Acer Aspire 8942G review

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Great features and power combine in budget MacBook Pro rival

Acer may have only become a household name in the last few years here in the UK, but they make some of the best value, best built notebooks around, and the Acer Aspire 8942G highlights this.

What really impresses here are the features, power and performance on offer for the money – and in a way it shows up it's Core i7 rival, the Apple MacBook Pro's high asking price.

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The Intel Core i7 processor – with its hyperthreading and overclocking capabilities – lays waste to most tasks, with applications running smoothly and quickly, even concurrently, thanks to the 6GB of memory included. Those after no compromise performance for running resource heavy applications will find much to like here.

A very powerful ATi Mobility Radeon HD 5850 graphics card has been employed, giving this machine the sort of power normally associated with gaming rigs from the likes of Alienware, letting you get your game on when you're finished working. To give an idea of the performance on offer here, we had little trouble running the infamous Crysis with settings pretty high.

Acer Aspire 8942G: The screen

A Blu-ray drive is present but there's no writing capabilities for burning to the format. Nevertheless Blu-ray films look fantastic on the enormous screen which – at 18.4-inches – you could land a 747 on. Although pictures are good rather than being excellent, but is full HD. A capacious 640GB hard drive is incredibly generous, and leaves plenty of space for you're your photo, music and movie libraries.

The size of the screen ensures a massive chassis, and also a large, comfortable keyboard. A dedicated number pad is included – for the serious number crunchers – and there's also a touch activated media control centre for conveniently changing track or volume of your music, for example.

Acer Aspire 8942G: Connections

The Acer provides a huge choice of connections, with HDMI, eSATA, Firewire, USB and DisplayPort all represented. This gives you great freedom when hooking up to external monitors, hard drives and peripherals, such as your smartphone.

Portability isn't the best here, and the 4.6kg chassis and 205 minute battery life means this is essentially a desktop replacement notebook. While this won't suit everyone, those simply after power, multimedia and a great screen, withouth breaking the bank won't do much better than this.

Link: Save On Laptops

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SPECIFICATIONS

OS: Windows 7 Home Premium

Screen (size and res): 18.4-inch (1920 x 1080)

Processor (inc speed): Intel 1.6GHz Core i7 720QM

Graphics: ATi Mobility Radeon HD 5850

Memory: 6GB 
Storage (inc DVD): 640GB Blu-ray (Read and write) 
Battery tested: 205

Battery claimed: 180
Connections: 5x USB, eSATA, Firewire, VGA, HDMI, DisplayPort, SD Card Slot, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet

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