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Acer Ethos 5951G 15.6in Core i5 notebook: With removable touchpad/remote control looks pretty superb comes with long battery life but it isnt cheap will cost you around £900 |
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Reviews
The Acer Etos 5951G the Intel Core i5-2410M CPU runs its two cores both with HyperThreading, at 2.3GHz. It has a maximum Turbo Boost rating of 2.9GHz and is backed up by 8GB of 1333MHz DDR 3 Ram. The laptop comes in matt black casing and blue activity LEDs with brushed finish on the lid, weighing 3.3kg.
The laptop is slim but is not lightweight. DirectX 11 graphics are provided by an Nvidia GeForce GT 540 M chip with 1GB of dedicated video memory. This scores 1659 in 3DMark 11 on Entry settings and 8736 in 3DMark06. This makes it 50% better than the GMA HD 3000 graphics that Intel provides in the Sandy Bridge core and they are more than adequate for powering the visual bells and whistles that are part of 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium.
The LED-backlit 15.6in screen contains 1366 x 768 pixels so it can manage 720p HD video playback, though 1080p content can be pumped out through the laptop's HDMI port. The optical drive is a multi-format DVD unit rather than Blu-ray.
Connectivity is good: USB in its 2.0 and 3.0 flavours, and there's a combo USB/eSata port too. You even get FireWire, and VGA for owners of old projectors.
Dubbed the MediaRemote, which is actually detachable. Slide the trigger at the front of the laptop to lift the MediaRemote away from its magnetic catch and you can pull the touchpad clean out of the chassis. The MediaRemote has a rechargeable battery and a wireless range of ten or so metres. You can see it pulled apart at the FCC website here.
With the remote you can navigate around websites and when the MediaRemote is detached the left and right mouse buttons remain in the chassis so you make selections by tapping the pad but you can't use the MediaRemote to perform right clicks.
Clicking the button that nestles in one corner of the pad allowed me to switch from mouse mode to media mode which lights up a set of media control buttons that were previously invisible. These buttons work in conjunction with the Acer/CyberLink Clear-fi media player software, which stands ready to play music, photos and videos using DLNA tech.
keyboard there are three shortcut keys. One is user-defined, the second linked to Clear.fi and the third controls the keyboard backlight.
Clever as the removable pad is, it's not all that makes the Ethos 5951G interesting. We also have a fetching durable aluminium lid and keyboard surround, powerful specifications (including a 'Sandy Bridge' Core i5, 8GB of RAM and discrete graphics), as well as – surprising on a desktop replacement like this – good battery life.
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