This review is from: Acer Aspire V3-571G-6602 15.6-Inch Laptop (Midnight Black) (Personal Computers)
This laptop is exactly what I wanted. A mid weight laptop with a core i5 processor and a dedicated graphics card to be able to run Guild Wars 2 when it releases in August. Most other laptops here on Amazon in this price range had the processor I was looking for but only had integrated graphics, which are not recommended for gaming. I really like the LED screen, it has a light gloss look to it but not too shiny. Great thin, sleek design. The glossy cover looks great when it is clean but is a fingerprint magnet. When I was looking over the product features I overlooked the Dolby speakers it had and was surprised at the quality when I put some music on YouTube. I mean, they don’t get VERY loud but for a laptop the quality is fantastic. I plan to upgrade the 4gb of ram currently installed.
As for gaming, I ran a test on the System Requirements Lab website to get a picture on how this machine would run Guild Wars 2. It said that this PC would run GW2 as “Fast”. I even ran a test on how it would run Mass Effect 3 and it exceeded both the minimum and recommended specifications. That being said I will update once GW2 releases on how well it runs the game and maybe Mass Effect 3 if I decide to buy it.
Pros: i5 processor + dedicated video card at $600 Overall build quality is great Great display speaker quality nice keyboard + full numeric keypad
Cons: Though not a big deal at all Fingerprint magnet cover I wish the power button was located in the center instead of the left corner, I already turned it off a couple of times while moving the laptop, no biggie just me being clumsy.
>>>>>>EDIT 7/28/2012<<<<<<< I had to return my laptop because I’m probably not going to receive financial aid this semester, so I’m going to use the money from the refund to help pay for classes/books. ALTHOUGH I still highly recommend this laptop and was very disappointed that I have to go back to my old clunker of a desktop, GW2 will also have to wait. I will still be tracking comments on this review to answer any questions anybody might have to the best of my ability/memory.
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This review is from: Acer Aspire V3-571G-6602 15.6-Inch Laptop (Midnight Black) (Personal Computers)
UPDATE: Make sure you grab the v1.08 BIOS found on acer’s site. They help a lot.
First and foremost, remove a star or even two if you’re going to do any hardware modification such as HDD replacement, or even just reinstalling a fresh windows to remove bloatware. A fresh install of windows won’t see much of the laptop hardware at all, and requires that you get all of the drivers from Acer’s website then burn them to a disc. Please note that both the LAN and WLAN will not function, meaning that you must grab the drivers from another computer. To top it all off, acer’s drivers are quite behind but are still required for your hardward to even see any updates for it; biggest being the Nvidia Optimus duo. Get the acer version drivers for both Intel HD and Nvidia, install, then get the latest versions of both from their respective websites and reinstall (the beta 304.79 is the only Nvidia driver that will install correctly under optimus and only after you update the Intel HD to it’s own latest drivers). It goes past being a critical annoyance.
For the raw hardware, though, this is a decent deal. The specs are good enough to play modern games on at least mid (and more than likely high) due to the combination of the still-current GT 630M and the somewhat-low 1366×768 screen resolution. LoL and Dota2 load up just fine, as does Diablo 3. GW2 runs fine at mid, but that’s the beta build.
As far as video performance goes, you CAN run the supercodec madVR at full settings with 1080p content, which is an accomplishment at this price. However, the laptop does not play blu-rays without an external player, so good luck using it for that.
As for editing, AdobeSuite/Blender sees the GT 630M and defaults to that, and every last tool in the suite works fine and with a decent speed. A few tweaks and you’re ready to go. Note about Adobe Dreamweaver CS6: it will complain on install but otherwise run fine once you rearrange it.
TurboBoost looks erratic but it’s intended this way. It will dynamically underclock the CPU when it’s not being used to conserve power, or kick it up to 3.1GHz (though it likes to keep it at 2.8GHz) when under load. Without the notification going, however, you’ll never notice it.
The laptop can get a bit warm (not scalding hot, though), so I’d recommend a stand if you’re to use it on your lap. Grab evga’s GPU tuner if you want to underclock the GT 630M a bit if you don’t plan on using it to spare you some heat/power consumption.
Ports are in a pretty standard place. Nothing going on here. Overall design-wise, it’s nice and thin. Thinner than expected, actually; you may want to figure out a bag for it when travelling. As the other reviewer said, though, fingerprint magnet, even if you’ve recently washed your hands (but nothing a little plastic polish / microfiber cloth every once in a while can’t fix).
Battery life is as stated so long as both TurboBoost and Optimus are working as intended. Otherwise it is a bit lower.
Quirks? If you have large hands you’re better off turning off the touchpad and using a mouse, as you’ll bump into it constantly. The fan sounds a bit erratic, thanks to TurboBoost/Optimus. The sound is LOUD but just the slightest bit tinny through the build in speakers. The touchpad’s left mouse button won’t register near it’s center as it feels pretty solid around the divider.
But if you want, you can replace the HDD with a SSD and get some nice G.Skill RAM and this thing will replace your desktop pretty easily for a great price. Just be careful when reinstalling Windows.
Pros: Hardware specs for the price Gaming/Video/Editing Performance Can actually last a while on battery That screen
Cons: Reinstalling Windows WILL be a pain Has a few, non-gamebreaking quirks No blu-ray Bad support from Acer software-wise
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This review is from: Acer Aspire V3-571G-6602 15.6-Inch Laptop (Midnight Black) (Personal Computers)
This is my first review on Amazon. I never written a review before, so forgive me if I mis-speak or have typos.
I bought this laptop to replace my venerable Asus g50 Vt-X5 after I burned it out. Being a broke college student, this laptop had everything I needed and under 600$. Pros Decent dedicated GT 630M graphics card. I’ve only played some light F2P game such as Dragon’s Nest, and it runs it well. I will update after I test out Skyrim on it….but read the Cons first to understand why I haven’t yet. *I have D3, but game is no fun, probably wont even bother reinstalling it.* Keyboard : I love it. It is very responsive and much improvement over my old G50. I also love the full sized 10 key pad. I use to work as an office clerk, and it’s wonderful to be able to utilized the keypad fully. Good speakers and sound system over all. Weight is good for a laptop this size. Its 5.7Lb compared to my old 7.98lb is a vast improvement. USB 3.0 – this was one of the main reasons I choose this Aspire over the Lenovo Z575 PU (with the Radeon HD 6650M). i5 is blazing fast. Easy access to RAM and HD. Thin profile…relative to other 15.6″ laptops.
Cons Plastic is finger print magnet. Webcam does not look good. Could use more USB ports. 2x 3.0 + 2x 2.0 would be good. Feels flimsy, but probably stronger than it seems. key and Enter key is combined…not much of a con, but slight annoyance. 5400rpm HD. Seriously, the industry need to move on to the 7200 rpms.
Screen : This is where this laptop lose the 2 stars for me. I can deal with other cons, and so far up to this point, all cons were just nitpicky stuff. However, I can not stand this display. I can deal with 1366×786 resolution. For under 600$, you wont find 1080p. That’s not the issue. The issue is, this display is cheap and unsatisfying to use. Sure it’s brightly lit, but the white feels like you are looking at the sun. I have adjusted the brightness and the colors enhancement for the last 2 days, and I can not get this screen to look nice. My high quality profession photos looks over exposed (very white), and not vibrant at all. 720p movies would become “color noisy”. Also when I scroll text up or down, the text flashes in and out like the cheap monitors my school’s computer lab uses. I finally hooked up the laptop to my 720p TV to see if it’s a GPU issue. It’s not. The image on my TV is beautiful. At least I know the HDMI works well. The colors were vibrant, the white is not overwhelming, contrast is good, and very well detailed. My wallpaper is a Skyrim scene where the dovhakin looks over the valley. On my display, the snow on the mountain is not white, it’s blue. I can’t get it to be white. If I tried, they look like glowing snow and burn my retina. Did I mention toning down the “brightness” does not help? If you do that, your other colors becomes faded. However, during the time my laptop was connected to the TV, I did manage to make it look slightly better(Skyrim’s snow is still blue or glowing white balls) I founded it better to disable the window’s calibration. That did nothing. Instead use the Nvidia control panel. I’ve been at it for 2 days…and at my wit’s end. I will be looking at lenovo’s comp and see how their screens stack up. I will update. This screen issue has me on the borderline of returning this laptop. I like everything else, but whats the point if I can’t stand looking at the display. Btw, my old G50 never had screen issues like this. It’s not just me, my wife agrees it’s not pleasant to look at.
Other thoughts I bought an extra 1 x 4 gb ram and a sandisk SSD. Both were great buys and well worth the money. The laptop comes with 1x 4gb ram, and open slot. Bios is older 1.6 verison but still recognized the sandisk SSD. I burned the recovery disks and installed the OS onto the SSD. Windows loads in less than 15 secs. Hardware was easy to install. Just be sure to select install to FULL FACTORY setting, otherwise you would just waste 3 hours. However, if I do not find a solution to the screen issue, this will all be for naught :/.
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Authors bio is coming up shortly. 
Great for the price.,
This laptop is exactly what I wanted. A mid weight laptop with a core i5 processor and a dedicated graphics card to be able to run Guild Wars 2 when it releases in August. Most other laptops here on Amazon in this price range had the processor I was looking for but only had integrated graphics, which are not recommended for gaming. I really like the LED screen, it has a light gloss look to it but not too shiny. Great thin, sleek design. The glossy cover looks great when it is clean but is a fingerprint magnet. When I was looking over the product features I overlooked the Dolby speakers it had and was surprised at the quality when I put some music on YouTube. I mean, they don’t get VERY loud but for a laptop the quality is fantastic. I plan to upgrade the 4gb of ram currently installed.
As for gaming, I ran a test on the System Requirements Lab website to get a picture on how this machine would run Guild Wars 2. It said that this PC would run GW2 as “Fast”. I even ran a test on how it would run Mass Effect 3 and it exceeded both the minimum and recommended specifications. That being said I will update once GW2 releases on how well it runs the game and maybe Mass Effect 3 if I decide to buy it.
Pros:
i5 processor + dedicated video card at $600
Overall build quality is great
Great display
speaker quality
nice keyboard + full numeric keypad
Cons:
Though not a big deal at all
Fingerprint magnet cover
I wish the power button was located in the center instead of the left corner, I already turned it off a couple of times while moving the laptop, no biggie just me being clumsy.
>>>>>>EDIT 7/28/2012<<<<<<<
I had to return my laptop because I’m probably not going to receive financial aid this semester, so I’m going to use the money from the refund to help pay for classes/books. ALTHOUGH I still highly recommend this laptop and was very disappointed that I have to go back to my old clunker of a desktop, GW2 will also have to wait. I will still be tracking comments on this review to answer any questions anybody might have to the best of my ability/memory.
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|Good laptop for the price with a few quirks,
UPDATE: Make sure you grab the v1.08 BIOS found on acer’s site. They help a lot.
First and foremost, remove a star or even two if you’re going to do any hardware modification such as HDD replacement, or even just reinstalling a fresh windows to remove bloatware. A fresh install of windows won’t see much of the laptop hardware at all, and requires that you get all of the drivers from Acer’s website then burn them to a disc. Please note that both the LAN and WLAN will not function, meaning that you must grab the drivers from another computer. To top it all off, acer’s drivers are quite behind but are still required for your hardward to even see any updates for it; biggest being the Nvidia Optimus duo. Get the acer version drivers for both Intel HD and Nvidia, install, then get the latest versions of both from their respective websites and reinstall (the beta 304.79 is the only Nvidia driver that will install correctly under optimus and only after you update the Intel HD to it’s own latest drivers). It goes past being a critical annoyance.
For the raw hardware, though, this is a decent deal. The specs are good enough to play modern games on at least mid (and more than likely high) due to the combination of the still-current GT 630M and the somewhat-low 1366×768 screen resolution. LoL and Dota2 load up just fine, as does Diablo 3. GW2 runs fine at mid, but that’s the beta build.
As far as video performance goes, you CAN run the supercodec madVR at full settings with 1080p content, which is an accomplishment at this price. However, the laptop does not play blu-rays without an external player, so good luck using it for that.
As for editing, AdobeSuite/Blender sees the GT 630M and defaults to that, and every last tool in the suite works fine and with a decent speed. A few tweaks and you’re ready to go. Note about Adobe Dreamweaver CS6: it will complain on install but otherwise run fine once you rearrange it.
TurboBoost looks erratic but it’s intended this way. It will dynamically underclock the CPU when it’s not being used to conserve power, or kick it up to 3.1GHz (though it likes to keep it at 2.8GHz) when under load. Without the notification going, however, you’ll never notice it.
The laptop can get a bit warm (not scalding hot, though), so I’d recommend a stand if you’re to use it on your lap. Grab evga’s GPU tuner if you want to underclock the GT 630M a bit if you don’t plan on using it to spare you some heat/power consumption.
Ports are in a pretty standard place. Nothing going on here. Overall design-wise, it’s nice and thin. Thinner than expected, actually; you may want to figure out a bag for it when travelling. As the other reviewer said, though, fingerprint magnet, even if you’ve recently washed your hands (but nothing a little plastic polish / microfiber cloth every once in a while can’t fix).
Battery life is as stated so long as both TurboBoost and Optimus are working as intended. Otherwise it is a bit lower.
Quirks? If you have large hands you’re better off turning off the touchpad and using a mouse, as you’ll bump into it constantly. The fan sounds a bit erratic, thanks to TurboBoost/Optimus. The sound is LOUD but just the slightest bit tinny through the build in speakers. The touchpad’s left mouse button won’t register near it’s center as it feels pretty solid around the divider.
But if you want, you can replace the HDD with a SSD and get some nice G.Skill RAM and this thing will replace your desktop pretty easily for a great price. Just be careful when reinstalling Windows.
Pros:
Hardware specs for the price
Gaming/Video/Editing Performance
Can actually last a while on battery
That screen
Cons:
Reinstalling Windows WILL be a pain
Has a few, non-gamebreaking quirks
No blu-ray
Bad support from Acer software-wise
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|Good laptop for the price, but the display is headache,
This is my first review on Amazon. I never written a review before, so forgive me if I mis-speak or have typos.
I bought this laptop to replace my venerable Asus g50 Vt-X5 after I burned it out. Being a broke college student, this laptop had everything I needed and under 600$.
Pros
Decent dedicated GT 630M graphics card. I’ve only played some light F2P game such as Dragon’s Nest, and it runs it well. I will update after I test out Skyrim on it….but read the Cons first to understand why I haven’t yet. *I have D3, but game is no fun, probably wont even bother reinstalling it.*
Keyboard : I love it. It is very responsive and much improvement over my old G50.
I also love the full sized 10 key pad. I use to work as an office clerk, and it’s wonderful to be able to utilized the keypad fully.
Good speakers and sound system over all.
Weight is good for a laptop this size. Its 5.7Lb compared to my old 7.98lb is a vast improvement.
USB 3.0 – this was one of the main reasons I choose this Aspire over the Lenovo Z575 PU (with the Radeon HD 6650M).
i5 is blazing fast.
Easy access to RAM and HD.
Thin profile…relative to other 15.6″ laptops.
Cons
Plastic is finger print magnet.
Webcam does not look good.
Could use more USB ports. 2x 3.0 + 2x 2.0 would be good.
Feels flimsy, but probably stronger than it seems.
key and Enter key is combined…not much of a con, but slight annoyance.
5400rpm HD. Seriously, the industry need to move on to the 7200 rpms.
Screen : This is where this laptop lose the 2 stars for me. I can deal with other cons, and so far up to this point, all cons were just nitpicky stuff. However, I can not stand this display. I can deal with 1366×786 resolution. For under 600$, you wont find 1080p. That’s not the issue.
The issue is, this display is cheap and unsatisfying to use. Sure it’s brightly lit, but the white feels like you are looking at the sun. I have adjusted the brightness and the colors enhancement for the last 2 days, and I can not get this screen to look nice. My high quality profession photos looks over exposed (very white), and not vibrant at all. 720p movies would become “color noisy”. Also when I scroll text up or down, the text flashes in and out like the cheap monitors my school’s computer lab uses.
I finally hooked up the laptop to my 720p TV to see if it’s a GPU issue. It’s not. The image on my TV is beautiful. At least I know the HDMI works well. The colors were vibrant, the white is not overwhelming, contrast is good, and very well detailed.
My wallpaper is a Skyrim scene where the dovhakin looks over the valley. On my display, the snow on the mountain is not white, it’s blue. I can’t get it to be white. If I tried, they look like glowing snow and burn my retina. Did I mention toning down the “brightness” does not help? If you do that, your other colors becomes faded.
However, during the time my laptop was connected to the TV, I did manage to make it look slightly better(Skyrim’s snow is still blue or glowing white balls) I founded it better to disable the window’s calibration. That did nothing. Instead use the Nvidia control panel. I’ve been at it for 2 days…and at my wit’s end. I will be looking at lenovo’s comp and see how their screens stack up. I will update. This screen issue has me on the borderline of returning this laptop. I like everything else, but whats the point if I can’t stand looking at the display.
Btw, my old G50 never had screen issues like this. It’s not just me, my wife agrees it’s not pleasant to look at.
Other thoughts
I bought an extra 1 x 4 gb ram and a sandisk SSD. Both were great buys and well worth the money. The laptop comes with 1x 4gb ram, and open slot. Bios is older 1.6 verison but still recognized the sandisk SSD. I burned the recovery disks and installed the OS onto the SSD. Windows loads in less than 15 secs. Hardware was easy to install. Just be sure to select install to FULL FACTORY setting, otherwise you would just waste 3 hours. However, if I do not find a solution to the screen issue, this will all be for naught :/.
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