Overview
I am a firm believer that you shouldn’t always take what is written on the packaging as gospel as you could be in for a nasty surprise. This is also the case when I’m out buying my latest gadget. I make it a habit to go into the shop and thoroughly take it for a test drive, and this is exactly what I did with the Acer 5520 Laptop, to find out whether it is worth the label it is written on!
Review
If you look at the system spec of this laptop it looks like a decent bit of kit. Having being built with a generous 3GB of RAM, a dedicated graphics card and a dual core processor you would think this laptop could plough though anything you threw at it.
But it’s not until you do a bit of research that you find out this laptop is trying to run before it can walk. For starters, this laptops hard drive runs at a very slow 4200rpm. Now you could argue with me that this is a laptop and as such you’ll only find desktops that run a standard 7200rpm hard drive. However, with most laptops coming as standard with a 5200rpm hard drive you can understand why I class this as ‘slow’ for a laptop.
After looking at the graphics card; it became even more evident that this is a low-end model. Although the card was designed with the laptop in mind it certainly will not be able to handle the FPS (Frames Per Second) that games of today produce. Although the laptop was able to play games such as FEAR, Unreal Tournament 3, BioShock, and Crysis because the settings were reduced to the lowest they could go, I wasn’t expecting to play the next generation of games in a rush!
All in all this is a very disappointing laptop because with the memory and processor that has been built onto this laptop it’s a shame that it was not given a slightly better hard drive and graphics card as these pull the Acer down like a lead weight.
The Gaj-It Verdict
Design 7/10
Usability: 8/10
Features: 5/10
Value: 6/10
We Say
Ultimately, this is laptop is a sheep in wolfs clothing. With a slow hard drive and graphics card, don't be expecting to play games on anything but the lowest of settings, even with the spec looking as promising as it does.
Laptop Spec
Processor: AMD Turion 64 x2 Processor TL 60
Processor Speed: 1.9 GHz, 1600 MHZ FSB, 1 MB Cache
Operating System: Genuine Windows Vista ® Home Premium
Memory: 3 GB
Hard Drive: 160 GB
Optical Drive: DVD SuperMulti Drive
Screen Size: 15.4” WXGA CrystalBrite
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 7000M
Sound Type: High Definition
USB Connections: 4
Wireless Enabled: Yes
Weight: 2.75 kg
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2 thoughts on “Acer 5520: Always Read the Label”
what’s the price? i’m sure the first thing most consumers would look at, especially in the current economic climate, is the price! The specs come second.
Hi Suheal, im sure you can find the price by clicking on the compare link, which is averaging at around £380.
In regards to you second question I can understand your point but I believe price sometimes is not everything, some people will buy a laptop just for the name (Sony, Toshiba etc) and while this may be a very nice laptop there might be others on the market that cost a little less but have much higher spec.
I for one am a gamer so specs are important to me, im a saver as well but I want a laptop thats worth what i’m paying out so looking at the spec is a must for me.