Acer Aspire V3-571G-9435: The Value Proposition
by Jarred Walton on July 4, 2012 4:25 AM ESTAcer V3-571G Battery Life, Thermals, and Acoustics
I mentioned in the introduction that there were three areas where I feel Acer made some unnecessary compromises. One was the choice of LCD, the second was the choice of hard drive, and the third was their battery capacity. The V3-571G comes with a 6-cell 48Wh battery, and while it’s not the end of the world I still feel a 56Wh or 63Wh battery would have been easy enough to fit into the system without altering the price. Unfortunately, bean counters tend to look for every possible area of savings on budget laptops, and the drop in battery capacity probably shaved off dollar (give or take?) from the Bill of Materials. So how does that affect battery life?
Actually, considering the capacity the battery life isn’t so bad. Maximum possible battery life is 6.5 hours, and typical use battery life for surfing the Internet is still five hours. Anyone interested in using the laptop to watch movies on a longer flight will note that you get just under four hours of H.264 playback from the hard drive, which is only enough to make it through two medium length films. Looking at the normalized battery life results, the Acer V3 rates near the top of the pack, with only the M3 Ultrabook beating it in all three tests and AMD’s Trinity leading in two of the three tests (but losing in normalized H.264 playback). Had Acer equipped the V3 with a 56Wh battery like the M3 or Trinity, we’d be looking at another 30 to 60 minutes of battery life.
Looking at the thermal performance, it’s pretty clear that the V3 chassis provides sufficient cooling for the IVB and Kepler parts. During extended stress testing, the CPU did hit just under 90C on one core, but that was atypical—generally, under load we saw temperatures in the low to mid 80s. The GPU does even better, with a maximum temperature we recorded during stress testing of just 68C.
Noise levels are equally impressive, with idle noise near our testing floor of 30dB, coming in just slightly higher at 31dB. Under heavier CPU or GPU loads, noise creeps up to 33.5dB, with periodic increases to 34.5dB. With a maximum load on the CPU and GPU, we did manage to reach and stay at 35.6dB pretty much as long as we let the testing continue, but that's still pretty quiet for a laptop under full load. The only real concern I have with noise levels is that it appears we’re at maximum fan speed when we’re hitting ~36dB. Why is that a problem? It means that if the laptop happens to be in a more extreme environment (say, Arizona summer weather, with you sitting outside in 110F+ heat), there’s no room for the fan to try and compensate for added heat.
I actually covered the exhaust with my hand for a couple minutes to see if I could get a higher fan speed, with no success (and an uncomfortably hot hand). Interestingly, rather than getting hotter it appears both the CPU and GPU throttled a bit—or at least, I didn’t see core temperatures increase beyond the previously measured highs. This is worrisome as I have a friend with an older Gateway P-series FX notebook that behaves in a similar fashion, only now he’s getting to the point where the 3-year-old notebook occasionally overheats and crashes—something it didn’t do during the first couple years of use. Will the Acer V3 behave similarly in a couple years? Only time will tell, but I’d feel better if there was at least one or two more notches on the fan speed. I’d rather have a loud laptop that runs stably than a quiet laptop that crashes.
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StormyParis - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
It's an article of faith among tech reviewers that SSDs are where it's at nowadays. I have doubts:1- Size: especially on a laptop, I'd rather have a large HD on which I can stick a few games, 10+ hours of films for me and the kids. AN SSDs pretty much means you *have* to carry an external HD. Or read getting bored.
2- Reliability: the only reliability survey I ever saw says SSDs fail on average almost twice as much as HDDs.
3- limited use case: very few apps do a lot of disk I/O once launched, and 4GB systems mostly don't swap, so SSDs are mostly useful during boot and app launch. Also, many users now do sleep/hibernation with apps open, instead of a full reboot + apps relaunch. That makes for a scarce few seconds when the SSD will be felt.
I'm fairly sure reviewers aren't needing hours of videos during their reviews (they're at work, not snowed in with the kids ^^), do full startups (and few of those), and are given somewhat pre-tested units. Isn't there a big disconnected between reviews and users ?
Omoronovo - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
1. For a laptop, you're unlikely to have many games installed that are dedicated, hardcore games that take up 25GB of space each. Diablo 3 et al are all relatively large games, certainly, but you will know which ones will be playable on a machine like this and you will be clever enough to plan accordingly. As for movies, having anything higher than 720p on a machine with this resolution is pointless; and even at maximum quality (again, ruined on a panel of this quality, but for arguments sake), you're talking about 40GB of movies for 10 hours of potential playback. A 128GB ssd would be enough to cater to both of these with space to spare.2. Unless you can cite your source for this survey, we can't really comment on its validity. Solid state drives have come a long way; I have no doubt that drives like my first generation Indilinx-based SSD have higher failure rates, but that's the price for early adoption. They are far, far more reliable now, with Sandforce being able to de-dupe and compress data so that only a fraction of nand is physically written to (whereas early Indilinx based drives had insane write amplification, wearing nand far faster than necessary for the sake of performance).
3. SSD's make a tangible "snappiness" improvement to your machine. This is especially noticeable with Windows due to the way it prioritizes data in ram. Take a theoretical example: Opening control panel. On a standard disk based system, each and every file called needs to be accessed from disk; excluding those files already loaded (like the ui elements as those are shared with all standard explorer windows). If there are 30 files to access, with a standard disk you will have as much as 450ms latency to get all of those files loaded into ram and the panel opened, not to mention any processing time (ordering of icons and such). This is only half a second, that is true. Scale this up with all file and folder access on the machine (from all programs, devices, and services, bearing in mind that when multiple programs try to access the disk (HDD) at once, the latency is exacerbated), and you quickly realize why using an SSD makes such a huge improvement to the day to day usability of a machine.
In my case, personally, I noticed far more of an upgrade in my day to day use of my machine when I upgraded to a SSD, than I did upgrading to a core i7-920 from a Core 2 duo E7200.
One final point I'd like to make: Although this laptop doesn't, there is nothing preventing a manufacturer dropping optical storage and using the space for a hybrid disk drive and SSD setup. When Windows 8 ships and OEM's start tearing into the Storage Spaces feature, "normal" people won't even have to go out of their way to move bulk data onto the disk drive, as windows will do it automatically and merge the SSD and HDD space into one contiguous area. Just something to think about.
Rollo_Thomasi - Thursday, July 5, 2012 - link
Even if the OEM:s usualy favors an ODD over a SSD HDD combo you can simply replace the ODD yourself.Here is an article on that:
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/131697-ivy-br...
Christopher29 - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
1. Agreed, size still is not enough ...2. Completely untrue - see forum xtremesystems thread: SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm/page195 - where users intentionally try to wear out SSDs, most of them hold from 600TB - 800TB, and 256GB Samsung 830 holds 2,500TB Host writes. Everyone died after stating correct S.M.A.R.T warnings.
For your perspective, I have written 3,8TB of data on my SSD since 2009 and this is 1/200 (0,5%) of possible writes that this SSD will handle - in other words - this SSD will outlive two to three laptops in which it will be used.
3. You tottaly don't know (and probably used) anything what You've just written in this point.
piroroadkill - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
What are you even talking about? You can get 256GB SSDs for a very reasonable price these days, job done.Less power use, less likely to die in the manner that is MOST caused by use in laptops - knocking the heads around...
I would say maybe you can't afford an SSD, but really, very recently the prices have come right down to the point where there's no reason not to have one..
jabber - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
Yes I picked up a SATA2 120GB SSD for $100 a few weeks ago.Why SATA2 well as my laptop only runs SATA2 I felt it pointless to get a 500MBps capable SSD when it will only run at half that speed.
Oh and its cheaper. Anyway instead of the WD Black 320GB drive giving me 85MBps I now have an SSD giving me around 275MBps. Big improvement especially in access times.
zorxd - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
$780 is a high end laptop. Most people by laptops cheaper than that. This review sounds like the review of a BMW by a Ferrari owner, saying that the BMW is OK if don't care about cheap build quality and bad performance.zorxd - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
The average selling price of a windows laptop was $513 in the US in February 2012.JarredWalton - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
Where exactly does that stat come from, and what happens if you remove netbook class hardware from the list? Netbooks (and ultraportables like the 11.6" stuff with Brazos) are very inexpensive, but if people want to complain about this Acer's quality they should be even more harsh on such laptops. Regardless, $780 is hardly high-end for a laptop; it's at most lower-midrange pricing.zorxd - Wednesday, July 4, 2012 - link
http://blog.laptopmag.com/the-average-pc-laptop-co...netbooks or not, $780 is still much more than the average price for a laptop.
And this is only in the US, a rich country. The average of the world is probably much lower.