Acer Aspire 9802WKMi review

Features
The Aspire 9802WKMi's 20-inch screen one of the best displays we've seen on any laptop. It's bright (200 cd/m2), clear, has a wide horizontal and vertical viewing angle, and proved a joy to use in a variety of applications. Its 16:10 widescreen aspect ratio (running at a resolution of 1,680x1,050 pixels) makes it ideal for watching DVD or DivX movies, and its glossy screen coating helps enhance contrast and intensity of colours. The glossy coating makes the screen prone to picking up unwanted reflections, but this didn't prove a problem during our tests.

Acer has thoughtfully set the laptop's font size to 120 dots per inch (dpi) -- which is 125 per cent larger than normal. This is a welcome move, as it makes text more readable and reduces the likelihood of having to squint -- a common occurrence with many laptops.

Though it matches the Dell XPS M2010 for girth, the Acer Aspire 9802WKMi isn't quite as powerful. The top-spec 9804WKMi model has a 2.0GHz T2400 Intel Centrino Duo processor, but our 9802WKMi review sample uses the more pedestrian T2300 CPU, running at 1.66GHz, and 1GB of DDR2 RAM running at 667MHz. This specification can more commonly be found on mid-range thin-and-light laptops, so to see it in a hefty 20-inch device is slightly disconcerting.

The Nvidia GeForce Go 7600 graphics card in the Aspire 9802WKMi is a far better solution than the integrated Intel graphics cards found in most laptops. It provides enough graphical horsepower to run high-definition movies and modern games, although you won't be able to run the latest titles properly at full resolution with full-screen anti-aliasing (FSAA) or anisotropic filtering (AF) image enhancements enabled.

TV buffs will be happy at the inclusion of an AVerMedia Hybrid analogue/digital TV tuner card that lets you watch and record one Freeview (or analogue) station while you watch another. The laptop doesn't use Windows XP Media Center Edition, but browsing your multimedia files is made easy thanks to the inclusion of the Acer Aspire Arcade software -- a Media Center clone. It's not quite as feature-rich as Microsoft's offering, but it's a welcome addition, particularly as it can be used with the accompanying Acer remote control.

The 9802WKMi has a pair of 120GB hard drives arranged in a RAID 0 configuration and offers a total storage capacity of 240GB. This will appeal to anyone with a large file collection and will please speed freaks as the RAID 0 configuration allows faster disc access time than you'd get if using a single hard drive. User data is broken down into chunks with each chunk written to a separate disc. Because the load is spread across multiple drives, input/output speed is greatly increased.

Acer initially piqued our interest in the Aspire 9802WKMi by claiming it would be the company's first laptop equipped with an HD DVD drive. Sadly it has shipped without an HD DVD drive -- in its place you get a Matshita UJ845S 8-speed DVD rewriter. It's a dual-layer model, so it can create backups of up to 8.5GB on compatible discs, but we'd have preferred if Acer had been able to supply a next-generation optical drive.

Performance
The Aspire 9802WKMi is one of the largest laptops in the world, but it's definitely not among the fastest. Its Intel T2300 processor runs at a modest 1.66GHz, so it's not the ideal platform if you intend to do loads of processor-intensive tasks such video editing and encoding. It's a dual-core processor though, so it'll handle everyday tasks without batting an eyelid, as indicated by its PCMark 2005 score of 2,841.

The Aspire 9802WKMi's graphics performance wasn't particularly inspiring either. Kudos to Acer for not relying on an Intel integrated graphics adaptor, but the GeForce 7600 card it has chosen offers only average gaming performance. It achieved a 3DMark 2006 score of 3,213, which is good enough to run Doom 3 at 78 frames per second at a resolution of 1,280x1,024 pixels. At maximum image quality at a resolution of 1,600x1,200 pixels the frame rate dropped to an average of 32fps.