Acer V7-482PG-9884 Review: Everything You Need
by Jarred Walton on August 24, 2013 12:00 AM ESTConclusion: A Fine Balancing Act
As I mentioned in the introduction, every computer and laptop ends up being a balance between various goals. If you want a faster CPU and GPU, price will inevitably go up but so will the cooling requirements, which in turn means a heavier laptop. Touchscreens also add weight relative to regular displays, and the choice of materials for the chassis affects the weight as well as the durability and cost. It’s basically impossible to create a laptop that will be ideal for every single user out there – if you make a lightweight laptop, power users might want more performance; a fast and lightweight laptop might be possible, but then budget minded users will think it’s too expensive; etc. Acer goes for a middle-of-the-road approach, providing a decent level of performance with good build quality and an attractive aesthetic, with what I consider to be a reasonable price. There are certainly laptops that cost less, but in this case you get what you pay for.
The Acer Aspire V7 is quite possibly my favorite Acer laptop of the past five or more years. We’ve joked before that every PC laptop tends to come with (at least) one critical flaw; in the case of the Aspire V7, I can’t think of any clear failures. Some areas could be better, but there’s not a single element where I want to pull my hair out and groan, “What were they thinking?” The display is good, the speakers are good, the keyboard layout is good (even if I would prefer a gap between the backslash and enter keys), the laptop is built well, and the performance is certainly sufficient for most users. In short, I really like the Aspire V7.
So what areas could still use improvement? Probably my biggest complaint is with the lack of key travel on the keyboard. It’s not so bad that you can’t type on it, but it’s far from the most comfortable laptop keyboard I’ve typed on. I also wish that Acer had used at least a 128GB SSD in place of the 24GB SSD cache, as that provides a better overall experience in my opinion. Acer should have included 802.11ac WiFi, and that’s something I’ll say of any laptop costing over $800 going forward. Oh, and whose idea was it to move the power button to the side of the laptop? It might look nice to not have it on the keyboard area, but I managed to accidentally power off the V7 (and R7 and S7) at least a few times during testing in just a few weeks. The edge of a laptop is not a good place for such a button.
The final concern is the pricing; Acer is asking more than you’ll pay for a base MacBook Air 13, and even though performance is quite a bit better than the Air in some areas, the only company that can get away with charging Apple prices is Apple. So then we look at the $1300 MSRP and that’s the same price as the upgraded MBA13; however, Acer is tossing in a Core i7 processor, three times as much RAM, a GT 750M graphics chip, and a good quality 1080p touchscreen; Apple counters with arguably better build quality and a 256GB SSD. It may not have the same cachet as an Apple laptop, but it’s hardly a poor bargain. Hopefully we’ll see retail prices drop a bit further, down to $1200 or less, but $1300 seems like a reasonable price.
When we look at all of the things that the Acer V7 gets right, I end up doing something I rarely do. The Acer Aspire V7 warrants an Editor’s Choice Award, not because it’s perfect but because it’s about as close as I’ve seen in recent years. It’s really heartening to see Acer eschew their usual budget-minded compromises in order to provide a better overall experience, and I can only hope that the market will let them know that they’ve made the right decision in not cutting too many corners. We’re giving it our Silver Editors’ Choice Award, leaving room for improvement and potentially better products down the line (giving the GPU GDDR5 and having better keyboard travel would have likely pushed it up to Gold), but as far as mainstream laptops go I can’t immediately come up with a more compelling alternative that doesn’t have its own share of flaws.
Acer also has other V-series laptops available, and while I wish that they had the same sensibilities as the V7-482PG reviewed here, just looking at the spec sheets I can see that’s not the case. The V7-582PG-6421 has a 15.6” 1080p IPS display, but the CPU is a Core i5-4200U and the GPU is a rather questionable GT 720M (that's 96 Fermi cores with a 64-bit bus, if you're wondering); at least the price is $250 lower than the 482PG. Meanwhile the V7-582PG-9478 upgrades the CPU to an i7-4500U but drops to a TN 1366x768 display and a price of $1000. In short, while the core chassis may be similar, many of the extras that make the V7-482PG-9884 stand out seem to be lacking. So shop carefully, because there’s a fine line between greatness and mediocrity, and a few too many “minor” changes will often find you on the wrong side of that line.
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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.