Acer Aspire 4520

For a budget laptop, the 4520 sports an impressive specification sheet. It’s powered by AMD’s latest dual core effort – the TK-53, clocked at 1.7 GHz, which is based on a 65nm process. It also has 1 GB of DDR2 667 MB RAM, and a 160 GB HDD. Its graphics runs on Nvidia’s 7000M chipset, which is very basic. Another impressive feature is a pair of speakers that are DOLBY DIGITAL LIVE certified.

To test the performance of the laptop we put it through our normal series of battery life tests, PCMark and 3DMark tests. In the PCMark test the laptop achieved an average score of 2975. This is an overall healthy score and shows the robustness of AMD’s processors.

The score was of course impacted by the basic graphical subsystem as despite our repeated efforts 3DMark 06 was not able to complete a single run. After a clean format and rebuild of the system, we were able to run 3DMark 06 and got a score of 652. This is not a very good score from a gamer's point of view. However one thing in favor of the 7000M chipset is that it is DX9-compatible. This means it supports the Aero features of Windows Vista – and does it quite nicely.

In our battery life tests, with a heavy workload we were able to achieve a battery life of 2 hrs 15 mins. This is again a decent score and with some judicious use can easily be extended to nearly 3 hours.