Acer have been pretty active lately with the release of
Windows 8 and the niche Ultrabook market. The S7 looks to stand out from the
crowd with a slick design and luxury features that make it a head turner.
Packs
quite the punch ey? Well it should because at $1900 you’re going to be expecting
some serious grunt from this machine. It does however feature a few extra
specials like a cleaning cloth for the display and a matching wireless mouse
(with batteries!). The packaging itself is also quite elegant with crafted
individual boxes slipping into their own aligned spaces with bits of material
to pull each one up. Premium product packaging for a premium product makes
sense doesn’t it?
Let’s
start but looking at the design. Its high glossy white, it’s thin and
expectantly lightweight. Opening the lid truly reveals the exquisiteness of the
slick design. Simplicity is key here and Acer has pulled it off very well.
There’s very little marketing stuff going on around the keyboard with an Intel
Core i7 sticker, the model of the laptop, Dolby theatre text and unnecessarily
‘Professionally Tuned’ on the right hand side. Seriously Acer, get rid of it
and the Dolby text (the Dolby text is also plastered next to the speakers on
the BOTTOM of the unit). Not many people care about things like that. Many
people are well aware of the quality of audio they are to expect coming out of
a 13” Ultrabook. Annoyingly Acer has once again opted to put the Power button
on the side of the unit which adds this tiny extrusion to what is otherwise a
slick looking machine.
The rest
of the unit is just as slick and continues the simple design throughout the
unit. The display is probably one of the biggest selling points on this unit.
Featuring a 13.3” Full HD Touch Display. There is a downside however. With a
13.3” display, the Full-HD resolution can make things appear pretty small on
the screen which can cause a few annoying issues for people who have not so
good eyes and people who have a chunky pointy finger (it is a touch screen
after all). The quality and performance of the screen however is pretty much
the best I have seen on a laptop. The colour saturation, black reproduction and
overall contrast of the display make your high definition photos and videos
just stand out that ever so better. It truly is a magnificent display.
The
performance of the laptop is equally impressive. With a 128GB SSD which
actually appears to be 2x 64GB’s in some sort of RAID setup (I’m assuming
either RAID1 or a proprietary RAID-like setup similar to MSI). It does however
seem to have worked. With SSD benchmarks providing average score of 350MB/s and
740MB/s Write and Read respectively. Those read speeds are absolutely
astonishing and is one of the most important part of an SSD, not the Write
speeds. Booting up the unit from a cold start comes in around 5-7 seconds which
is a definite eye turner for all those mobile workers.
Unlike
other Acer Ultrabooks I’ve tested this unit did not seem to have any issue with
playing back Full-HD MKV content. A few others caused lag and stuttering
throughout the vide whereas the S7 powered through with no issues and managed
to do an entire 90 minute feature film on battery with plenty of time
remaining. In fact the S7 managed to give me 4hrs of battery life including the
90 minutes of watching a movie full screen and about another 90 minutes
watching YouTube videos and other Flash related content (Flash media is
generally CPU intensive and great on draining batteries).
Gaming is
a miss with this laptop and so it should be as it isn’t designed to be used as
a mobile gamer. This laptop is a high performance machine for people who need
the power on the move.
Its thin,
its lightweight and features a full HD display ideal for professionals on the
go. If you need a superfast laptop with good internals this could be for you. With
a relatively hefty price tag, it is aimed at the higher end users.
sahin.s@centrecom.com.au |
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Showing posts with label ultrabook review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ultrabook review. Show all posts
Monday, 3 December 2012
Acer Aspire S7
Thursday, 15 March 2012
Asus Zenbook Review!
The popular Zenbook, yay or nay?
In my hands today is not the newest piece of tech, but definitely something sweeping the international markets, the Ultrabook that is the Asus Zenbook.
Let’s take a look at the specs.Model: Zenbook UX21E-KX013X
OS: Windows 7 Professional 64bit
CPU: Intel® Core™ i5-2467M (1.6GHz)
Memory: 4GB DDR3 (1333MHz)
Hard Drive(s): 256GB SSD
Optical Drive(s): None
Networking: 802.11b/g/n Wireless
Graphics: Intel HD3000
Display: 11.6” HD LED (1366x768 Resolution)
Audio: Bang & Olufsen ICEpower®
Coms: Bluetooth 4.0
Camera: Built-in
Inputs: 1x USB2.0, 1x USB3.0, Microphone Built-in, SD Card Reader
Outputs: 1x Headphone Out, 1x micro HDMI, 1x Mini-VGA
Battery: 35Whrs Polymer Battery
From the outside of the box to all its internals, the Zenbook oozes with the style and simplicity that is associated with the Ultrabook family. The packaging however does resemble the Transformer Prime tablet box with similar colour and layout design. Once in your hands you can’t help but feel an absolute love for it in your hands. It just feels beautiful and extremely elegant. The looks of it is equally glorious with the brushed purple aluminium on the lid making this unit stand out. Looking at it from the sides you see its pure slickness and just how thin the unit is. With equal number of ports on either side of the unit it gives it a nice balance to the look of the unit.
Opening the lid revealed the Zenbook’s true beauty. The brushed silver aluminium with silver keys and simple design make this stand out. It’s hard to argue against its beauty. It’s hard to counter argue this units looks as it clearly stands out from the rest of the competition.
With an SSD under its belt, the unit booted up and was ready without me even realizing. My PCMark benchmark came in at an impressive 1904 points, blitzing even the full sized Lenovo Y570. However it is worthy to know that it achieved significant performance while plugged in to a power outlet. Once you unplug the unit from the power, something must happen inside that drastically decreases the performance because it was extremely noticeable. Mostly on watching videos, a full HD MKV video struggled playing smoothly with regular freezes and blotched pixels.Typing on the keyboard was a bit of a hit-and-miss. The problem I had was the key press is so smaller than usual, meaning it takes a lot less force to press the key than usual, so I found myself accidently brushing over several keys before pressing the one I actually intended on, however this can be a bit of a personal issue as light fingered people may find the keyboard to their exact liking.
The battery on the Zenbook was more than impressive and clearly outshines. On a full charge I was able to watch a full HD MKV video for about 2 hours with a good 40% or so remaining. The next 2-2.5 hours went on general browsing and YouTube videos so it gave a solid 5 hours of heavy use which is absolutely fantastic. Exactly what you’d expect from an Ultrabook.
By Sahin Selvi
sahin.s@centrecom.com.au
sahin.s@centrecom.com.au
The benchmark results may differ from user to user depending on what background software you are running and versions of benchmark software. These results aren’t portrayed to be seen as exact performance figures but merely as a rough estimate on the performance of the machine. These results are in no way bias to any company or person and are here to provide the end user in depth details and to provide extra assistance of potential purchases. All information on this page is subject to copyright. Please do not copy any parts of this article. This includes and is not limited to Photos and Data Graphs. The photos and data graphs shown on this blog are subject to copyright to Centre Com. Any unauthorized copying, modifying or using for other purposes are forbidden. Centre Com reserves the right to take legal action against those found breaking these terms.
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