Acer’s Aspire V7 (model 482PG-9884) remedies many of the shortcomings I mention in my review of HP’s Envy TouchSmart 15t. In addition, it has faster components, more memory, and better battery life. On the other hand, the Aspire V7 costs $350 more than the Envy—but there are a number of good reasons for that.
Acer selected Intel’s Core i7-4500U CPU, a lower-voltage chip than the one HP chose; it has a maximum thermal design power of 15 watts, in contrast to the 47-watt TDP of the Core i7-4700MQ in the Envy. That CPU contributes greatly to the Aspire V7’s superior battery life (5 hours, 2 minutes in our tests, versus the HP’s 3 hours, 19 minutes).
Robert CardinAnd whereas HP cut a few corners to squeeze both a Core i7 processor and a discrete GPU into the Envy’s $950 price tag, Acer managed to toss in a 24GB solid-state drive and 12GB of DDR3/1600 memory alongside a faster discrete GPU, Nvidia’s GeForce GT 750M. The SSD acts as a cache for a 1TB, 5400-rpm mechanical hard drive, and it makes Windows and applications load lickety-split. The SSD and the graphics card boosted the Aspire V7’s benchmark scores by a considerable margin.
Acer’s machine delivered an impressive Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 246, marking it as nearly 2.5 times faster than our reference notebook, an Asus VivoBook S550CA powered by a third-generation Core i5 CPU. The Aspire V7 is a capable gaming notebook, too, as it ran our BioShock Infinite test at a very playable 76.5 frames per second (with the resolution set to 1024 by 768 pixels and the visual quality set to low).
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