Acer Aspire 5750Z Review

Price is an important factor with any product, including notebooks. Even though there might be new waves of notebooks washing up on Indian shores, consumers are constantly looking for affordable solutions. Each brand has its own model placed across price ranges. Acer has recently launched the Aspire 5750Z (AS5750Z-B942G50Mnkk), a notebook priced under the Rs. 30,000 mark and based on Intel’s slightly older Sandy Bridge architecture. 

Video Review

The Acer Aspire 5750z caught on video

Design and build quality

In terms of design, it’s actually built rather well on the outside and boasts an attractive design. It’s somewhat large, considering it comes with a 15.6-inch screen. There is some slight flexing of the bezel surrounding the screen. The base and the panels holding the keyboard and trackpad together are solid though. The hinge of the display also doesn’t move around too easily, which is a good thing if you’re using the notebook on your lap while travelling in cars and buses.

Well laid out keyboard - spacious and usable

The keys have a good bit of travel to them and are isolated, but not like the ones found on the MacBooks. Cleaning the space between the keys will be easy as well. The trackpad appears a tad small as compared to the other large sized notebooks. 

Features

This particular Acer Aspire 5750Z is powered by an Intel Pentium Core B940 processor, a dual-core processor clocked at 2GHz, with 3MB of L3 cache - not particularly powerful by today’s standards. The laptop ships with 2GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive. It also has a rather large 15.6-inch LED-backlit screen that runs a native resolution of 1366 x 768. The rest of the specifications are pretty standard as with any other notebook in its price range. There’s Wi-Fi 802.11n and Bluetooth support. Acer sells the notebook with Windows 7 Home Basic pre-installed on it. In terms of connectivity, there are three USB ports, an HDMI port and two standard audio ports - one for headphones and the other for an external microphone.

HDMI connectivity if you want to connect it to a larger display

Unlike some of the more expensive models, you don’t get any dedicated multimedia buttons here. There are shortcut keys for them as well as for volume and screen brightness levels. The keys have a good tactile feel to them. The buttons on the trackpad lack separate buttons for the left and right click, but the trackpad itself supports multi-touch. 

Performance

As far as core CPU performance is concerned, it’s an average performer. It’s nowhere close to the latest Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge notebooks in the market today. Recently, we reviewed a bunch of notebooks priced under the Rs. 30,000mark and they included notebooks running Pentium class of processors. The Aspire 5750Z’s Pentium B940 is a bit quicker than the slower Pentium 987, but it’s still a good 20 percent or so slower than the Sandy Bridge alternatives. 

An optical drive on the other side

Hard drive performance is average as well, with speeds hovering around the 73MB/s mark for read and write tests using CrystalMark as well as SiSoft Sandra’s integrated file system tests. Graphics performance isn’t impressive at all. The integrated graphics card is only ideal for handling older game titles. Nevertheless, HD video playback won’t be an issue. You can’t use this notebook to run very intensive graphics and CPU intensive suites such as Photoshop, 3D Studio Max etc. 3D Mark Vantage throws up scores of 4879, as compared to the scores of approximately 8,000 from other standard Sandy Bridge-powered notebooks.

The screen is average and you won’t be particularly blown away by its quality. Of course, it’s pretty large so you can use it to watch movies and TV shows every now and then. Colours appear a tad pale, but viewing angles in general are pretty decent. 

Decent looking notebook for everyday use

Audio performance isn’t too bad either. The speakers aren’t very loud, but the quality is good. The speakers are mounted at the front, facing the user, so the sound isn’t muffled as such.

It’s not like the average processing performance results in superior battery life. With a highly CPU-intensive battery test, it lasts a good hour and a half. This is decent, but it’s easy to extend this time to a few hours if you were to use it for desktop applications and general browsing purposes. 

Verdict

A standard Acer Aspire design

The Acer Aspire 5750Z isn’t a particularly impressive notebook when it comes to performance. It is, however, a good buy if you consider bang for your buck; it sells for Rs. 26,999 in India. For that money, you get a full-flegded, rather well built laptop with a bundled operating system, something you miss on other low-priced notebooks. If you’re on an extremely tight budget, then this might be worth considering if you aren’t into gaming.