Fancy a new machine.... is it worth the upgrade?

Vince

Vince

Vince

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Joined
30 Oct 2003
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Current machine is an Acer 5942g spec:

I5 M520
4gb ddr3
ATI Radeon HD 5650 1gb DDR5
650gb hdd

The machine im looking at is an aspire 5560g with the following spec:

AMD QC A8-3500M
8GB RAM ddr3
750GB HDD
AMD Radeon HD 6650M 1gb DDR5

My current machine is now about a year old and I have the budget to upgrade through work. Usage is mainly work, coding, batch processing of large coding tasks, sharepoint dev, vm ware workstation etc.

When I am not working I like to have a little game on mainly league of legends.

So should I take the plunge?
 
I will do a little side by side review with framerates etc. The reason I am replacing the current one is that the down key is slightly broken and because the keyboard is backlit im looking at £100 to replace.

Instead of spending the £100 plus the cost of a new HDD I just though... buy a new lappy...
 
Ok so its arrived and so far I love it, ok so it isn't in some ways as specced as the 5942g in that the keyboard is not backlit, there is no finger print reader or blue ray drive. Not to mention that the chassis (specifically around the screen) is not particularly sturdy and the keyboard is a similar design to the 5942g so not great, but.... the spec sheet when I bought it said that this baby has a 6650M ati gpu, and well, they wern't lying but it also has a 6620G amd gpu which lets you enable crossfire between the two to create a 6740G2 graphics solution. Bonus as I was sold on it just having a 6650.


On the plus side it is significantly less bulky than the 5942g that it is replacing and appears to have a fair amount less weight (handy when it treks to london with me each day).

So a few mandatory pics:









Now clearly as I have only got this today I can't comment yet but I am told that the battery life on the llano platform is fantastic for the performance so will no doubt comment on this later.
 
mrk1@1 said:
very nice, thanks for the pics

acer reliability here which is very poor:p http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18287269&highlight=startername_mrk1@1
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Thats if you believe all that... I have several acer machines (read more than 50) doing the rounds of the 5720 & 5730 variety, some have been in service for 4 years and are still working well. I even have a little stock pile of spare machines.



Way back when all the acers were made of poor plastic and had silver tops they were shocking, these days you will be hard pressed to differentiate build quality between these and any tosh, sony, asus or msi. In fact of them all I would discount msi and asus way before acer.
 
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yea, i have noticed the quality and finish seems to have improved a substantial amount with last years andthis years models :D

it a moot point anyway as their warranty extensions are so cheap £50ish for three years it is silly not to take one.

guessing it cost you around the £600 mark as well so great bang for buck
 
mrk1@1 said:
yea, i have noticed the quality and finish seems to have improved a substantial amount with last years andthis years models :D

it a moot point anyway as their warranty extensions are so cheap £50ish for three years it is silly not to take one.

guessing it cost you around the £600 mark as well so great bang for buck
Click to expand...

Slightly more than that inc vat but around £640 before vat so very reasonable indeed. There are other versions of the same machine with the dual core rather than the quad which can be picked up for late £500 mark but because it is replacing the i5 540m I feel that taking the dual would have been a fair downgrade. This is more of a side step with a slight performace gain.
 
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