Acer’s V3-571G Value Proposition

While there have been a few reasonably impressive Acer laptops over the years, most target a familiar refrain: deliver better performance at a lower price than the competition. Acer manages this quite thanks to their size (e.g. large buying power) and their willingness to compromise on certain aspects of the laptop experience. Their latest Aspire V3 series does come with several noteworthy updates compared to previous value offerings, however, and the price might just scare a few of their competitors into making some much-needed improvements.

Starting with the exterior overview, we find a throwback to some of the older style Acer laptops with a preponderance of glossy black plastic. Let’s be frank: I like glossy black plastic on a laptop about as much as I like letting my kids borrow my tablet after they’ve been eating chicken wings. I’m not sure if Acer actually did some research study that determined their customers actually like glossy plastic shells, but this one is about as bad as it gets on the lid and palm rest, and if you’re a bit OCD on such things you’ll find yourself constantly wiping away the inevitable fingerprints and smudges. The keyboard area at least gets a matte silver finish, which makes me wonder why they couldn’t have done the same for the rest of the laptop. (Probably because it didn’t photograph/render as well in the early design stages, and if so the people who made this decision need to clue in to the difference between marketing photos and actually using a laptop!)

Naturally, the display is also glossy, but just about the only laptops delivering matte displays these days are business models—oh, and the ASUS N56VM/N56VZ that we really liked when we previewed Ivy Bridge. The casing of the laptop in general just feels a bit cheap, which is what you’d expect from plastic, but if you’re not the type that abuses their laptop by stuffing it into a backpack with some heavy textbooks, or occasionally dropping it, the V3-571G should hold up okay.

The one thing that Acer gets right is something near and dear to my heart, however: the keyboard. Gone are the horrible floating island keys, replaced instead by a conventional chiclet keyboard. It may not be the absolute best laptop keyboard in the world, but there’s little flex, key travel is decent, the spacing is right, and what’s more Acer seems to be one of the few companies that understands what a laptop 10-key is supposed to look like. There’s no silly half-size zero key, the plus, minus, etc. keys are all in the correct places, and for accountants or others that routinely input a lot of numbers the 10-key is exactly what it should be.

The only complaint I have is a minor one: the “merged” Enter and Backslash keys. We’ve seen this on a few Acer laptops in the past year, and I don’t know what purpose the non-gap layout serves, but for the most part it’s more of an aesthetic oddity than something that actually bothered me. I did a fair amount of typing on the V3 during the course of this review, and while I still prefer the key action on older ThinkPad and Latitude laptops, there's a lot of personal preference in what makes for a comfortable keyboard. At least the new key style doesn't make me want to cry.

For those interested in some shots of the internals, we did completely disassemble the V3-571G during testing (more on this later). Mostly, users might want to upgrade the RAM or storage, and that’s thankfully much easier than getting at the other components. Before continuing the discussion, let’s check out the full spec sheet to see exactly what hardware Acer delivers with the V3-571G-9435.

We’ll start with the good news: quad-core Ivy Bridge i7-3610QM comes standard, along with NVIDIA’s GT 640M Kepler GPU. That’s an awful lot of performance potential right there, especially considering the sub-$800 price. Back when AMD’s Trinity launched, I expressed concern about the target pricing we were hearing from AMD. At $700+ for laptops sporting the top-end A10-4600M APU, that left an awfully big gap in CPU performance compared to Intel’s Ivy Bridge. Acer has now successfully managed to put together a laptop with a significantly faster CPU and GPU for a price that’s not much higher than we’re seeing from many A10-4600M laptops. Thankfully for AMD, there are also companies like Toshiba selling 15.6” A10-4600M notebooks for under $700 ($660 at Amazon at the time of writing). Make no mistake, however: the i7-3610QM will run circles around the A10-4600M, and the GT 640M DDR3 will easily trounce the HD 7660G (though battery life is a different matter); we’ll have the full results in our benchmarks.

There are a few other nice hardware updates this round, including a dual-band 300Mb WiFi solution instead of the all-too-common 2.4GHz only 150Mb adapters. Bluetooth 4.0 is also present, along with Gigabit Ethernet, so at least Acer has everything covered on the networking front. And last but not least, like nearly all modern NVIDIA-equipped laptops, Acer supports NVIDIA’s Optimus Technology to enable dynamic switching between the Intel IGP and the discrete GPU. We finished our benchmarking with the original 295-series NVIDIA drivers, but the latest 304.48 beta drivers installed without a hitch (though spot-testing several games didn’t show any notable improvements in performance).

If that’s the good news, what’s the bad? For starters, there’s the LCD. Glossy isn’t the end of the world—some people actually like glossy panels—but the 1366x768 resolution for a 15.6” panel continues to be woefully inadequate. When companies like Apple are pushing the boundaries of what is possible with their Retina displays, and ASUS has 11.6” and 13.3” Ultrabooks with 1080p displays, 1366x768 needs to simply go away. Not surprisingly, the color quality and contrast on the LG panel are also mediocre at best. There are two other pretty significant shortcomings, but both are again a factor of the pricing. The Toshiba 500GB 5400RPM hard drive is pretty much bottom of the barrel as far as storage performance goes, and there’s no option for SSD caching available to lend a hand. The final complaint isn’t quite as egregious, but the 48Wh battery capacity is decidedly out of date compared to other 6-cell batteries. Couple all of this with the moderately large chassis size and we can’t help but feel disappointed.

I should also take a moment to discuss the softare loadout of the laptop. Like many OEMs, Acer stuffs all sorts of junk onto their machines. Some of it provides real value (e.g. a fully functional copy of CyberLink's Media Espresso video transcoding utility with support for Quick Sync), but much of the software is useless junk. It's not the hard drive space that's a problem with all these unwanted extras, but rather it's the toll they take on machine responsiveness and boot times--and I received an email from one user complaining about how the auto-update functionality for much of the software comes enabled by default and how it can hog a lot of bandwidth on an office network. Here's the list of software I uninstalled before I even bothered with starting testing:

Acer Games
Bing Bar
eBay Worldwide
Fooz Kids (and Fooz Kids Platform)
McAfee Internet Security Suite
MyWinLocker Suite
newsXpresso
Nook for PC
Norton Online Backup

Besides the above items that I felt were completely useless and had the potential to interfere with using the laptop, there are some other software packages that you might want to uninstall as well:

Acer Backup Manager
Acer Instant Update
Acer Registration
Acer Screen Saver
Evernote
Identity Card

One hour or so later, with a few reboots, and we're finally at a Windows desktop without a bunch of other extras loading in the background. Don't forget to defrag the hard drive at this point, of course! And some people might like a few of the items in the above list (Evernote isn't all bad, some of the Acer utilities could prove useful, etc.)

Ah, but there’s still that price, isn’t there? If you’re not a stickler on such things as display quality, hard drive performance (you can always upgrade to an SSD on your own dime), greater than six hours of moderate use battery life, and you don’t mind a less durable/rigid plastic chassis, Acer’s performance is going to be tough—actually nearly impossible—to beat at this price point, at least until we see the next generation CPUs and GPUs come out. That’s still a ways off considering Ivy Bridge and Kepler just came out within the last couple of months. And with that out of the way, let’s see what Acer’s V3 value offering delivers in our performance metrics.

Acer V3-571G General Performance

We start as usual with our general performance application benchmarks. We still don’t have quite as many laptops available in our updated Mobile Benchmark Suite as we’d like, and there’s not much point in comparing a full-size notebook with several different models of Ultrabook. We’ve tried to stick with the more meaningful comparisons where possible, but we also wanted to flesh out the charts with additional data points. The result is the following selection of laptops, with their basic specs listed in the table, and as always, should you want to make additional comparisons, head over to Mobile Bench.

As we’re starting with PCMark results, we again want to note how much of an impact the presence of an SSD has on the results. It makes most of the comparisons between the HDD and SSD equipped laptops meaningless, but it does serve to drive home the point that for some workloads an SSD will make a huge difference. I switched over to a 240GB SSD for my laptop and Ultrabook use, and whenever I have to use and test a laptop that only has HDD storage (like the Acer V3), the difference is painfully obvious.

The placement of the Acer V3 in the above charts isn’t very inspiring, but remember what we said about SSDs. Most of the higher scoring laptops feature SSDs and/or slightly faster CPUs. For general use, any of the laptops will be “fast enough”, and as long as you don’t mind waiting during intense periods of disk activity (e.g. initial boot up of the OS and various applications) even the HDD equipped laptops will work well. Still, one look at what an SSD does for the ASUS N56VM might make you consider splurging on better storage system. Acer adds insult to injury here by going with a 5400RPM hard drive, and the only slower Storage score in the charts comes from the Toshiba P755D—which also uses a 5400RPM Toshiba hard drive, not surprisingly.

If we look at the one PCMark 7 test that doesn’t hit storage at all, the Computation suite, we run into a different problem. Here, all of the laptops that support Intel’s Quick Sync technology get a massive performance boost, and the Ivy Bridge processors are basically twice as fast with Quick Sync as Sandy Bridge parts. It makes for yet another lopsided graph, which makes the overall usefulness of the PCMark scores debatable. As long as we understand what the charts represent, however, we can at least use them to gauge relative performance. The basic summary is that, for general use, a moderate CPU (e.g. Trinity, Llano, or Sandy Bridge) with an SSD will offer a better experience than just about any current HDD-based laptop; similarly, if you want to do hardware accelerated video encoding, there’s no beating Quick Sync.

When we shift over to our more CPU- and GPU-centric tests, the performance results start to look more sensible. As one of two quad-core Ivy Bridge laptops, the Acer V3-571G takes second place in all four of our CPU-based tests, losing out by a small margin to the higher clocked i7-3720QM in the ASUS N56VM. The 3DMark scores tell a similar story, although this time it’s the GTX 560M in the ASUS G74SX that takes first place, with the GT 640M generally falling into second place and trading blows with the Razer Blade and Acer M3-581TG Ultrabook. The latter has the same GPU but a slower ULV Sandy Bridge processor, and we should hopefully have the updated M5 Ivy Bridge model in for testing in the near future.

Acer V3-571G Gaming Performance

Next up in our test suite are our gaming tests, which we discussed in our 2012 Mobile Benchmark Matrix. We conducted all of the 1366x768 testing with the internal LCD and connected an external 1080p display for the Mainstream and Enthusiast test results. Our Value settings are generally very easy on the V3-571G while the Mainstream settings can sometimes be a bit much and the Enthusiast settings (shown in Mobile Bench)  are typically beyond the capabilities of the GT 640M. One of the disappointing decisions Acer made with this laptop is the choice to go with slightly cheaper DDR3 memory for the GPU; while GDDR5 isn’t as necessary at the native LCD resolution, it certainly would have helped with gaming on an external LCD. Of course, we would have liked both GDDR5 and a better LCD, but we tend to be greedy.

Value Gaming Results

We won’t say too much about our Value settings, other than the V3-571G is more than capable of running all the test games at these settings without difficulty. Civilization V was initially the odd man out, with performance coming in just shy of 30FPS at 28.3; however, the just-released-yesterday 304.79 beta drivers have improved Civ5 performance by around 15%, pushing Civ5 up to 33.4FPS. I still feel it’s possible the current NVIDIA drivers aren’t optimized very well for mobile Kepler, but how much more performance they can eke out with driver updates remains to be seen. The previous generation GT 555M in the Razer Blade is still 10% faster than the GT 640M, and AMD’s A10 Trinity chip is nipping at the heels of what should otherwise be a much faster GPU. The GT 650M in the W110ER also comes in a whopping 65% faster (with a core clock that’s only 18% higher), so something is certainly odd with the current Civ5 results. The V3 breaks 60FPS in nearly all of the other games, Battlefield 3 being the other exception (though at 47FPS it’s certainly fast enough for multiplayer gaming).

Note that in all of these games, the Clevo W110ER with the faster clocked GT 650M (but still with 2GB DDR3) easily outperforms the GT 640M, suggesting that at least for our Value settings memory bandwidth isn’t a bottleneck. The GT 555M GDDR5 on the other hand trades blows with the GT 640M, winning several matchups but falling slightly behind in others. In terms of compute power, the GT 640M should win out by roughly 20%, but the GDDR5 memory gives the GT 555M nearly 40% more bandwidth, with the result being a pretty even fight. Let’s see what happens at our more demanding Mainstream settings.

Mainstream Gaming Results

With the increase in detail levels and resolution, performance drops are pretty significant. The V3-571G manages to stay above 30FPS in all of the titles, with the exception of Civilization V, but frame rates are low enough in BF3 that we’d recommend using lower settings for multiplayer. The Razer Blade likewise continues to trade blows with the V3, indicating we’re still pretty balanced between memory and shader requirements. Of course, outside of gaming on an external display, no one would actually be running at our 900p Mainstream or 1080p Enthusiast settings, so we put together another table with our recommended settings and the performance you can expect.

Recommended Gaming Settings and Performance

Most of the games in our test suite run fine at close to maximum detail at the LCD’s native resolution. You can read our testing notes from above, and the only games that need lowered settings are BF3 and Civ5 (surprise). I also ran a test of Diablo 3 (Nightmare difficulty, midway through Act 1) and found that even 1080p at maxed out settings (with the newly added “High (Smooth)” shadowing enabled) was playable on an external LCD, with an average frame rate of 38FPS over 30 minutes. During that period, there were only four dips below 20FPS, with frame rates staying above 30FPS 91% of the time and above 25FPS 99.5% of the time. Of course, if you play on the integrated laptop display you won’t have any issues with frame rates whatsoever. [Ed: Battle.net lag on the other hand….]

The short summary of the gaming results is that the V3-571G definitely has sufficient performance for running any modern game, though not always at max quality. If you prefer gaming performance put into perspective, today’s mainstream GT 640M is generally faster than the GTX 285M from a couple years back, and it consumes less than half the power. It’s also a pretty good match up against the Radeon Mobility HD 5850 and GTX 460M—again, while using substantially less power. With GDDR5 memory, the GT 640M would likely outperform both of those cards.

Acer V3-571G Battery Life, Thermals, and Acoustics

I mentioned in the introduction that there were three areas where I feel Acer made some unnecessary compromises. One was the choice of LCD, the second was the choice of hard drive, and the third was their battery capacity. The V3-571G comes with a 6-cell 48Wh battery, and while it’s not the end of the world I still feel a 56Wh or 63Wh battery would have been easy enough to fit into the system without altering the price. Unfortunately, bean counters tend to look for every possible area of savings on budget laptops, and the drop in battery capacity probably shaved off dollar (give or take?) from the Bill of Materials. So how does that affect battery life?

Actually, considering the capacity the battery life isn’t so bad. Maximum possible battery life is 6.5 hours, and typical use battery life for surfing the Internet is still five hours. Anyone interested in using the laptop to watch movies on a longer flight will note that you get just under four hours of H.264 playback from the hard drive, which is only enough to make it through two medium length films. Looking at the normalized battery life results, the Acer V3 rates near the top of the pack, with only the M3 Ultrabook beating it in all three tests and AMD’s Trinity leading in two of the three tests (but losing in normalized H.264 playback). Had Acer equipped the V3 with a 56Wh battery like the M3 or Trinity, we’d be looking at another 30 to 60 minutes of battery life.

Looking at the thermal performance, it’s pretty clear that the V3 chassis provides sufficient cooling for the IVB and Kepler parts. During extended stress testing, the CPU did hit just under 90C on one core, but that was atypical—generally, under load we saw temperatures in the low to mid 80s. The GPU does even better, with a maximum temperature we recorded during stress testing of just 68C.

Noise levels are equally impressive, with idle noise near our testing floor of 30dB, coming in just slightly higher at 31dB. Under heavier CPU or GPU loads, noise creeps up to 33.5dB, with periodic increases to 34.5dB. With a maximum load on the CPU and GPU, we did manage to reach and stay at 35.6dB pretty much as long as we let the testing continue, but that's still pretty quiet for a laptop under full load. The only real concern I have with noise levels is that it appears we’re at maximum fan speed when we’re hitting ~36dB. Why is that a problem? It means that if the laptop happens to be in a more extreme environment (say, Arizona summer weather, with you sitting outside in 110F+ heat), there’s no room for the fan to try and compensate for added heat.

I actually covered the exhaust with my hand for a couple minutes to see if I could get a higher fan speed, with no success (and an uncomfortably hot hand). Interestingly, rather than getting hotter it appears both the CPU and GPU throttled a bit—or at least, I didn’t see core temperatures increase beyond the previously measured highs. This is worrisome as I have a friend with an older Gateway P-series FX notebook that behaves in a similar fashion, only now he’s getting to the point where the 3-year-old notebook occasionally overheats and crashes—something it didn’t do during the first couple years of use. Will the Acer V3 behave similarly in a couple years? Only time will tell, but I’d feel better if there was at least one or two more notches on the fan speed. I’d rather have a loud laptop that runs stably than a quiet laptop that crashes.

Acer V3-571G: Just How Bad Is the LCD?

We’ve made it a habit of pointing out just how bad a lot of laptop LCDs are, and sadly (but not surprisingly) Acer’s V3 laptop does nothing to buck the trend. We’re not even hoping for something like Apple’s Retina MacBook Pro here; I’d setting for just getting a better resolution than 1366x768 on a 15.6” display, and improved contrast would be icing on the cake. The LG LP156WH4 panel sadly provides neither. First, let’s see the results.

You get very poor contrast, poor maximum brightness, and weak colors. Note that we’re reporting color accuracy after calibration—run any of the laptops without using calibration software and hardware and you’ll get a Delta E consistently in the 15-25 range. (That might seem horrible, and it is, but it’s basically the same thing you get with every single tablet right now so keep that in mind.) Viewing angles are also really poor, with massive color shifting when you view the display from above or below.

But Can You Do Anything About It?

With all the bad aspects of the LCD, I got thinking: can you replace the panel with something better? As luck would have it, I have one of my favorite LCDs from the past several years ready for just such a test, the AU Optronics B156HW01v4. This particular panel comes courtesy of LaptopScreen.com, and you can even purchase your own for just $86 right now. (The original LP156WH4 costs $65, if you’re curious—and LaptopScreens has it in glossy and matte variants if you’re interested; the B156HW01 v7 is the glossy equivalent of the v4 as well, if you prefer glossy.)

I have to say, having had two cracked LCDs on laptops during the past five or so years, the improved availability of replacements (at very reasonable prices!) is definitely welcome. Even better news: the B156HW01 fits perfectly into the Acer V3 chassis. You can see the disassembly process in the following gallery—I used an old credit card to help pry the plastic chassis apart.

That’s all great news, but sadly there’s not a happy ending to this particular story. Despite a rather complex disassembly process (and the very real potential to break off some plastic clips), even though everything fits the final result was a failure. The original display is a budget 1366x768 panel, and as best I can tell Acer uses a data cable that doesn’t support higher resolutions properly. With the B156HW01 installed, you can boot up the laptop without trouble and even select the 1920x1080 resolution within Windows, but every other column of pixels ends up being white.

Update: The technical explanation is that, much like single-link DVI vs. dual-link DVI, there are single-channel LVDS cables and dual-channel LVDS cables. Single-channel LVDS can support up to 1366x768 (1280x800), but anything beyond that requires dual-channel LVDS. That means if you get a laptop with a 1600x900 display, you can upgrade to 1080p without needing a different cable, but for laptops like the V3 that ship with a native 1366x768 panel you will likely need a different cable. The single-channel LVDS cables have eight missing (empty) wires for the second data channel, which is why every other column ended up blank. Unfortunately, I haven't had any luck finding a compatible cable for the newly launch V3-571G. If you're feeling really adventurous, you could always try to roll your own.

If you can find an appropriate data/power cable, you should be able to get the 1080p display to work properly, but I have to send this laptop back to Acer so I’m not going to spend any more effort on the attempt. In general, you should be able to replace an LCD in a laptop with any LCD that runs at the same or lower resolution (and has the same form factor—note that there are at least four different form factors/mounting mechanisms just for 15.6” screens), but for higher resolution displays you will need a laptop that is designed to support such displays. If you buy a laptop where the manufacturer supports multiple resolutions (e.g. Dell’s XPS 15z can be configured with either a 1366x768 or a 1920x1080 display), you should be able to make the upgrade as well, but ideally you’d just buy a laptop with a quality display in the first place.

When I see 1920x1200 tablets from ASUS and Acer hitting the market, or ASUS’ 1080p Ultrabooks—not to mention Apple pushing their Retina displays on all of their product lines—I keep thinking, “Maybe we’re finally going to see the end of low resolution displays.” After all, go shopping for a new HDTV and you’ll see that no one even bothers with 720p these days and the only HDTVs that aren’t 1080p (or higher) are on clearance. So why is it that our laptops are still stuck with such a low resolution? If you care about displays, my recommendation is to make sure to let your wallet do the talking, and encourage friends and relatives to do the same. (/rant)

Conclusion: Compromises, Yes, but It’s Fast and Cheap

If you’re looking for something that will wow like the MacBook Pro Retina, and a sexy Ultrabook, obviously Acer’s C3-571G isn’t for you. Many elements of the industrial design (like the black glossy black plastic finish) feel like a throwback to several years ago. Acer has also definitely cut some corners in order to hit the price target. It’s too bad we have to accept compromises, but unfortunately that’s how companies make money. If you’re more interested in getting a decent budget laptop that can do everything you might want, however, the sub-$800 price makes up for a lot of the omissions.

Back when AMD launched their Trinity laptops, they commented that Trinity was designed to hit price points that we just wouldn’t see from Ivy Bridge any time soon. I expressed concern at the time that $700 was too much for what was otherwise a fairly budget oriented design, and Acer has now brought my concerns front and center. Given that Trinity is designed to hit lower price points, I don’t expect build quality or features to be any better than what Acer has put together with the V3-751G, but performance in most areas is going to be substantially better than AMD’s A10 APU with the quad-core Ivy Bridge CPU and Kepler GPU. The question is, how much more are you willing to spend to make such an upgrade, and what compromises will you make in the process?

The Acer V3-751G-6435 certainly has its fair share of compromises. A 5400RPM hard drive in today’s SSD-equipped Ultrabook world feels painfully slow at best, and untenable at worst. The USB ports on the Acer are a bit of a joke as well—how is it that we have a chipset that supports up to four USB 3.0 ports natively, and yet the V3 only includes one USB 3.0 port and two USB 2.0 ports? The battery capacity is also mediocre, and the plastic chassis isn’t going to win any design awards. As for the display, low contrast low resolution LCDs are everywhere, sadly, so at least that doesn’t stand out as a major flaw compared to competing offerings. There are other compromises as well: the use of DDR3-1333 memory instead of DDR3-1600 for the system may not matter much, but going with DDR3-1800 RAM on the GPU instead of GDDR5-4000 certainly cuts into the performance potential. On the bright side, Acer has a great keyboard layout and has ditched their old flat floating island keys, and the performance is best in class for the price.

From the competition, looking at Ivy Bridge i7-3610QM laptops you can get an ASUS R500VM for $800 (8GB RAM, 750GB HDD, and 15.6” LCD but with a GT 630M GPU). Toshiba has their Satellite S855-S5266 for the same $780 price as the V3-571G, but they use an AMD HD 7670M GPU (with 6GB RAM, 640GB HDD, and the same 1366x768 15.6” LCD spec). Acer also has a larger version of the V3-571G, the V3-771G-9875 for $830 (6GB, 750GB HDD, GT 650M, 1600x900 17.3” LCD). Beyond those laptops, prices on quad-core Ivy Bridge go up from there, often giving you integrated-only HD 4000 graphics until you get into the $1000+ range.

If you prefer the AMD Trinity route, sticking with the top A10-4600M, you can get the Toshiba S855D-S5253 for $660 that we mentioned earlier (6GB, 750GB HDD, 1366x768 15.6” LCD, and HD 7660G—Amazon lists incorrect GPU information, incidentally), or there’s a similar Toshiba S855D-S5256 that adds Blu-Ray support for $700—or there’s the S875D-S7239, a 17.3” notebook with a 1600x900 display for $750. Lenovo has a notebook with virtually identical specs (but obviously a different chassis) with the IdeaPad Z585 starting at $722. And last but not least (expensive) is the HP Pavilion dv7-7010us, a 17.3” 1600x900 notebook again with the same 6GB RAM + 750GB HDD starting at $750 online. Unless the aesthetics or design of one of the other models really suits your fancy, I’d recommend either sticking with the least expensive Toshiba S855D models, or go for the Acer V3-571G.

What about those who are looking for something higher quality than this Acer? You need to determine your priorities first, naturally, as well as how much you're willing to spend. Just as a high water mark, if you want the same performance but with great build quality and a "real" LCD, Lenovo's T530 will set you back $1700 or more (with i7-3720QM, NVIDIA NVS 5400M, 4GB RAM, and 500GB HDD it's around $1700; upgrade to 8GB RAM and a 32GB SSD cache and you're looking at $2000+). Dell's Latitude E5530 is more reasonably priced but drops support for quad-core CPU and only has integrated graphics: $1250 will get you i5-3320M, 8GB RAM, 500GB HDD (no SSD caching option for now), and a 1080p display. There's also Dell's new XPS 15, with a 1080p display, SSD caching, i7-3612QM (35W quad-core), and GT 640 GDDR5, all in an attractive aluminum finish; it will set you back $1700 for such a configuration. More affordable options (e.g. Dell's Inspiron 15R Special Edition) drop the price back down into $1000 range, but build quality tends to drop along with the pricing.

Acer doesn’t hit a homerun with their V3 line, but they do hit a very enticing price point. I’d still prefer spending more money to get a laptop with a better display and a chassis that isn’t so glossy, but I can certainly understand how back-to-school shoppers will be swayed by the low price tag and the performance. Can you find higher quality laptops? Certainly. You can also find faster laptops, or laptops with better displays, improved battery life, or even lower prices. What you won’t find are laptops that deliver quad-core Ivy Bridge with an Optimus-enabled Kepler GPU for less money (at least not right now). It may not be the sexiest notebook on the block, but the Acer V3-571G will certainly crunch numbers, encode videos, and even play games as well as laptops that cost hundreds of dollars more.