The Acer AS6930 – Simply wow

I think I owe a pack of beer to our supplier for letting me testing this notebook. I tested in the past year about 10 notebooks –also wrote review about 5 or 6 –, but the Acer AS6930 crowned the past year with its performance, stability and, well, coolness.

The Acer AS6930 is simply beautiful: it’s amongst the first Acer notebooks which takes the advantages of the new “Gemstone Blue” (TM) design. And the first advantage for Acer is that — as our supplier said –, the people falls in love with the notebooks which follows the Gemstone Blue line.

The AS6930 notebook is advertised as multimedia notebook. It’s the first notebook which has a 16 inch (yeah, 16″) display and is capable of 16:9 aspect ratio. The 16″ is almost 15% more than what you get with a 15,4″ and this advantage makes the AS6930 perfect for watching HD movies. It has integrated HDMI output which makes perfect for linking the notebook to HDMI projectors or flat-screens.
The native resolution of the Acer HD CineCrystal display is 1366×758 and it performs well in almost any light. I say any, because in heavy sunshine it’s just as useless as any other LCD.

The native Dolby Home Theater support with True 5.1 channel output and the HDMI output revolutionizes the multimedia notebook concept.

The gaming tests were the coolest. We didn’t find ANY game at our supplier which didn’t work well on the Acer AS6930, and we didn’t have mercy when tested it as we’ve found the most resource eating games on the shelves: The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, FEAR, Dead Space, Grand Theft Auto IV.
The good performance is the result of the high-end hardware from within the shell:

• the graphics board, a GeForce 9600 GT with 512 MB DDR3 dedicated(!) RAM
• Intel Core 2 Due, T5800 processor working at 2GHz
• 4Gigs of DDR2 RAM

The storage space is kinda generous: 320 Gigs on a hard disk which spins up to max. 5400 revolutions per minute. Installing OSes was easy. Every Microsoft operating system recognized most of the hardware. Switching off AHCI (from the BIOS) in case of ANY Microsoft OS is necessary in this notebook’s case, too.
Finding the drivers for Vista was easy as Acer provided every driver for this notebook on the official support website. In XP’s case there is one issue: there are no drivers provided, because Microsoft hand in hand with the manufacturers makes everything possible to put Vista on as many PCs as possible.
To obtain drivers for the unrecognized hardware, we had to download the XP drivers from each hardware manufacturer’s support website.

The ergonomics were neither forgotten when Acer designed the AS6930. It has a full size keyboard which means that it has all the keys you have on the keyboard of your PC. The reversed “T” touch-pad is sensitive enough and it also has incorporated a biometric fingerprint scanner which assures the AS6930’s user that no one can access the files stored on the notebook. The battery life of the 6-cell LiIon battery is satisfactory, it averages around 3 hours.

And finally my personal thoughts. Where I live the Acer Aspire AS6930 is $1100 with 19% VAT included (around 820 euros). The notebook performed well in any situation and has a quite good battery life, so I think if you have the money to purchase it, do it. The Acer Aspire AS6930 is both beautiful and a power-plant.

Clevo M570 notebook – The Lamborghini Diablo of the notebooks

Ever heard of Clevo? I didn’t, so when I got the call to test something from this firm my first question was what’s a Clevo. Yeah, shame on me.

So the very beginning of the review is what I’ve learned about Clevo.

Clevo is a notebook and computer peripherals manufacturer from Taiwan. Interesting is, that they ship their notebooks as barebones. That means that the notebooks are half-assembled. But don’t worry, the firm doesn’t deal with end-users but with a very limited number of OEMs, who (custom) build the notebooks, then ship to resellers and end-users. So, when you get the notebook, it’s fully functioning.

Clevo is infamous because of the quality of the materials they use when building their notebooks. M570 is neither an exception. It’s extraordinarily beautiful. The materials for building this notebook are excellent, the mate plastic used is very pleasant and is very resistant to stitches. In one word: the finishes are perfect.

The keyboard is a full size one, something almost normal at 17″ notebooks. My only issue was that as they had to create the space for the numeric pad, they pushed the Home/End/PgDn/PgUp on the top of the cursor buttons and can be reached by pushing the Fn button and the appropriate cursor key simultaneously. I hate this solution and never could get used with it.
The touchpad on the other hand is very simple yet effective. It’s sensitive enough and the two buttons (right and left click) are responsive. I didn’t encounter a problem while using it. Just with like the fingerprint scanner. It always recognized my fingerprint without a single error.

The lid is made almost entirely of aluminum, less the top where is a strip of shiny plastic.
Unlike the other notebook manufacturers, Clevo has kept the old closing system by closing hook. A system which is very secure and easy to use.

The notebook is quite heavy, it has a weight of about 4 kg (all with battery), but I think this is normal; a monster like this with a 17″ LCD on the top of a graphic accelerator, nVidia 8800M GTX, neither is pillow-light. Due to its height, it’s unlikely you will take this notebook to trips. It’s excellent for office job or for home usages though.

The M570R1 from Clevo comes with a 17.1″ WXGA with an aspect ratio of 19 to 10. Unfortunately, the surface of the screen is shiny which makes the usage of the notebook difficult in very bright environments. But every downside has its opposite, namely that the shiny surface gives extremely vivid color and great visibility, even if viewing the screen from wide angles.
Also, it’s also quite annoying that the screen of the M570 suffers from backlight bleeding in about 60-70%, which is more than bad when watching movies.

Gaming and the Clevo M570

The notebook has been tested with 3 games as usual: The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, World of Warcraft and F.E.A.R.
I think it’s better I tell you some specs of the M570R1 first. The CPU is an Intel Core2 Duo T7500 (Merom) wich is working at 2.2 GHz under maximum load and with 4MB L2 Cache. The front side bus is working at 800 MHz. The model I got had 3 Gigabytes of RAM and an nVidia GeForce 8800M GTX video card, with 512MB GDD3 VRAM.
Now that you know the specs, you can imagine how the above games run on the notebook. Truth is, that the notebook has been made especially for gaming.

The Clevo M570 and different operating systems

Miraculously, Clevo provided all the drivers for all the Microsoft operating systems on a DVD; I mean, every driver. The switch between OSes was the easiest in my career.

Verdict on the Clevo M570

It’s a piece of art! I can recommend it without hesitation for anyone, both gamers and for the business class, too. Its autonomy is excellent in its class: 2 and a half hours for office jobs and browsing and an hour and 20 minutes for gaming.
Is this a must buy? Yes, even if it’s around $2300 (~€1800) where I live.

The Fujitsu-Siemens Esprimo V5535 – Tests and Review

I was asked the other day to review a Fujitsu-Siemens notebook, an Esprimo V5535. So here’s the review.
I tested the notebook one whole day, installed, better said tried to install 3 different operating systems and 2 different games: World of Warcraft and The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. I tried to view under every operating system I installed a HD(720p) movie, and finally I tested how much the batteries resist with and without power saver mode, again, under various OSes.
What you will read is my personal experience, I didn’t get payed to write a review, I tell you only what I encountered with a specific notebook.

Fujitsu-Siemens Esprimo V5535 specifications

The notebook I tested had an Intel Core2Duo processor (T7300), running under full load at 2 gigahertz (2000 MHz). The front side bus working at 800 MHz, the 4 MBytes of second level cache and the 2 Gigabytes of RAM makes this laptop extremely fast.
The WXGA display with anti-glare layer is visible and clear in almost all the situations, and the SiS Mirage 3+ graphics card just makes the picture even grater. The graphics card has 64 Mbyte shared RAM by default, you can set this up to 256 MBytes. If the SiS Mirage 3+ isn’t enough for you and your Esprimo, upgrading the notebook with a better graphics card using the integrated additional PCI express port.
Connecting to other devices shouldn’t be a problem either. The notebook comes with integrated 10/100/1000 ethernet card, modem and 3 USB ports. Connecting to an external display also becomes easy with the extra VGA output.

Linux, Windows XP and Vista on Esprimo V5535

The laptop came with Windows Vista and every single driver installed already. The DVD provided with the notebook also contained every possible driver for the system so future Vista re-installs will not be a problem.
Installing XP on the other hand can give some neat headaches. First of all, the 160 Gig HDD being SATA, will not be recognized by all the versions of XP. I tried with Windows XP Home edition and I had to provide the hard drive SATA drivers on a floppy disk – which is impossible as modern notebooks doesn’t have floppy disk drives- or CD/DVD. The latter is only possible if you previously downloaded the correct drivers from the Fujitsu-Siemens Support Website and wrote on a blank CD/DVD.

During installing XP Professional there was not even a single issue. Everything was loaded properly and XP found its own drivers for most of the components. The missing XP drivers for the Esprimo V5535 can be downloaded for every component from the official Support Website mentioned above.

Linux on the other hand can be much more a pain to install. The lack of support begins on the very beginning when the Cent OS distro didn’t find any hard drives where it could install itself. I have to admit that I didn’t bother to really install it, tho. The lack of the users which uses its notebook with a Linux OS made me decide to not fight to install it, and the fact that those who really want to install it, usually have the knowledge to do it.

HD movies, games and the Esprimo V5535

Thanks to the Esprimo V5535’s performance, a HD(720p) movie becomes extremely enjoyable. I also linked the notebook to a plasma screen via the additional VGA port, maximizing the joy to its limits.
Two different games were installed on the Esprimo V5535: World of Warcraft (WoW) and The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. Since Wow’s requirements are way lower than the computing power provided by the Esprimo V5535, playing WoW was more than a pleasure. The graphics were high quality, fast and the motion flawless.
For my pleasure, Oblivion also worked unexpectedly well too. This is the first notebook from the ones I tested which ran the Oblivion without issues. It’s really unexpected for me.
The performance of the games were better a bit under Vista. Probably because of DirectX 10 and the support of the SiS Mirage 3+ for DX10. Transform and Lightening and some other effects are handled via software which can decrease the performance and the quality of some applications.

Low-end batteries for a High-end notebook

The only annoyance of this notebook is its batteries. The Esprimo V5535 I tested came with a 4 cell 2000 mAh (29.6 Wh) battery. As the tests showed, this is far from the recommended.
The Esprimo V5535 with XP, running in power saver mode and playing music with Media Player lasted about 50 minutes, 55 minutes if I stopped the music. If I switched to High performance mode, this value dropped to 30 respectively 35 minutes.
Vista on the other hand manages power way better: in power saver mode, running Media Player the batteries lasted about a 1 hour and 15 minutes, the same in high performance mode resulted a 1 hour battery life. In power saver mode and without playing music, the battery life was 1 hour and 30 minutes, in high performance mode 1 hour and about 15 minutes.

Verdict on the Fujitsu-Siemens V5535

It’s not the cheapest notebook, we have to admit. Where I live its price is around $900 + VAT in online stores and more than $1000 at retailers.
It’s a piece of art when comes about performance, it’s design is quite neat so I’d recommend it for anyone who doesn’t travel with his/her notebook.
For the business class, who travels with his/her laptop and in the meantime works on it it’s absolutely not recommended because of the short battery life.