November 21, 2008 5:56 pm GMT
Cheap Notebook for Gaming: The Acer AS5520G
by Gary IllyesIt’s quite frustrating to write about this notebook. While the review process of the Acer AS5520G was pleasant, I’m not sure about whether to recommend it or not. Why? While the notebook performed excellently the hardware from within the case is no-name, except the processor and the materials used by Acer are very poor quality.
Acer AS5520G: Appearance
The notebook looks good, that’s sure. It has that typical high-contrast Acer design which attracts the human eye: outside is dark (blackish) inside almost white (grayish). The plastic material is kinda soft, just as the keys of the keyboard. When you press a key you get the feeling that if you press it a bit more, it will brake. It’s very weird.
When you open the lid, the sight is pleasant: Acer chosen for the AS5520G a display with a low response time, 8 ms and which was built with “glare” technology, called by Acer CrystalClear. The display has very good visibility in almost any situation, less in extreme bright environments when the display is much more a mirror.
Performance of the Acer AS5520G
When Acer built this notebook, they were thinking about to create a notebook with very high performance but at very low cost. If we are thinking with clear logic, this is possible only if they put no-name hardware in the case. Starting from the video card, which has an NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS chipset, through the modem and lasting with the DVD-RW unit, everything is no-name. This fact however does not have impact on the AS5520G’s performance, but on the liability of the hardware.
In the performance tests the Acer AS5520G performed very well; not a miracle since Acer built it for performance. Three games were installed as usually, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, World of Warcraft and FEAR. Each game performed excellently even if the details were set to high.
Next test was viewing true high definition movies on the Acer AS5520G. Nonetheless to say that the play was flawless.
The high performance of the Acer AS5520G can be thanked to the high amount of DDR2 RAM, working at 667 MHz, the AMD Turion 64 X2 processor with 1MB L2 cache and working at 2GHz. The video card is a high performance NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS with 512 Megs of dedicated memory.
Final thoughts about the Acer AS5520G
Switching between operating systems was extremely easy since Acer provided each and every driver on its support website. Initially, the Acer AS5520G had Windows Vista Home edition installed; this is in conformity with Acer’s new philosophy which is about to spread genuine Windows Vista. Switching to any other Microsoft OS was easy enough to make me encourage anyone to change the initial OS, who doesn’t like it.
The AS5520G comes equipped with a 6 cell Li-Ion, but since the notebook has extremely high consumers, the notebook doesn’t last more than an hour and a view minutes, even with Vista’s intelligent power management knowledge. Playing a HD movie or playing a game reduces the time the notebook can run on batteries drastically.
Would I recommend it for you? The notebook performed extremely well in any situation, but under high load the temperature of the processor and the video card got hot, around 70 degrees in the case of the video card. The touchpad of the Acer AS5520G stopped responding after two days of use and the system cooler was very noisy.
My final verdict would be that the Acer AS5520G is a good notebook for its price (where I live its about $700), but if you want a reliable notebook, buy something else.
A.Faith on Sun, 1st Feb 2009 12:11 pm
I’m having a terrible problem with this kind of laptop I’ve bought one year ago. It’s heating at about 100 degrees Celsius and I can’t even reinstall my OS.
This kind of problems started during the summer, when I blamed the hot temperatures outside for the malfunctioning of my laptop, but today it seems failed to serve me.
Have you heard anything about this kind of problems? Can you give me a good advice, except sending it back to the shop I’ve bought it from? I believe my warranty expired and I’m in a pretty bad situation.
methode on Sun, 1st Feb 2009 12:28 pm
I’m sorry, but there’s no solution in this case which does not involve spending money.
The overheating most likely is caused by one of the coolers which started to malfunction in the summer. The cheap ones tend to fail when the air is already hot around them.
So, to be sincere, you have two solutions:
1. bite the bullet and go back to the shop even if the warranty has expired and you have to pay for the repair and the new cooler(s).
2. if you’re a techie person, you may want to remove the notebook’s back, turn it on and see which cooler is malfunctioning. When found, release it from its socket and smoothly pull it out, then run in a specialized shop to buy a new one with the old in your hand. Based on your location, I would guess that UltraProComputers have coolers for this notebook, one of our authors used to test products from their shop(s).
The worse case scenario is that you already baked one of the hardware. Let’s hope you did not…
A.Faith on Sun, 1st Feb 2009 2:17 pm
thanks for your fast answer. I think I will try to open it myself, because I bought it from eMag.ro and sending it back to them and wait ~20 days to come back from Acer Service it will drive me crazy. I also have to work over the internet and the old desktop is not very good for what I have to do.
anyway, I’ve also contacted a blogger that bought the same laptop as me and he confirmed that he also had a few minor problems related to overheating (http://www.scorpiono.com/personal/notebook-acer-as5520g-402g16mi-dual-core-tl-58-19ghz-2gb-160gb-bluetooth/).
I was wondering if you ever opened an Acer laptop and if you encountered any specific problems? I want to be prepared if anything goes wrong..
methode on Sun, 1st Feb 2009 5:45 pm
I don’t know the eMag.ro website/eshop so I can’t state anything regarding that. The Acer Service however in western Europe is quite fast.
The Scorpionon might be right, but I think that you won’t succeed by simply cleaning the vents and radiators. If it acts like that since summer, I guess they completely failed since then so a change will be required.
I didn’t have to open Acer notebooks yet, but usually they are not so complicated to open like a Vaio for example. It’s a matter of a few bolts if am not mistaken.
Please do post back with updates please, i’d be interested.
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