Acer V7-482PG-9884 Review: Everything You Need
by Jarred Walton on August 24, 2013 12:00 AM ESTAcer V7 Gaming Performance
Our focus for gaming performance is going to be on our Value and Mainstream settings, although we’ve also run our Enthusiast settings and as usual you can find the results in Mobile Bench. The short summary is that in most cases, the Aspire V7 easily handles the Value settings and typically gets above 30 FPS on the Mainstream settings; what that means for 1080p gaming is that medium detail should suffice, but anything more and you’re often going to drop below 30 FPS. I’ll save additional commentary for after the graphs break….
One other item to discuss before we get to the gaming benchmarks is the 4GB DDR3-1800 RAM used on the GT 750M. I commented earlier that the amount of RAM is overkill, and the decision to use DDR3 instead of GDDR5 would likely reduce performance quite a bit. There are of course ways to mitigate this, as well as investigate how much the GPU memory bandwidth limits performance. I installed MSI Afterburner 3.0 Beta 14 (gotta love the monthly betas that keep expiring...), and proceded to overclock just the RAM. Initially I tried for DDR3-2500, but that resulted in a frowny-faced BSOD (Windows' 8 has a much nicer BSOD, apparently). DDR3-2300 failed as well, but without the BSOD, while DDR3-2200 ran through all of our gaming benchmarks without issue. That represents a 22% overclock of the RAM, and I've included the results in the charts below.
Value Gaming Performance
Mainstream Gaming Performance
The two most demanding games in our test suite right now are Metro: Last Light and Company of Heroes 2 – I didn’t include graphs for the latter above, simply because we’ve only run it on three laptops so far, but it ends up being the slowest running game in our suite by far to the tune of 23.7 FPS at 1366x768 medium/low settings. It’s basically the opposite of StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm, where it apparently pounds the GPU (shaders) and doesn’t require as much of the CPU. Speaking of which, Skyrim and StarCraft 2 are in the interesting camp of being more CPU limited, so we actually see better numbers from the Aspire V7 with GT 750M than we get from the MSI GX60 with HD 7970M, even at our Mainstream settings. Somewhat surprisingly, GRID 2 and Sleeping Dogs also fall into that category, at least if we limit ourselves to the Mainstream settings.
It all goes back to what I was talking about in the introduction: balance. The Acer V7 is certainly not the fastest laptop on the block, and the GT 750M really has no business outperforming an HD 7970M. The problem is the CPU-GPU balance in the GX60 is just way off. In some games like Tomb Raider and Bioshock Infinity, even moderately slow CPUs are fast enough; in other cases, however, more (single-threaded) CPU performance is required. In an Ultrabook like the V7, I think the GT 750M is a pretty good fit for a Haswell ULT CPU.
My only wish is that Acer had equipped the GPU with 2GB GDDR5 memory; I don’t know exactly how much that would have helped, but simply overclocking the DDR3 memory by 22% produced some interesting results. At our less demanding Value settings, the overclock only improves performance by 3.6% on average, and in one game at least (Skyrim) it was actually slightly slower. The reason for the lack of improvement is that Value settings tend to be more CPU constrained, so increasing the GPU performance doesn't always help much; still, Bioshock and Tomb Raider both improve by over 10%. Move up to the Mainstream settings and the increased memory bandwidth becomes far more useful. There we see an average performance increase of 11.5%, and only Skyrim and GRID 2 fail to post double digit percentage improvements.
If all of this can be achieved with a 22% overclock of DDR3 RAM, what would more than doubling the bandwidth with GDDR5 accomplish? It definitely wouldn't reduce performance, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see an extra 15-30% performance increase at our Mainstream settings for a relatively minor change in BOM costs. Even without GDDR5, though, the Acer V7 posts respectible numbers and can handle most games at 1080p and Medium detail. It's not a gaming enthusiasts dream laptop, but for less demanding gamers it's more than sufficient.
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JarredWalton - Saturday, August 24, 2013 - link
Build quality is an unknown, as is battery life and some other factors, but the bigger issue is that you just can't get it yet, at least in the US. I need to ping Gigabyte and see what's up, as the only place I can find it in the US says, "This product is not available and cannot be purchased. It has been discontinued by the manufacturer or vendor." But it might simply be in the pre-release phase.GrammarNietzsche - Saturday, August 24, 2013 - link
The "major flaw" with the P34G seems to be its TN panel. source: http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/laptops/1300168/gig...You can also see the color shift on YouTube videos of the P34G.
davejake - Saturday, August 24, 2013 - link
The Gigabyte specs page claims it to be 1080p AHVA (~IPS)http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx...
This might be another obnoxious case of the various country models being different.
Also, thanks Jarred for the response. The "Gigabyte NB" facebook page keeps talking about early september availability for the p34g-- later for the the p35k-- but I'm trying to not hold my breath.
Samunosuke - Saturday, August 24, 2013 - link
Been looking forward to this review ever since you mentioned it was coming, in your R7 review. I believe this particular SKU is seriously overpriced. The model available on the US ncix website comes with an i5-4200U, GT 750m 4GB,same 1080p IPS touchscreen and 500GB + 24GB storage for $899. To me this is a far better value proposition than the $1300 model. The i5 might be a bottleneck in some games but its not going to be too different from the i7.Comparing this to the Asus N550 and I feel that the N550JV-DB72T is a far better deal with an i7-4700HQ, same GT 750m (2GB), 1080p IPS touchscreen,all aluminum body, max 16GB RAM and 3 USB 3.0 ports. Although the Acer has an msata slot for ssd's, the Asus has an optical drive where the mechanical drive can be put while a 2.5" ssd occupies the main HDD slot. Weight and thickness favour the Acer but I'm willing to accept that. The Acer is $1066 for the touchscreen version and $969 for the matte non touch. Absolute no brainer.
JarredWalton - Saturday, August 24, 2013 - link
The ASUS N550 does weigh about 1.5 pounds more, let's not forget that, and it looks like the same basic design as the N56JV, which was good but still rather bulky, with more plastic in the chassis. If you're after something with higher performance than the V7, there are many options out there; if you want what is basically a gaming Ultrabook that can handle any moderate task you might throw at it, I think the V7-482PG strikes a nice balance. I would like to have the option for a 1080p matte non-touch if it could save $150, but sadly there isn't one.Funny enough, the NCIX version of the V7 is apparently a Canadian model (http://store.acer.com/store/acerna/en_CA/pd/ThemeI... This is one of the frustrating things with Acer, ASUS, and a lot of other OEMs: they have good SKUs that are only released in specific markets, and often I can't figure out why. I've never tried ordering from NCIX before, but for $899 (though it's backordered), the V7-482PG-6662 is basically giving you a slower CPU, smaller HDD and less RAM for $400 less. Of course, that's a "street price" and I suspect the 9884 street prices might end up in the $1100-$1200 range, making it a more reasonable upgrade.
GrammarNietzsche - Saturday, August 24, 2013 - link
The 9884 is available on the US NCIX site as well. I couldn't link it in this comment, so you'll have to remove the (dot)http://us.ncix(dot)com/products/?sku=83180&vpn...
JBaich - Saturday, August 24, 2013 - link
Congrats to Acer for reversing course on the "race to the bottom". RTTBSadly, it might be another 10 years for me before the name Acer doesn't resonate with garbage. They will, and should, suffer for a build-em-and-sell-em-cheap strategy. I'm not convinced.
Anonymous1a - Saturday, August 24, 2013 - link
I was wondering, given that the processor, despite being an i7, is still a ULT processor, and not even a quad-core, will this not be a limiting factor to the graphics card and will this laptop be able to render graphically challenging games?JarredWalton - Saturday, August 24, 2013 - link
The majority of games still don't really need more than one or two CPU cores, and with Turbo Boost you're still able to hit 2.7-3.0GHz on the i7-4500U. With a faster GPU it would be more of a bottleneck, but the GT 750M is clearly tapped out in most titles already, at least at our Mainstream settings. (You'll notice that overclocking the GPU RAM didn't help on the Value settings, but that could be more the GPU core not needing more RAM than a CPU bottleneck; I'd have to investigate more to say for certain.) I think a GTX 765M would probably be where we see the shift to being CPU bound with a ULT processor, but even then you can usually get >40FPS from the CPU if the GPU can manage, so you can turn up details to compensate if you had a faster GPU.This is where the MSI GX60 runs into problems with some games, as single-threaded performance of the A10 APUs is still significantly slower than even the ULV/ULT parts. It's pretty sad that an Ultrabook with a much slower GPU can outperform it in several of the games, even at Mainstream detail.
just2btecky - Saturday, August 24, 2013 - link
Acer Aspire V7-482PG-9884 has a funky name I'll never remember. I aspire:) for a name that's really cute.