Acer Aspire 5920 review

Acer Aspire 5920 Review

Reviewed by: Rory Reid

Reviewed on: 31 May 2007

Features
The Aspire 5920 has plenty of substance to make up for its questionable style. It's a next-generation Centrino Duo, or Santa Rosa, laptop that uses a 2GHz Intel T5300 CPU and an ample 2GB of RAM. The memory runs at 667MHz and not the full 800MHz supported by the motherboard, but we expect Acer will switch to faster memory as it becomes more widely available.

The Aspire 5920 ships with 512MB of Intel Turbo Memory -- the first laptop we've seen to do so. Also known as Robson Flash memory, this dedicated memory module is designed to reduce the amount of time it takes for the laptop to power up, access programs and read/write data.

It works by reducing the laptop's reliance on the hard drive, which can be a bottleneck in many cases.  It didn't seem to make much of a difference for our model though -- it took 59 seconds to boot up from the moment we hit the power button.

Acer has positioned the Aspire 5920 primarily as a Media Center laptop. It has 'Dolby Home Theater' and 'Virtual Surround Sound' scrawled across the top of the keyboard, just above a silver panel housing the speakers. A subwoofer is mounted on the underside of the laptop to provide extra bass. It'll never replace a decent set of dedicated speakers, but the audio sounds surprisingly good. The laptop features 7.1-channel audio capability, so you can connect it to a set of external speakers.

The bottom-mounted subwoofer in all its glory

The laptop's media capabilities are helped by a lovely 15.4-inch screen. It looks fabulous in use and is ideal for watching movies, or browsing pictures on. Our only qualms are that its reflective CrystalBrite coating renders it nearly unusable in direct sunlight, and that the hinge is quite unstable. It wobbles noticeably even sitting on a desk and even more so when being used on a train or plane.

Acer supplies a 160GB hard drive, which is on the small size for a media laptop. The Vista Ultimate edition operating system and pre-installed programs occupy about 40GB, leaving you with approximately 120GB to play with. The DVD rewriter drive lets you create backups or watch DVDs, but if you really want to push the boat out you can opt for the version with an HD DVD drive, which'll set you back an extra £200.

The mouse trackpad on our review sample was often very unresponsive

If you're more of a gamer than a movie buff you'll appreciate the Nvidia GeForce 8600GT graphics card. It's quick enough to run most modern games. It has 256MB of dedicated memory, and if you need extra juice it can borrow up to 512MB from the main system memory. It can't compete with the dual graphics card-wielding Alienware laptops, but it won't shy away from a little 3D carnage.