Aspire V7-582PG-7657 (850m) battery life, thin, gaming

Hi,

I've been wanting a decent thin gaming laptop, with a decent battery. I have almost bought the Lenovo Y50 several times- but ultimately (as I will be doing design/website work) I decided I must have an IPS screen (and a good one). I am considering the Y50, then replacing the screen, but then I found this one...

Acer Aspire V7-582PG-7657 link

• Intel® Core™ i7-4510U processor (2.0GHz/3.1GHz w/ Turbo Boost)
• 8GB DDR3L memory
• 500GB hard drive - solid state drive for quick boot & 16GB mSSD (500gb seems low)
• 15.6" Full HD IPS widescreen CineCrystal™ (1920 x 1080) - 10-point multi-touch control
• NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 850M graphics w/ 4GB DDR3 VRAM (possibly mis-print on acer's site

Their site also says it has an 8 hour battery. May be a misprint too.

This ticks a LOT of boxes for me. Battery life, slim, gaming and a beautiful screen (the Y50 you were so close!).

I need a matte screen (lots of out door use). Would a 3M matte filter stop the touch functionality?

I will play GTA:V/Watch dogs (ie sandbox style games)- would the 850M be much of a downgrade on the 860m?

Do you think Acer will release a cheaper i5 version?

 

What sucks is that the Acer has the ddr3 version of the 850m. Compared to the y50 860m, its roughly 35% weaker, so yes it is a significant downgrade.

That said, if you can live with it, I would consider the N550jk a better choice with the same 850m

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

So the DDR5 version would have been a much better choice?

The N550jk is quite heavy/bulky compared to the Acer V7's from what I've seen.

 

Not sure about the US market, but here in The Netherlands there is a pre-order for a cheaper i5 model.

799 euros: i5 4210U, 8GB RAM, 500GB HD and GTX 850M.

Edit: sorry that is a V5, not V7 (no touchscreen).

 

Could you please link me to this? Is the body/build the same on the V5 & V7? What is the difference (besides touch)?

 

It's not up on Acers website yet, but it can be found on some webshops. The i7 version (999 euro) is already available.

Acer Aspire V5-573G-54208G50aii, 15.6 notebook Zilver, 500GB,...

It's basically a V7, but with a matte display finish (IPS FullHD) and no touchscreen.

 

Thanks for that, the V5 looks great as I'm after a matte display (will use outdoors).

I'm concerned as it's an 850M- with games like Watch Dogs & GTA:V will it cope? Or would the 860M be a much better option?

 

GTX 860M gddr5 will always be the better choice. GTX 850M ddr3 performs roughly the same as gddr5 GTX 760/765M, which is quite good considering the fact it has ddr3 memory.

Otherwise, there are not many options available. The Y50 has a crappy display, but it has great specs for the price. The Acer V5 has a great IPS display, but it lacks the raw power of Y50's quad-core CPU and faster GPU.

I've not seen other thin and light 15" notebooks with gddr5 GTX 850M graphics yet.

 

Good lord, the GDDR3 will be a huge bottleneck for the 850m, especially for Watchdogs which is known to be extremely VRAM heavy (this means both capacity and bandwidth). The game actually streams parts of the city in real-time from the VRAM block. Goodness, Watchdogs can bring my Crossfire desktop AMD 290s to their knees and they have 352GB/s of VRAM bandwidth, you can imagine the kind of stutter fest you will get with the measly 32Gb/s GDDR3 will deliver even if the core can render it.
In fact, most open world games like Watchdogs are extremely VRAM capacity and Bandwidth dependent due to the large scale nature of the game engine.

If you get a GPU, make sure its at least GDDR5. GDDR3 is only fit for cards with less than 192 CUDA cores of rendering power.

If you want a reasonably portable Laptop with no compromises to run games like Watchdogs, consider the Clevo W230SS. IPS screen, i7 Quadcore, 2 mSATA + 2.5inch bay, 860m Maxwell with GDDR5, 13.3 inches and a great community support. Otherwise, consider the bigger ones with beefier GPUs. Don't get anything with GDDR3, you will regret it.

 

Thanks for that- very useful. I do need a 15.6" screen as I will be doing design and website work- so the W230SS is out (13.3").

At the sacrifice of battery life. I think a Y50 (i5 version) then replacing the screen (B156HAN01.2) would be a better option if I'm planning GTA:V & Watch Dogs.

Are there any other thin 860m laptops due to come out anytime soon?

The Asus GX500 would be good BUT 1. It's $$$ (~1799), 2. No numeric keypad 3. Glossy screen

 

MSI GS60 is an option, I do not know anything about its build quality unfortunately.

 

MSI GS60 is supposedly very well built. The only downsides are that the bottom of the notebook and upper portion of the notebook (near the screen above the keyboard) heat up under load.
Other than that it's universally praised by reviewers.

Personally I don't like it but objectively it is an interesting choice.

 

I kinda like it, not sure about the design but I could live with that. The only problem for me personally, the price. GS60 costs like 1500 euro here which is very expensive compared to the Y50 (999 euro). I just can't spend that kind of money on a laptop which can't run the latest games anymore next year on high settings.

 

Hmmm, tough requirements. There aren't many IPS laptops to begin with, ones with 860m Maxwells even rarer. And I only know of 1 machine that is below $1500. I guess for design work with that power and budget, you could check out the W355SS, it pretty much has the W230SS's internals except in a 15.6inch chassis, it won't be an IPS screen but you can request a high Gamut LCD, depending on the reseller you choose.
Cost wise from this point, you are approaching dedicated gaming laptop territory. Which means the Alienwares, P150SM-A, ASUS G75s which actually won't have the Maxwell 860m GPUs (the Kepler ones are weaker by 10-15%), you'll need to fork out to get the more powerful 870m.

 

For me the Y50 is so close to being all of this. With the IPS screen replaced, it could represent the perfect affordable portable gaming laptop if it had more battery life.

Basically I'm wondering- will we need to hack/modified the bios to change the volt speeds on the CPU to under-clock (ie to extend the battery)?

Is it possible to replace the CPU a more efficient one (like the 4510mq)?

I made a thread about this here

 

hows that poss you have 850 nvidia ??!!? acer v7 is only with 750m ...

 

no. there are new variants incoming,which sport the new generation of the GPUs (alas the GTX850M) as well as the CPUs (e.g. the i5-42 10U as a very slight upgrade to the i5-4200U in the ACer V5 573G).

Acer Aspire V5-573G-54208G50aii, Core i5-4210U, Linux, silber (NX.MQ4EG.005) Preisvergleich | Geizhals Deutschland

if the 850M is really bottlenecked by the DDR3 is a fair question. all the reviews with laptops sporting it said clearly: NO. yes, the GDDR5-version of the 850M is faster, but not that much (10 to 15%).

is the 850M enough to play Watch Dogs and GTA V? sorry, I don't know. but getting such a nice screen, so much battery time and quite a good performace for only 700€ really IS tempting. plus it has a mSATA-slot, which for example the Asus N550 is missing.

the bad screen on the Y50 is still a REAL downer. the could have come SO close to a "perfect" laptop. better screen and mSATA (or m.2)-port and wow!

 

The gddr5 version of the 850m actually trumps the ddr3 version by around 25-30%

http://d27gsy1ysdham8.cloudfront.ne...R5-vs-GTX-850M-DDR3-vs-GTX-860M-I7.png?174598

I would call that a rather substantial difference

 

It's not that you lose anything with this notebook since it never had GDDR5 vram to begin with. It's not that big of a deal in my opinion. Fact is, the GTX 850M with DDR3 vram is much faster than the GT 750M with DDR3 it replaces.

 

Obviously you don't "lose" anything, but your still getting a lot less performance than you could have. A current gen chip is faster than last gen - that's supposed to happen.

For the price point of 1100, you could get a base y50 for 1000 and buy a screen to swap it out - much better value and you're getting a 35-40% performance boost in GPU. Another option is the clevo w230ss which you could pick up with os for 1100, also with an 860m.

For the price point Acer is setting, they easily could have and should have put the GDDR5 version in. Not sure there are a lot of people that would call a 25% performance boost "not a big deal"

 

It's not a big deal because this notebook range never had GDDR5, that is my point. You've talked about a 25 dollar markup on the retail price to include GDDR5. Of course they are not going to do that. Acer invested in a better IPS display instead of GDDR5 memory which no average joe consumer cares about. What they do care about is price. If another similar laptop is 25 dollar cheaper, they might get that one instead of the Acer. The Lenovo has a bad TN panel, but great performance. It's kinda like this with every notebook, pro's and cons.

The Acer without touch is 800 euros, that's cheap for a GTX 850M notebook that's as compact and light as this Acer.

We can go on and on about this, but it's useless. Acer never used GDDR5 in this range and they will never use it until they are forced by NVIDIA to use GDDR5 memory. GTX 850M boosts performance over the previous model. Maybe not as much as you would have wanted but it's just not the case. It's as simple as that. Want more performance? Get a dedicated gaming laptop...

This is my last post about this topic, it sucks it doesn't have GDDR5 but discussing this over and over again is giving me headaches.

 

Well they have used GDDR5 in v3 which is in the same price - range. I find your irritation with the subject peculiar - that's what this forum is for, discussion. No one is saying that it's not a worthy upgrade but complaints are in order here.

As for the quality of the screen on Lenovo notebook there are mixed opinions on this - I have to see one myself otherwise it's all hearsay to me.

Anyway - I'm yet to make a decision on this and what I need to make one is a comprehensive review of the Acer with all the benchmarks included. Then I'll see if the decrease in performance is justified by decrease in price.

 

Acer Aspire V3 is not thin and certainly not light (pro's and cons....) It also already had GDDR5 memory (on some models at least) so it makes much more sense in that model that it has GDDR5 again. V7/V5 is a whole different story. Different laptops, different target audiences, different price points, different specs etc.

It would have been awesome if the V5 and V7 had the better memory, but it is what it is unfortunately and I've accepted it. Let's just wait and see how it performs.

I am considering the Y50 since a few days since it's so affordable here. I've had the Y500 and it was a great notebook, Y50 will be a nice upgrade. The Acer does have a much better screen, that makes the choice a bit harder.

 

i would go for this one .. price nearly same.. MSI Global GS70 2PE Stealth Pro

 

How about overclocking the 850m up to an 860m? Or is this laptop too thin and would probably have heating issues with it?

 

You can't overclock a ddr3 850m to 860m levels - its bottlenecked by the inferior vram. An 850m gddr5 can likely easily be overclocked to 860m.

 

Ok good to know.

I game rarely, but I want to enjoy it when I do. Games like Far Cry, Sim city, GTA:V & Watch Dogs. Realistically how much of a down grade would it be from the 860M to the 850 (DDR3 version) in my case?

 

35-40% less fps on average

 

well, the average differences in FPS I found so far are more in the range of 20-35%:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 850M - NotebookCheck.net Tech

check out the different games. if you click on the fps-numbers, you see the appropriate laptop. yes, the GE70 with the GDDR5 scores almost always noticable higher. but the differences are very game dependant. examples (for DDR3 I have choosen mostly the Nexoc M731 -> similar CPU used):
BF4 high: 56.4 vs. 65.1 FPS (15 % better from the 56,4 FPS)
BF4 FullHD, ultra: 20.1 vs. 26.2 FPS -> 30 % diff.

Thief FullHD-ultra: 18.1 vs. 22 FPS -> 21.5 % diff.
Dota 2 FullHD, ultra: 68.4 vs. 72.6 FPS -> 6.1 % diff.
GRID 2 FullHD, ultra: 36.8 vs. 42.7 FPS -> 16 % diff.
Crysis 3 FullHD, ultra: 15.2 vs. 17.8 FPS -> 17.1 % diff.
Metro Last Ligt FullHD, ultra: 27.7 vs. 25.9 FPS -> 19.3 % diff.
and for example Anno 2070 FullHD, ultra: 41.5 vs. 42.4 FPS -> only 2.1 % diff.
other extremum: Bioshock Infinite FullHD, ultra: 28.4 vs. 39.6 FPS -> 39.4 % diff.

see what I mean? GDDR5 is better FOR SURE. but DDR3 doesn't tear down your FPS into oblivion as well. if you can get bot cards at roughly the same amount of cash and both lapotops are similar (heat, noise, screen, battery time) -> go for the GDDR5 as a nobrainer.

but if the specs differ quite a bit, one should really consider thorougly.

 

One thing I would like to mention is that 860M might have higher core voltage than 850M to make it stable at higher frequency it operates on (876MHz for 859M and 1029MHz for 860M). This means (if it is indeed the case) that 860M would be able to handle more OC than 850M (although it would also mean higher power output which could kind of explain why it couldn't be used in a skinny notebook like Acer in the first place).

But again - as pointed by many people in this thread - it all boils down to how much money are you going to pay for certain performance level.

 

The 860m has shown to be very easily cooled - the gigabyte p34g v2 for example is .8 inches thick and 14 inches. It doesn't even come close to throttling there.

Obviously the Gddr5 makes less of a difference the less stressful the test is. My 35-40% was referring to games on ultra quality. If you plan on playing non intensive games or games on lower settings then ddr3 won't hinder you that much.

I tend to be ocd about performance left on the table though, so buying a chip knowing there's an identically named one that performs better is a no no for me

 

well, I showed most of the FPS at ultra-settings anyways and ended up more often in the region 20% better with GDDR5. only very few games are that demanding on bandwidth. plus most of those do not run playable on ultra settings on both versions of the 850M.

and I am totally with you, that the manufacturers (especially Asus ans Acer, but Clevo as well) did a BAD choice when choosing the DDR3-version over the GDDR5 to safe just a little cash. MSI did better, but the GE60 and GE70 have other problems (cooling, strange keyboard layout, ...).

but GTX850M with DDR3 and with GDDR5 are NOT identical. they just share the name (and the chip itself, except the memory and slight diff. for the chip clocks). nothing better than confusing the customer.

 

Thanks for this comparison- I can accurately look at the type of games I like playing, and what the difference is. I'm not clear tho- is this version they're comparing the GDDR5 or GDDR3 version?

For most games- it's only about 10-20% difference, which is making me re-consider this Acer.

For photoshop, video editing and other design applications would the CPU hold me back much (compared to the i4200M?)

 

well, just click on the fps-number. then you see the laptop, hich achieved that performance. and they state the typ of graphics memory within the NB-specs. but in general: only the FPS of the MSI GE70 are for GDDR5 (only brand so far using GTX850M with GDDR5), all the others are with DDR3. all the numbers given there are for GTX850M - if you want to compare to e.g. 860M, my best approach is either opening up the comparison list for each game or even better just use a second tab in the browser and check out the 860M.

Mobile Processors - Benchmarklist - NotebookCheck.net Tech

they have benchmarks for CPUs too -> the i7-4510U should give you an almost identical performance, compared to the i5-4200M. their turbo-clocks are exactly the same and the i7 eveen has one MB more cache. the benches available show also nearly identical results.

I really wished, Intel wouldn't charge so much more for the i7-4510U. the Acer V5 with the i5-4210U is available from 699€ here. but to get the i7-4510U they charge you 300€ (because they throw in a unnecessary SSD in exchange for the HDD (I would rather add a mSATA-SSD on top of the HDD) and don't offer it without OS like the base version. and THAT isn't worth paying almost more than 40 % more.

 

Great idea- it looks like, for the games I play (Watch dogs, gta, far cry), there is only 10-30% difference in performance over the 860m.

This doesn't have any extra mSata slots, does it?

 

Anyone knows when is it going to be released?

 

I'm not sure- but it surface a few weeks back so I'm hoping it's soon.

Any chance of replacing the screen with a QHD one now/later down the track?

 

which NB do you mean? the Acers (be it the V5 or the V7) are very likely to have one - the older versions for sure had.

and the MSI GE70 has even two mSATA-slots, IIRC.

 

Great- I meant the V7.

One question- does the manufacturer throttle/slow the CPU on purpose to keep it cool? I realise it has a powerful GPU, but would games be bottlenecked by the CPU (such as SimCity, GTA:V, & Watch dogs)?

Do all V7's come with a display port?

 

I'm still undecided between this and the W230SS. The glossy screen is a problem-would an anti glare filter stop the touch functionality?

I can't wait for this to be released-any updates?

 

The v5-573G is the same computer with matte non-touch screen. That could be an option if you don't like glossy.

 

Cheers- can you provide me a link about it? I can't find much on google, nor any mention of a "matte" screen

 

It's matte as far as FullHD one is concerned. 572G also had a FullHD matte one but a 768p glossy screen, so that might be the case here too (if there even is a 768p version of 573G) but FullHD is definitely matte.

 

Here's the number and link: Acer Aspire V5-573G-74518
Acer Aspire V5-573G-74518G25A_ Intel ® 2000 MHz 256 GB 8192 MB Flash Hard Drive GeForce GTX 850M: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories

Review
Acer Aspire V5-573G-74518G25aii - Notebookcheck.net External Reviews
Google Translate

 

It's a good review (both the review and the laptop itself are good is what I mean) but one complaint that I have is that the photos clearly show V5-572G not 573G.
You can see it in the video and photos on the sticker on the right side of the palm-rest and on nVidia sticker showing 750M where it should show 850M.

I would understand if they used old photos because laptops are identical on the outside, but according to the review the new one is made out of metal (not plastic and metal), is lighter and has a bigger battery - so it's clearly not the same.

On the other hand the picture of the battery is clearly from the new unit as it's showing increased capacity.

I'm slightly confused here.

That said- good screen, good performance (even though it's the i5 version) and really good battery life. I'm thinking of buying one after all.

EDIT: I misunderstood it slightly - it turns out that 573G from before the refresh also had a battery of increased capacity so this photo might be old too.

 

I think they mean the old V5 571 with that. Sloppy copy and paste from the old review.

 

Will they have v5-573 GTX with i7, not i5?

 

Yes - the refreshed v5-573G is available with Core i7-4510U or with Core i5-4210U.
The difference in price is pretty much nonexistent - about $50-60 between base versions of both.

 

So which might be better in performance, v5-573g i7 GTX or v7 GTX?

 

There's going to be no difference - same chipset, same CPU, same GPU.

That said - I think we should move out discussion about v5-573G to a separate thread - either to this one or to en entirely new one dedicated to the refreshed unit.

Either way it's time to stop hijacking the thread about v7 (sorry guys )