Do four cores and discrete graphics really matter in a notebook?  I have heard that question a few times and wanted to take a look at it myself.  Over the last few months, I have taken a few notebooks out for a spin. First I looked at the MSI U250 11.6″ ultraportable and then the Toshiba 13.3″, 1″ thick T235D ultrathin.  Now it was time to try out the bookend, the Acer 7551G-5821, a quad-core, discrete graphics desktop replacement notebook with a 17.3″ display.  I want to share with you my experiences.

Spec Highlights

First, some specs that I thought were unique:

• AMD Phenom™ II Quad-Core Mobile Processor N930 (2MB L2 cache, 2.0GHz)
• Discrete ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 5650 graphics with Microsoft® DirectX® 11.0 support
• Windows® 7 Home Premium 64 bit
• 4GB DDR3 1066 SDRAM
• 500GB SATA hard drive
• Acer® CineCrystal HD+ 17.3″ (1600 x 900) high-brightness (220-nit) TFT LCD 16:9 aspect ratio, 8ms response time, 60% color gamut, LED backlight
• HDMI™ port
• Four USB 2.0 ports
• Acer® InviLink Nplify network connection supporting 802.11b/g/n wireless LAN, Acer® SignalUp technology
• Multi-gesture touchpad supporting two-finger scroll, pinch, rotate, flip
• 1280×1024 resolution webcam

Style

I usually don’t talk much about the style of a notebook, but I will make an exception here.  With a desktop replacement notebook, you usually don’t think thin, but the Acer 7511 is thin at 1.1-1.4″ given its capabilities and the fact it has a DVD drive.

The texture of the Acer 7551G is awesome.  It feels great to the touch, like leather with the strength of rubber.

Video Playback

With four CPU cores and a discrete GPU, the Acer 7551G played back the highest density video beautifully, including 40mbps MTS files at 1080P resolution. MTS files are the basic file format that Blu-ray uses.  The great video playback is primarily in thanks to the ATI Mobility Radeon^TM HD 5650 graphics which uses UVD 2 technology to play the videos. Not only does it playback efficiently yielding little heat and drawing little power than playback with CPU alone, it also makes the video beautiful.  When using a player like Cyberlink PowerDVD or Arcsoft Total Media Theater, the 5650 takes the jitters out of video and can even improve the quality when resolution is raised higher than the source video.

The 17.3″ 16:9 ratio display was beautiful with videos.  The high “nit count” made the brightness as high as any external monitor I have used in a while.  This comes handy in a well-lit room and when sharing video content with someone else in the room.  While not 1080P (1920×1080), the 1600×900 display resolution was more than adequate at 17.3″ with HD videos as well as being higher than most notebooks.  If you want more than 1600×900 you can always connect to an HDTV via the HDMI port to display full 1080p resolution.

Games

I did not run the Acer 7551G through sufficient paces to specifically comment on the gaming performance, but for my taste in FPS, the specs speak for themselves.  Sure, it’s not like playing on a monster AMD Eyefinity technology rig with dual AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series GPUs, but a really good portable gaming experience nonetheless.

With DirectX 11 support, the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 GPU is compatible with the latest and greatest DirectX 11 games, a claim very few notebooks can make.  Additionally the graphics subsystem supports new GPU compute standards, OpenCL^TM and Microsoft’s DirectCompute.

Overall, the quad-core CPU and the discrete ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 graphics provided for a responsive system. The Acer 7551G was a pleasure to use in an attractive form. Looking at common tasks, I have enjoyed the power of this system, but how will it handle some more advanced usage scenarios? Watch for my next blog to find out.

Pat Moorhead is Corporate Vice President and Corporate Marketing Fellow and a Member of the Office of Strategy at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. used by permission by Khronos.

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