Acer V7-482PG-9884 Review: Everything You Need
by Jarred Walton on August 24, 2013 12:00 AM ESTAcer V7 LCD Analysis
A big part of what made both the Razer Blade 14 and the MSI GE40 so frustrating was that with all the good elements, both laptos botched the LCD. Thankfully, the V7 doesn’t have to come with that caveat. The LCD is a good quality AHVA panel from AU Optronics, and while colors aren’t perfect, they’re better than many alternatives. I wish that PC manufactures would start factory calibrating their displays, though, as out of the box the color accuracy is substantially lower than what our charts below show – I tested uncalibrated color accuracy and measured average Delta E of >10 out of the box. The color shift that happens when you load the calibrated profile is pretty drastic. Anyway, here’s how the LCD stacks up, post-calibration:
The contrast is excellent, which is one of the most noticeable things for most users, so that’s always good to see. Maximum brightness unfortunately is again lower than I’d like – I feel like we need at least 400 nits for laptops, particularly if they have glossy panels. You can use the V7 outdoors or in brightly lit environments, sure, but it’s less than ideal. As for color accuracy, my results are merely okay, and while gamut appears quite good, like the R7 I want to note that the greens are undersaturated while blues and reds are oversaturated.
The important thing is that the LCD at least delivers a good overall experience and won’t garner too many complaints. Compared to the many low quality, low resolution TN panels we’ve seen over the years, this is a great display. And if you use the touchscreen, I hope you remember to bring along a microfiber cloth for cleaning it….
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Seriously, as much as people may laud touchscreens, until we get displays that don’t show every little fingerprint, I’m more than happy to stick with a mouse/touchpad and keyboard. You don’t even want to see what a touchscreen looks like after a three year old is finished playing with it!
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JarredWalton - Saturday, August 24, 2013 - link
Build quality is an unknown, as is battery life and some other factors, but the bigger issue is that you just can't get it yet, at least in the US. I need to ping Gigabyte and see what's up, as the only place I can find it in the US says, "This product is not available and cannot be purchased. It has been discontinued by the manufacturer or vendor." But it might simply be in the pre-release phase.GrammarNietzsche - Saturday, August 24, 2013 - link
The "major flaw" with the P34G seems to be its TN panel. source: http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/laptops/1300168/gig...You can also see the color shift on YouTube videos of the P34G.
davejake - Saturday, August 24, 2013 - link
The Gigabyte specs page claims it to be 1080p AHVA (~IPS)http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx...
This might be another obnoxious case of the various country models being different.
Also, thanks Jarred for the response. The "Gigabyte NB" facebook page keeps talking about early september availability for the p34g-- later for the the p35k-- but I'm trying to not hold my breath.
Samunosuke - Saturday, August 24, 2013 - link
Been looking forward to this review ever since you mentioned it was coming, in your R7 review. I believe this particular SKU is seriously overpriced. The model available on the US ncix website comes with an i5-4200U, GT 750m 4GB,same 1080p IPS touchscreen and 500GB + 24GB storage for $899. To me this is a far better value proposition than the $1300 model. The i5 might be a bottleneck in some games but its not going to be too different from the i7.Comparing this to the Asus N550 and I feel that the N550JV-DB72T is a far better deal with an i7-4700HQ, same GT 750m (2GB), 1080p IPS touchscreen,all aluminum body, max 16GB RAM and 3 USB 3.0 ports. Although the Acer has an msata slot for ssd's, the Asus has an optical drive where the mechanical drive can be put while a 2.5" ssd occupies the main HDD slot. Weight and thickness favour the Acer but I'm willing to accept that. The Acer is $1066 for the touchscreen version and $969 for the matte non touch. Absolute no brainer.
JarredWalton - Saturday, August 24, 2013 - link
The ASUS N550 does weigh about 1.5 pounds more, let's not forget that, and it looks like the same basic design as the N56JV, which was good but still rather bulky, with more plastic in the chassis. If you're after something with higher performance than the V7, there are many options out there; if you want what is basically a gaming Ultrabook that can handle any moderate task you might throw at it, I think the V7-482PG strikes a nice balance. I would like to have the option for a 1080p matte non-touch if it could save $150, but sadly there isn't one.Funny enough, the NCIX version of the V7 is apparently a Canadian model (http://store.acer.com/store/acerna/en_CA/pd/ThemeI... This is one of the frustrating things with Acer, ASUS, and a lot of other OEMs: they have good SKUs that are only released in specific markets, and often I can't figure out why. I've never tried ordering from NCIX before, but for $899 (though it's backordered), the V7-482PG-6662 is basically giving you a slower CPU, smaller HDD and less RAM for $400 less. Of course, that's a "street price" and I suspect the 9884 street prices might end up in the $1100-$1200 range, making it a more reasonable upgrade.
GrammarNietzsche - Saturday, August 24, 2013 - link
The 9884 is available on the US NCIX site as well. I couldn't link it in this comment, so you'll have to remove the (dot)http://us.ncix(dot)com/products/?sku=83180&vpn...
JBaich - Saturday, August 24, 2013 - link
Congrats to Acer for reversing course on the "race to the bottom". RTTBSadly, it might be another 10 years for me before the name Acer doesn't resonate with garbage. They will, and should, suffer for a build-em-and-sell-em-cheap strategy. I'm not convinced.
Anonymous1a - Saturday, August 24, 2013 - link
I was wondering, given that the processor, despite being an i7, is still a ULT processor, and not even a quad-core, will this not be a limiting factor to the graphics card and will this laptop be able to render graphically challenging games?JarredWalton - Saturday, August 24, 2013 - link
The majority of games still don't really need more than one or two CPU cores, and with Turbo Boost you're still able to hit 2.7-3.0GHz on the i7-4500U. With a faster GPU it would be more of a bottleneck, but the GT 750M is clearly tapped out in most titles already, at least at our Mainstream settings. (You'll notice that overclocking the GPU RAM didn't help on the Value settings, but that could be more the GPU core not needing more RAM than a CPU bottleneck; I'd have to investigate more to say for certain.) I think a GTX 765M would probably be where we see the shift to being CPU bound with a ULT processor, but even then you can usually get >40FPS from the CPU if the GPU can manage, so you can turn up details to compensate if you had a faster GPU.This is where the MSI GX60 runs into problems with some games, as single-threaded performance of the A10 APUs is still significantly slower than even the ULV/ULT parts. It's pretty sad that an Ultrabook with a much slower GPU can outperform it in several of the games, even at Mainstream detail.
just2btecky - Saturday, August 24, 2013 - link
Acer Aspire V7-482PG-9884 has a funky name I'll never remember. I aspire:) for a name that's really cute.