Acer Aspire AS5740g-6454 review and 1st impression!

reason for the ram showing < 4 gb is because of the switchable gpu on the cpu die.....unfortunately I have noticed several laptops like this from acer and gateway that have no bios option to change this value, looks like thats how they make these so cheap, hahaha....

anyways, yeah some of the ram goes to the built in gpu and we can't get it back cause they never put in a switchable gpu option

 

yep its because of the hypermemory ATI has which reserves a portion of the system memory for utilization.... i am looking at ways of disabling it (apparently its supposed to be in the bios ??) but there are registry settings that can disable it too afaik will be researching this in detail.

but in anycase even 3.86 of ram is more than enough for day- to day and gaming uses and if you upgrade to 8gbs of ram you would sitll have at least 7.8ish of ram available

 

ah, good to know. thank you.

 

cool, if you discover the reg settins please tell

 

Hi, I bought the 5740g, the i3 model as I use it just for watching movies at work, and also some 3d modelling/ photoshop work.

I also enjoy gaming to help break up the boredom at work. I thought with an ati 5650 and 1 gig dedicated the laptop would be sweet for gaming. CoDMW2 is a little jerky at times, with details on high, but unfortunately I have to have AA turned off to get playable results. I am not sure how to view my in game fps.

But I am trying to work out where the performance is bottlenecking. I at first thought it was the 5400rpm hdd, but now im starting to think its the vid card.
Did you notice an improvement when swapping out the hdd?

Thanks for the bench marking tests so far guys

 

It's not the HDD. The only thing you get when you upgrade is faster load times, not more fps. If HDD could limit framerates we would have never even talked about advantages of 256bit memory over 128bit one.
Notebookcheck reports average framerate of 33fps for Sony notebook with underclocked HD5650 (450MHz instead of 550MHz) and that is with 4xAA.
Update your drivers, disable AV software and consider overclocking for starters.

 

I need to run some of the benchmarks you ran. I cant get 3d mark vantage to run on it without it crashing on the 3rd/4th test.

I am not running cat 10.3, but I double checked the drivers from Acer and its up to date, though it might be worth checking the ATI site. Or doing as you did and getting cat 10.3 beta.
After you talked about overclocking, you got my attention, but I dont know how to yet.
Didn't you return yours to default settings at some point, or was that just for a bench mark to compare the differences between default and overclocked performance?

 

There is no such thing as up-to-date Acer driver. They release one driver only when notebook is launched and never update it after that.
Starting with Catalyst 10.3 notebooks (with the exception of Sony, Panasonic and Toshiba) are going to be supported by Catalyst Suite too so you will be able to update with the most recent driver from ATI site.
As for default vs. OCed. I overclock for gaming or benchmarking only (with the most recent AMD GPU clock tool) as the card automatically reverts to 2D profile (99MHz core, 150MHz memory) while idle.
I did only one run of 3D Mark06 on default settings- it scored 7200 although it had been on unregistered version of 3D Mark that supposedly gives higher scores. Other tests have been performed on OCed card and with registered 3D Mark so you can't really compare those.

 

Do they even make Core i3 models with a Radeon 5650?? Acer product spreadsheet says no. You have a low performing Radeon 5470.

 

So I ordered this laptop directly from the supplier (nice perk of working in a computer shop) and apparently this laptop is now already end of life and will be replaced with something else that will be announced soon...

 

oh the joys of being a techno-geek! I don't expect any laptop to be around more than 3-6 mths before a refresh is done anyways

 

Yeah 3-6 months I can see, but has this even been out for nearly that long?
They are probably just making some minor changes like giving it USB 3 or something...

 

That wouldn't be minor. Intel chipsets don't support USB 3 so it would require an external controller.
My bet is it is not EOL for 5740G but for certain configuration- GPU is soldered in to mobo so it can't be replaced not to mention there is nothing to replace it with.
No one produces a new mobo to replace it within 3 months especially that this laptop is a bargain and people are looking for it, so it is not like no one want one so they need to refresh it.

 

i agree, this laptop sold out fast at most if not all resellers already

 

Do you known if the new model will be similar to this one (AS5740G-6454) ????

what I really like of AS5740G-6454 is the dedicated 1 gig video card, hope they will have similar config for the video card and most important the same price !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Could anyone here who owns 5740g try to cut HD (720p or 1080p) video? I'm curious if that Core i5 can handle it. Thanks

 

I do a lot of work in after effects and file exporting/compressing.

It chews it down better than a mac book pro, what more do you want?

 

sounds like we have a convert

and i agree, this thing chews up alot of things better than most higher priced laptops out there.

 

Hi Mordin, i recently bought an acer aspire 5740g intel I7 620M and i want to virtualize virtual machines. since i thought VT feature is disable by default in BIOS i decided to update my original BIOS version (v 1.09). i got v 1.22 from official acer webSite. it is a .zip file which has an application that updates the version of BIOS (it takes 1 or 2 minutes with a progress bar...pretty cool). at the beggining of running the app it asks you if you want to conect to download any updates (as i can remeber) and i suposed all software has to be in .zip file and i choose not to conect for download. after v 1.22 installation i could´t see any virtualization feature settings in BIOS. then i tried with the rest of availables BIOS updates in acer official webSite. same result...no VT feature settings available. after that i tried to update to v 1.22 again but conecting to download in the first question it makes to you at the beggining of updating process. since i press YES button IMMEDIATLY (normal proccess takes 1 or 2 minutes) prompt an alert message telling me "the update process finishes succesfully with an accept button. after pressing accept the computer restarts and here is the problem. computer starts , my scream is black, it tries to read disk but nothing happens, if i introduce a windows image DVD it tries to read it but nothing happens. can you give some advise??. how can i activate virtualization and what BIOS version let me do it???. i want to use hyper-v W2k8 to manage several VMachines.....is it possible with 5740G intel I7 ???
thnks in advanced