive that night makes me tremendously more efficient. Being able to comfortably indulge in my casual game of choice, Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013, while off the mains is wonderful, too. And finally, it's thin without being so thin that you start to make compromises when it comes to key depth, system noise, heat, and serviceability the way you do when you get to true ultrabooks.
I think either the i3-based version (currently only $399 on Amazon) or this i5-based model are potentially excellent companions for end users who need something portable and don't mind the truncated battery life. The savvy user will probably be able to eke out five hours of useful life just by knocking the brightness down a bit more, which makes it a little more palatable. The V5-171 isn't flawless, but it's a pretty powerful little system and a surprisingly worthy replacement for my venerable ThinkPad X100e.
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Dustin Sklavos - Thursday, November 22, 2012 - link
Well, me, for one.You make it sound like the battery lasts a whole fifteen minutes and the display borders on illegible. Neither of these is the case.
Four hours of useful running time isn't dire; my X100e ran for less during CES this year and still never ran down completely.
And yeah, the glossy display kind of sucks, but it still works and gets the job done.
In exchange, you have a system with a tremendous amount of performance on tap in a very portable form factor, with great thermals and noise and a low price. It's also far more responsive and enjoyable to use than an Atom netbook, and its IGP doesn't have the teething issues Atom's does.
Note also that this is NOT an ultrabook. It's simply an ultraportable, and for me at least, it's pretty ideal.
Calin - Thursday, November 22, 2012 - link
I think the money might buy you dual channel DDR (or interleaved or whatever it's called). If this is the case, there is quite a bit of extra graphic performance to be had, I think. Anyway, $200 is probably overpriced even soMrSpadge - Thursday, November 22, 2012 - link
The tested version already has dual channel (there are no 6 GB modules..), And most of the price increase is due to the CPU and is directly forwarded to Intel.Anonymous Blowhard - Thursday, November 22, 2012 - link
So glad that Acer decided to make this easily serviceable. Two DIMM slots, both on the bottom, and an easy-to-access HDD for a quick 7mm SSD upgrade? Love it.Battery life is a bit of a shame and the display is the usual budget crock, but like you said w.r.t Brazos laptops, if the price is right, you're willing to overlook some of these faults.
Matti - Thursday, November 22, 2012 - link
It's a joke to compare E-350 with i5 3317U (or E1200). Brazos are for Atom to compare with. Why not to include A6 4455M for comparsion, actually the tdp 17 W is just the same. It would be interesting to look at low voltage Trinity to perform against Intel ULV.Roland00Address - Thursday, November 22, 2012 - link
An a6-4455m is a 2 core (1 module) trinity part with 17w tdp, Its base clock is 2.1 ghz and it can turbo to 2.6 ghz. Compare this to an a10-4600m (the best laptop trinity)An a10-4600m is a 4 core (2 module) trinity part with a 35w tdp. Its base clock is 2.3 ghz and it can turbo up to 3.2 ghz. Thus the a10 has double the cores, as well as a 9% faster base clock, and a 23% faster turbo clock.
Well the i5-3317u (17w) is faster than the a10-4600m (35w) in both single and multithreaded tasks (the a10-4600m is faster in gpu). See the anandtech mobile bench.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/727?vs=600
In Cinebench R11.5 (Single-Threaded Benchmark) the i5-3317u scores 1.08 vs the a10-4600m 0.70 fps which makes the i5-3317u 54% faster in single threaded.
In Cinebench R11.5 (Multithreaded Benchmark) the i5-3517 scores 2.41 pts vs the a10-4600m 2.05 pts which makes the i5-3317u 17% faster in multithread.
There is no way a dual core a6 with lower clock speed can keep up with an i5 ivy when the quad core a10 is having problems.
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Now in graphics the a10 is faster than the i5 ulv ivybridge. But the a6-4455m has a lot less shader power. The a6 has 256 shaders instead of 384 (a10), in other words 66% of the shaders . In addition the a6-4455m has lower clocks 327 mhz instead of 496 mhz (a10), only 66% of the clock speed. Thus if the game is shader limited instead of memory, rop, or cpu limited the worse case scenario for the a6 ulv is that it will perform 43% as well as the a10. (In many games the a6 will perform a lot closer than the 43% since memory, rop, and cpu power does play a factor.)
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There are very few computers using the a6-4455m. AMD pretty much only got design wins with a couple hp 15.6" sleekbooks and a samsung 13.3" sleekbook. These a6 sleekbooks computers are all priced at 500 or greater. The i5 in this v5 on the other hand occupies a similar price range yet is in a smaller computer.
AMD just can't seem to gain any traction with the smaller size laptops.
MrSpadge - Thursday, November 22, 2012 - link
I like this form factor and the benefits a little more z-height brings over Ultrabooks. Personally I'd want higher quality (and would pay more for this), but may recommend this one to others.jeffkro - Thursday, November 22, 2012 - link
The best replacement for the netbook is the new chromebook laptops, nice light OS on light hardware. This thing is just a cheaper ultrabook.Death666Angel - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
I have the Travelmate 8172 with a Core i3 330UM (Arrandale ULV chips). I was considering buying the 1810 back in the day, but didn't like the glossy all over the place. The battery life with this unit is not as good (Arrandale ULV chips aren't that great at using less energy). But it still lasts me between 4 and 7 hours, depending on what I do with it. Build quality is great apart from one key that always fell off (which I could fix in 30 seconds with some pliers). This unit sounds like a great deal, it has a better chip, more RAM and is cheaper (I paid 650€ for my Travelmate). The downsides are the smaller battery and glossy display. If I had any reason to upgrade (I don't right now, hardly use the notebook these days), I would probably buy it or at least something similar. I don't like the Ultrabooks much, too much emphasise on style/size/weight and not enough on serviceability, price, usefulness. Still, I think Acer has come quite a way since they started out as the ultra-cheap vendor. :)Ignatius - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
I notice the HDD it comes with is only SATA II. Does anyone know if this Acer supports SATA III? It would seem kind of a waste to put an SSD in it to only get half the performance.