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Written by Sasa Pantelic
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Monday, 06 April 2009 |
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Page 2 of 3
The fact that this notebook has GeForce 9600M GT graphics card with 1GB of memory, sounds impressive but, for games it would be better that DDR3 memory was used even in smaller amount of 512MB. In this configuration you got a notebook that can run new games but not with in maximum settings. Since display has large resolution in most cases you will play games in lower resolutions than native (1900x1080).
Acer Aspire 8730G is desktop replacement notebook and in this scenario storage space is always scarce. Acer actually predicted this and provided this model with another HDD bay. Because of this you can always add another HDD if needed or, add one SSD, move system partition to SSD and end up with faster and more agile notebook. Even without SSD, Acer Aspire 8730G is very nippy notebook although it is not one of the faster on the market.
We expected from this notebook to have few “hot-spots” because of powerful components that can be found beneath the bonnet but, we were wrong. Because of large dissipation surface, heat-up is hardly noticeable on the left side. Also this notebook is not too noisy, even under full load.
Acer Aspire 8730G has preinstalled Windows Vista Home Premium and Acer InstantON Arcade. InstantON Arcade is based on Windows XP and it can be used for watching movies, listening music and watching pictures. In our case Acer Arcade didn’t recognize some file types like MKV. Webcam is, as expected from Acer, excellent. There are not many options to setup but it does its job perfectly.
When you take a look at the size of this notebook and its graphics card and other components, last thing that you expect from this notebook is to have descent autonomy. Although chances that you will use this notebook too far from power source are minimal, we must point out that 8-cell battery allows few hours of autonomy. Since most other manufacturers economize with batteries in their desktop replacement models, we must praise Acer’s decision to use large battery on this model.
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