Acer Aspire S7-391-9886
The Acer Aspire S7-391-9886 ($1,649.99 list) is one of the thinnest ultrabooks we've reviewed, especially given its touch screen. It comes with a quicker Core i7 processor than the run-of-the-mill ultrabook, and its SSD drives with RAID 0 striping make it a speed demon at multimedia tasks. The S7-391-9886 is certainly pricey, but it gives you an aluminum unibody construction, Gorilla Glass 2 on both sides of the lid, and a ten-finger touch screen perfect for learning to like Windows 8. A couple quirks and a relatively short battery life keep it from earning our top marks, but as a "money is no object" lust item, it's hard to go wrong with the Acer Aspire S7 ultrabook.
Design and Features
The S7-391-9886 is very thin, coming in at 0.47 inches thick, or 11.9 mm. This is almost one half of the thickness allotment (23 mm) that Intel mandates for touch screen equipped ultrabooks. It also makes the S7-391-9886 one of the thinnest ultrabooks, if not the thinnest laptop we've ever reviewed. To put this into perspective, the Editors' Choice winner for mainstream ultrabooks, the Toshiba Portege Z935-P300 is 16mm thick and the high-end ultrabook Editor's Choice Asus Zenbook Prime UX32VD-DB71 ($1,299 list, 4.0) is 0.7 inches thick (18mm). None of these three ultrabooks is thick by any means, but if you liken the Zenbook Prime to a weekly magazine, the Acer Aspire S7-391-9886 would be like a stack of a few sheets of paper, tacked to a wall. The S7-391-9886 is also very light, tipping the scales at 2.86 pounds, lighter than the Zenbook, but a smidge heavier than the Portege.
Performance
The S7-391-9886 comes with an Intel Core i7-3517U processor (a dual-core CPU with Hyper-Threading), 4GB of system memory, Intel HD Graphics 4000, and two 128GB SSDs in a RAID 0 array (256GB total). The RAID 0 array helps the system with performance. This is shown in the system's PCMark7 score of 5,090 points, which is much faster than the spinning hard drive-equipped Asus UX32VD's 2,523 points. Other scores were very good as well, including the system's multimedia scores like Photoshop CS6 (4 minutes 48 seconds) and Handbrake (1:17). The S7-391-9886 is certainly fast enough for the power multimedia user. But it falls short on 3D performance, with only integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics. You wouldn't want to use the system for gaming anyway. In high-performance mode, the system's fans kicked in any time the system was stressed. In low power (battery) mode, the system uses passive cooling at the expense of a little processing power.
The Acer Aspire S7-391-9886 is a media performance laptop for the traveling artist, similar to the main audience for the Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch (Retina Display) and the current Editors' Choice for ultrabooks, the Asus ZenBook Prime UX32VD-DB71. All three give you 1080p (or greater) resolution in a 13-inch portable package, as well as good multimedia benchmark performance. The S7-391-9886 is certainly the way to go if you want the slimmest possible touch-screen system to commute with you on the train. However, the other choices may be better if you're a plane commuter, since they have better battery life overall. The Asus UX32VD-DB71 in particular comes with discrete graphics and a much less dear price tag of $1,299. Even the other Windows 8 systems with touch screen (Dell XPS 12 and HP Envy TouchSmart Ultrabook 4t-1100) have better battery life than the S7-391-9886. Again, if you have $1,700 to spend, you'll probably be happy with the S7-391-9886, but for a little more ($200), you're in upgraded MacBook Pro 13-inch (Retina Display) territory. And that laptop will make it through a continental plane trip with many minutes to spare.
No comments:
Post a Comment