A few questions (mainly CPUs)

I have sat there today, wondering about Acer. I have two of their notebooks, and I paid quite some money for them a 4720-4721(4720z), and a 5570-2997(5570z). The 4720z I paid $541.99 and the 5570z, $649. Both offer a ton of features for the price, both of which neither Dell, nor HP can match (built in webcam, huge disk space, multi function buttons, etc.). Though I did realize they tend to hold back on performance, while you pay this kind of money, you would expect to at least get a Yonah, or a Penryn, for the price you pay, but instead you are stuck with a dual core Pentium, which does the job alright or poorly. So have you ever wondered if Acer will step into the game and offer better performance and build quality? Quality is one of Acer's weak points, because both have a significant amount of keyboard flex, and the 4720z has a great deal of lid,body, and chassis flex. Although I do not own a Gemstone Blue or a Ferrari, I do think that both of them offer better build quality, since you pay that much money, but more over, why Acer put in a better CPU (Penryn/Core 2 Duo) in the Gemstone Blue than with the Ferrari lineup, which runs AMD. I am not a fan of AMD because of numerous issues I have had with them. Well anyways, isn't the Ferrari lineup supposed to be Acer's own XPS-like series? So why would they equip their flagship lineup with the most stupid CPUs known? If you seriously think about it, Acer seems to be the only ones in the market who still give you a Pentium, rather than a C2D. If you see, Dell only gives you about one choice/price for a Pentium which is the cheapest of the bunch, and everything else is a Penryn, and is you step up from the Inspiron level, everything else seems to be Penryn Galore! It just seems weird to me that you would be paying the same price for an Acer as you would for a Dell, for a terrible processor.

 

Acers are like the worst, bottom of the barrel laptops money can buy. They use all the cheapest parts and put little care into build quality. This is how you get so many features for such a low price. I don't think you should be expecting a C2D in a 500 dollar Acer, no.

 

ACERs are CHEAP... i have only $500 invested in my aspire 5315 with all the upgrades listed in my SIG and MORE.

BTW those 4720's are EASY to upgrade the CPUs and you can get a CORE2DUO cheap on ebay!!!

 

so whats wrong with looking at the spec of the laptop before you buy. Then if you want cheap and solo core that can be upgraded to C2D.
shrewd,
Phil

 

Pentium Dual-Cores aren't explicitly "terrible processors" - they're Core 2 Duos with less L2 cache and a slower FSB. They're still using the Merom core, and can handle basic tasks quite ably.
Heck, some of the PDCs and Celerons can poke 2 GHz.
And as mentioned by hoggie and BigO, CPUs aren't soldered to the motherboard any more - most PDCs and Celerons can be upgraded to C2Ds.

As for AMD, they've released their newest Centrino-style platform - albeit most of the hype seems to be around the Radeom 3200 IGP than the CPU...