Acer Aspire 7551G-7459 Review
 

Acer Aspire 7551G-7459 Review

Well I've had this laptop for about 4 months now and it seems to have disappeared from the Acer website. So I thought I would do my first review on HWC about it.

So first off this laptop came in a fairly plain blue and white box with specs written on the side. The box itself is pretty sturdy and came with a nice plastic handle which made it super easy to carry home. Once opened the laptop itself was protected by more cardboard with about a 1" buffer around the edges of the laptop.
The laptop itself was neatly wrapped in a fibre white bag to protect it from scratches. There was also a fibre pad between the keyboard and the screen for more protection. As well the glossy screen bezel and keyboard trim were protected by plastic film.
The back of the screen(lid) has a nice texture to it. It almost looks like diamond plate but with recessed ovals instead of diamonds. There's also a nice chrome acer logo right in the centre. On the inside it looks pretty simple with the lack of any extra buttons from the keyboard and power button. The nicely textured (with fine concentric rings) power button is in the top left from the keyboard and has a blue power LED indicator. Located right beside the power button are the HDD indicator and WiFi indicator LEDs. Going down and looking at the chiclet keyboard we can see that this is a FR/EN keyboard with additional characters outlined in dark green. We can also see function buttons to do various tasks on the laptop(more on this later). A nice feature which is pretty much expected from 17" laptops is a full number pad.
Under the keyboard we have a nice smooth track pad with scroll bar accompanied by 2 buttons all in a thin chrome outline. A nice feature is that the track pad will disable itself if the computer senses that you are typing, a god send for bloggers. To either side of the track pad we have various stickers which I'm so thankful to acer for actually having them straight and not crooked.

Now, for inputs and outputs. On the very front all we have is a 5-in-1 card reader which supports most common media cards. To the left side we have headphone jack, mic jack, USB 2.0, HDMI out, VGA out, CPU/GPU exhaust, Gigabit LAN port, power in. On the right side we have 2x USB 2.0 ports, DVD+RW DL drive, kensington lock.

Hardware specs:
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
AMD Phenom II x4 N970 @ 2.2GHz
AMD Radeon HD 6470M with up to 3327MB HyperMemory
6GB DDR3
750GB HDD
DVD-Super Multi DL Drive
Multi-Gesture track pad
Acer Nplify 802.11 b/g/n
6 cell Lithium Ion battery energy star approved (approx 2.5 hours life)
17.3"(16:9) HD LED LCD

Bundled Software worth noting:
Acer Backup Manager
Acer Crystal Eye Webcam
Acer ePower Management
Acer eRecovery Management
Acer Games
Acer Registration
Acer ScreenSaver
Acer Updater
CyberLink PowerDVD 9
NTI Media Maker 8

Performance:
Performance is pretty decent on this laptop being a quad core with discrete graphics. Of course it does have its limitations. Below is the Windows Experience Index.


Component Details | Subscore Base score = 5.1
Processor AMD Phenom(tm) II N970 Quad-Core Processor | 6.9
Memory (RAM) 6.00 GB | 7.2
Graphics AMD Radeon HD 6470M | 5.1
Gaming graphics 3327 MB Total available graphics memory | 6.2
Primary hard disk 489GB Free (685GB Total) | 5.9
Windows 7 Home Premium

System
Manufacturer Acer
Model Aspire 7551
Total amount of system memory 6.00 GB RAM
System type 64-bit operating system
Number of processor cores 4

Storage
Total size of hard disk(s) 685 GB
Disk partition (C:) 489 GB Free (685 GB Total)
Media drive (D:) CD/DVD

Graphics
Display adapter type AMD Radeon HD 6470M
Total available graphics memory 3327 MB
Dedicated graphics memory 512 MB
Dedicated system memory 0 MB
Shared system memory 2815 MB
Display adapter driver version 8.783.2.0
Primary monitor resolution 1600x900
DirectX version DirectX 10

Network
Network Adapter Atheros AR5B97 Wireless Network Adapter
Network Adapter Broadcom NetLink (TM) Gigabit Ethernet



According to windows it's pretty good in the cpu and memory area and mid-range in the graphics area.

Unigine Heaven:
However while running Unigine Heaven we can see the laptop's limitations. The maximum FPS achieved in Heaven was 12 FPS and averaged 9 FPS.
NFS World:
Next we take a look at Need for Speed World. On max settings in full screen mode 1280x720 we manage a nice playable avg. of 30 fps with maxes of 40 fps and minimums of 27fps. Pretty decent performance from a laptop.
Lineage II:
Up next is Lineage II from NCsoft. The game was run full screen at 1600x900 with all details on high and 4xAA. Unlike the previous game it can be seen here that Lineage II is much more demanding with an average fps of 18 during action scenes. Not exactly playable but at lower settings we see a bump to 29 avg fps.
Kingdom Heroes:
The last game I'll look at is Kingdom Heroes from Aeria Games. With all settings at max and at a resolution of 1280x768 the laptop achieves a nice avg 35fps. However one flaw with this laptop and the game is that the game does not worth the the touch pad's scroll feature while it works with other games.

Folding:
I was just curious as to how well the laptop would fold using the smp client. It turns out fairly well. Although temps skyrocketed to 75c and luckily it's winter right now and I'm able to lower the ambient temp down to 15c which kept the cpu at bay at a toasty 66c. While running project 7504 the N970 achieved an impressive 12:40 TPF.

So all in all a pretty nice laptop a little on the heavy side but that's expected with a 17" laptop. It has nice aesthetics well rounded performance and didn't cost an arm and a leg. I was able to purchase this laptop at Futureshop for a nice even $300+tax on sale($150 off). It's not one of the top of the line laptop like the i7 machines out there but it's pretty good for watching videos and light gaming.
Pros:
-great layout and overall look
-auto disabling trackpad while typing
-decent performance in games
-good price point
Cons:
-Under very heavy load CPU can get very hot
-Volume is controlled via function button on the keyboard rather than hardware

My grade is A-