The Acer Aspire S7-393 Review: Broadwell Comes To Acer's Ultrabook
by Brett Howse on October 5, 2015 8:00 AM ESTBattery Life and Charge Time
Broadwell brought a lot of nice changes over Haswell. The move to 14 nm transistors from the 22 nm of Haswell brought about lower operating voltages, which results in less power being dissipated. This of course means better battery life too. The CPU is only a small part of the overall power output of a notebook, especially at light workloads where most of the CPU can be power gated. The display is a big percentage of the overall power drain on light workloads, and other factors come into play too like the wireless card and even the SSD – or both SSDs in this case.
Something pretty remarkable is that Acer has sampled us nearly identical Aspire S7 models for the past three generations. That means that we have battery life results on an almost identical notebook going back to Ivy Bridge. All three S7 models all came with the same resolution display too. There may be some changes to backlight efficiency, but overall we can look at a single notebook and see how much more power efficient it has gotten in three generations which is pretty neat.
All tests are done with the default browser (now Edge) and the display set at 200 nits.
Light Battery
The light test consists of light web browsing with the display set at 200 nits. It is heavily influenced by the display, especially in 2015 where the processors are so power efficient at idle or close to it. The Aspire S7 does very well in this test coming in very close to the Core M powered UX305 from ASUS. Unsurprisingly it is no where near the Dell XPS 13 FHD model which blew past all other notebooks.
Looking at the past generations shows just how big of a jump notebooks have made in just a couple of years. The original S7 with Ivy Bridge got only 240 minutes, or 4 hours on this test, but the latest version gets 10.5 hours. Even compared to Haswell there is a big jump in efficiency.
Heavy Battery
The heavy test ramps up the workload significantly, with much heavier web browsing combined with a 1 MB/s file download and a movie playing. The CPU becomes a much bigger factor here along with the wireless card.
Once again, the S7 does a reasonable job on this test. It has fallen a bit behind some of the other notebooks but not by a big amount. The exception is the Core M UX305, and of course the Dell XPS 13.
It is a pity, but the Haswell version of the S7 was not run through this test so we do not have a result from it, but clearly Broadwell is a huge step up from Ivy Bridge in terms of efficiency. The latest S7 is 124% more efficient at this test than Ivy Bridge. Impressive stuff.
Normalized Results
Next, we divide the time by the battery capacity to remove that from the equation. This gives us an apples to apples comparison of efficiency across devices.
Acer has done a good job with platform efficiency, coming in as one of the higher results seen. It is really held back more by the 46 Wh battery, which is slightly below average as far as capacity on this size of an Ultrabook. Clearly a redesign would be the only way to squeeze in more battery capacity since it has not changed since the first S7. But despite a slightly smaller battery, the S7 still scores as one of the longest running notebooks we have seen, if you ignore the XPS 13 and its silly battery life.
Charge Time
The other side of the power equation is charge time, and while it may not be important to everyone, those times where you are travelling and only have a couple of minutes to grab some electrons before you move on having a quick charging notebook can be a big benefit. Acer has included a 45 Watt A/C adapter to charge the 46 Wh battery.
The Acer S7 takes a bit longer than most devices to get to 100% when it is powered up like it is in this test. It is always a trade-off to include a larger adapter because they can get big and heavy, and make it less useful to travel with.
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Sietse Vliegen - Monday, February 8, 2016 - link
OK. I've been using one for about a year now. I have the i7 with the 2560x1440 display. Simply a brilliant piece of equipment.Unlike some of you, I have no preference for a particular brand. But I needed a sturdy reliable machine as I am on the road most of the time for business. Hence, the price was also not a decisive factor. In the past I have used laptops from Samsung, Toshiba, IBM, Lenovo, Apple. All of them had issues sooner or later. Therefore, I do not believe that any particular brand will guarantee a trouble free laptop future. I'm sure I'll have some issues with Acer too, eventually. But so far so good and boy, I do like this machine, a lot.
At the time I looked at the HP Spectre . Promising, but sold out pretty much everywhere. Didn't like the rubber surface on the Dell XPS, gets stained after a while. Didn't like the hinges on the Lenovo Yoga 3, looks like a weak point. Not enthusiastic about the Macbook Pro 13 inch either, especially the rough edges. And I need a Windows machine, for business purposes, not a Macbook running Parallels desktop or similar. Looked at the Acer, couldn't figure out why they chose a SSD raid config either. But I did like the look and feel of the machine, and most specs were on par with the other machines.
Ended up buying the Acer, and I must say I am impressed. Build quality is excellent, sturdy aluminium top, gorilla glass cover. Heck, you can even use it as a whiteboard. In business meetings, everyone wants to know what type of laptop it is, and checks how thin/light it is.
I use it almost every day and it is 100% silent most of the time, only at full load the fan spins up, but never gets really noisy. The 2560x1440 display is simply gorgeous. Everyone loves it. No problems with scaling of fonts or apps using Windows 8.1 or 10 (never tried Windows 8).
I have no problem with the flimsy powerplug. In fact, I think it's an advantage that it easily unplug from the laptop when someone trips over the power cord. But obviously, Apple's solution is even better.
The keyboard is fine. Spacing is ok and I can type really fast without any problems. I would prefer separate function keys, though. The silver color of the keys does not bother me one bit. The only minor niggle I have is that the keyboard backlight makes a slight whining noise at maximum brightness. Throttle down a bit and it's gone.
I don't understand the issue the reviewer has with *only* two USB ports. I use a Logitech Ultrathin T630 bluetooth mouse, which doesn't need a USB port anyway. Occasionally I use a USB stick. That leaves at least one spare USB port.
The reviewer states also that the displayport and the mini HDMI port could have been combined. Whereas that may be true, the simple fact remains that in business environments, most projectors/beamers either have an HDMI or VGA connector. DisplayPort is still pretty scarce although I do use it at home. HDMI works 100% of the time. VGA uses a dongle which is not always compatible with old plasma screens, so I found out: the laptop freezes until you unplug it from the screen.
Finally, the battery lasts about 6-7 hours, depending on what it is I'm doing (mostly office apps and webbrowsing). For business use that is excellent. In fact, I can usually use it for several days without charging. My previous $1500 Samsung notebook lasted only 3 hours or so.
All in all, I am extremely happy with this machine and I would definitely buy it again.
maccomb - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
Hi,I also bought the Acer S7-392. The looks are amazing but that is subjective.
What is not subjective is how good the 2560x1440 screen is; the battery time; how thin and light it is. It's now August 2016 and I bought this pc (where I'm typing) long time ago... don't really know 2 years or 3 ago? The gorilla glass cover is great, no scratches, no stains, nothing. It still as nice as when bought. Same for the screen itself. The keyboard: I also feel the lack of the dedicated Function key row, but other than that, it's great and the best compared to other ultrthin I know (asus and lenovo). I also don't understand the complaints on the SSD raid 0. Either I'm ignorant or you are... this provides me with aprox 1GB/s transfer rate. Specially when moving movies around from SSD to 1gbps network or to a fast USB3.0 external disk. As far as a I know, only Sony Vaio had something similar (4xraid0 or someting). It's as ran windows 7.. which I loved, then upgraded to 8.1 which was so-so, and now finally Windows 10 which is a great OS (and I'm a strong linux supporter mind you, for servers).
I reached to this article just because what I really wanted is to know if there was a newer version to buy, with more memory or more disk. I'm an intensive business pro user with virtualization running Linux, and lots of Office and all day long email and stuff... So you see. It's a light, slim, hardcore machine. I actually think that Acer has a bad trackrecord and must have created this S7 at this price to try to change it's image. It's unfair people look this laptop down without even testing it. My previous machine was a ibm thinkpad and toshibas before that. Oh well I just hope they keep making money from this line so they keep developing it.
maccomb - Saturday, August 20, 2016 - link
Hi,I also bought the Acer S7-392. The looks are amazing but that is subjective.
What is not subjective is how good the 2560x1440 screen is; the battery time; how thin and light it is. It's now August 2016 and I bought this pc (where I'm typing) long time ago... don't really know 2 years or 3 ago? The gorilla glass cover is great, no scratches, no stains, nothing. It still as nice as when bought. Same for the screen itself. The keyboard: I also feel the lack of the dedicated Function key row, but other than that, it's great and the best compared to other ultrthin I know (asus and lenovo). I also don't understand the complaints on the SSD raid 0. Either I'm ignorant or you are... this provides me with aprox 1GB/s transfer rate. Specially when moving movies around from SSD to 1gbps network or to a fast USB3.0 external disk. As far as a I know, only Sony Vaio had something similar (4xraid0 or someting). It's as ran windows 7.. which I loved, then upgraded to 8.1 which was so-so, and now finally Windows 10 which is a great OS (and I'm a strong linux supporter mind you, for servers).
I reached to this article just because what I really wanted is to know if there was a newer version to buy, with more memory or more disk. I'm an intensive business pro user with virtualization running Linux, and lots of Office and all day long email and stuff... So you see. It's a light, slim, hardcore machine. I actually think that Acer has a bad trackrecord and must have created this S7 at this price to try to change it's image. It's unfair people look this laptop down without even testing it. My previous machine was a ibm thinkpad and toshibas before that. Oh well I just hope they keep making money from this line so they keep developing it.