My review of the Acer Aspire 751

Overall: Excellent in all areas, awesome sound quality, bright display, large keyboard, good battery life, fanless, except the Atom Z520 processor which feels sluggish and is my only real gripe with this mini-notebook. Love the 1366x768 resolution.

I'd keep mine but there are warranty stickers covering everything on the back.

http://portablemonkey.com/reviews/revie ... 51-review/

Some pictures over on my Flickr account:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/31828796@N ... 574169965/

 

Very exact review, the first having a short view at the HD-Playback abilities. I think most people (especially other reviewers) have no clue that the GMA500 has a hardware video decoder in it.

Much thanks for the hint with the headphones, thougt it was a marketing-gag. Just tried it with my Sennheiser in-Ears i have for my iPod and was COMPLETELY blown away while watching the new Transformers Trailer. In 1080p, H.264, 5.1 of course

Greetings,
Felix

 

Hi Felix,

Nice to see you here, too. Thanks for all your advice on setting up my 751 to playback 1080P HD Video!

 

Hey guys,

I am looking at getting a 751 also (an upgrade from my black 8.9 AAO), but the only thing holding me back is the slower Intel Z520 processor. I have been using my 8.9 AAO to surf the net, watch youtube, yahoo, and other video sites as well as movies in h264 and avi formats on my hard drive, but rarely do I bump up the videos to view in HD quality...maybe just in full screen mode. I also run iTunes currently on it too and it's working well. I have read most of the reviews and even in this forum, saying that there are issues with the processor keeping up with the videos in full screen. I'd like to ask if you owners have experienced these kind of issues, full screen or not. I have also heard people overclocking their processors to run faster...anyone tried that yet here? I'm loving the screen size and the overall 751 size, which seems to be not much bigger than the D250. The D250 is my other upgrade option, but imo, the 751 design is nicer. Have you guys seen the black version of the 751 in person? Thanks in advance.

 

Hi dkp124:

if you buy a 751 and run it out of the box, it will be very slow. Get rid of all that bloatware, install a fast browser an overclock it to 1450mhz and i think you will be fine. Concerning your h264 videos, you will able to playback even 1080p with the Acer 751. There are lots of guides around the web.

I saw the black one at my local dealer. It has a high-gloss outside and you will see every fingerprint on it, i choosed the white one where you don´t see it so much.

 

Just to be clear, flash video (i.e. youtube and hulu) will often drop frames, even when windowed. And at full-screen, things can get really ugly depending on how much action is in the video. Remember, this netbook has to process twice as many pixels as a typical 1024x600 resolution model.

The odd thing about this machine is that the GMA 500 graphics chip can handle 1080p High Def videos in the correct formats. Talk about Jekyl and Hyde. Not handling standard def youtube videos very well, yet playing 1080p content beautifully in certain formats...

I love this machine, but it's really not well suited to streaming flash video. So if that's important to you, you may want to wait until some of the CULV models come out, like the 12" MSI Wind or Acer's next version of this 11.6" model. Can you last a couple of months with your current computer? If so, you might be glad you waited... But if you can't wait, it's a nice machine so long as your main usage isn't watching flash-based video.

 

Any idea where you saw the guides for overclocking?

 

Thanks Felix and TrackSmart for the comments and advice. Wow, tough decision. I'm usually an early adopter and waiting would be difficult, but after watching hulu on my 8.9 AAO full screen with no hiccups, i might just have to wait for the next 11.6, or look into the D250. Let's see if I'm able to wait that long. Will give an update here if I get the 751..I'm just so curious.

 

Just look for "SetFSB" here in the Acer 751 board.

To bad, i cannot test HULU in germany. Video-streaming, especially based on Adobe´s Flash Player, works bad actually. Others work fine, so this is some kind of driver/software issue.

@TrackSmart: would you like to test http://www.gametrailers.com/gt-hd in 720p Windows Media stream?

Greetings,
Felix

 

You are welcome for the insight.

I really *needed* a laptop when I bought the Acer 751. Duct tape was holding the battery and CD drives in place on my old Pentium 4 laptop and I was about to embark on 3 months of constant travel for work. So I'm not the least bit sorry I made the purchase. Of all the netbooks I looked at, the big screen and big keyboard on this model made the most sense for my usage (documents, large spreadsheets, powerpoint presentations, and other real work).

HOWEVER, if I had a perfectly well-functioning laptop (like you do) I would have waited. By the end of summer you should be able to pickup a machine with an 11.6" or 12" screen and a Core-2-based low-voltage processor for under $600. You'll get small size, relatively low price, and the ability to handle streaming video more effectively.

I can live with the crappy flash-video performance, but you don't have to make that same compromise if you are willing to wait a little bit...

 

I played the 720p Splinter Cell video. It was very choppy on my machine. I had a few applications open in the background (spreadsheets and documents), which impact performance slightly, but it wasn't even close to being smooth or watchable. My machine is on stock settings (no overclocking).

 

Thanks for the test TrackSmart, but sorry you got a bad experience. I suggest it has something to do with my Win7 and its advanced codecs. While microsoft is on the right way, Adobe isn´t yet The only way to get propper performance with Flash actually, is a faster CPU. Neither VIA or AMD has a good answer to this task at the moment, as they will drain your battery way faster than the intel Atoms. The core2solo´s like the Acer Timeline seems to be good. But don´t ignore what made Netbooks popular...mobility AND price.

 

Good to know, as it gives me some hope that future driver and software updates will potentially fix some of the streaming video problems. As we've both affirmed, even 1080p video will play flawlessly when the GMA 500's hardware decoder is being used. It's a shame that isn't usually the case with online streaming video.

 

Completely right! But i´m optimistic that theses things will change in the next months. If more people use devices with our GMA500, better support will come automaticly. Next Step will be the Asus 1101 (11"6) and T91 (tablet), a bit later every new Atom (Pineview Platform) will have the GMA500 intigrated in the CPU. Right now, we are some kind of pioneers and i can understand that not everybody is happy about it.

 

Hey guys, I tried playing DJ Hero in HD quality from the link Felix gave on my AAO 8.9 and it was very choppy too, actually stopped trying a little afterwards. I had a few tabs opened in my browser, but nothing major. Of course SD quality played fine with Atom n270. Were there any problems with the 751 playing SD quality in full screen? Also, I'd like to ask what kind of video formats would the hardware encoder recognize in order to play the videos smoothly? Thanks.

 

The video format it would play "Properly" would be :
.Gif
.Jpg
.Bmp
And thats pushing it to its MAX!


:lol: :lol: :lol:

 

Radioman1993 is right on this. Even scrolling through a .txt document in wordpad is a heavy task for the 751 :shock:

 

Those are image formats you have listed. If the 751 had issues even opening these formats then that would be really sad!

 

Just one small question, in your review you say linux unfriendly ??

I am running ubuntu 9.04 (not Unr) and just about everything works fine except wifi light but who cares.

 

There were some graphic-driver issues at the beginning, but i think this is solved today.