Comments and Questions about the Aspire 4730Z

I do not intend to do a traditional review of the Acer Aspire 4730Z, if for no other reason than this post will have a fair number of questions, perhaps even more questions than answers. First, I will make some comments about the Aspire itself, and then give the gaming benchmarks I have performed.

The Aspire was selling at Best Buy for $399, less than some netbooks. It has 2GB of RAM, Intel Dual Core T3400 CPU running at 2.1 GHz, 250 GB hard drive, and Intel x4500 integrated graphics. Interestingly, the computer itself says it has a Dual Core processor, whereas the Acer website says it as a Celeron processor. The only graphics information the computer will cough up is Mobil Intel 4 Series Express Chipset Family. The documentation says it as the GL40 chipset. If anybody knows how to get Windows Vista to tell me the exact chipset, I'm very much interested. The website systemlabrequirements.com could not tell me the exact chipset either.

As for build quality, the fit and finish seem fine. There is 2-3 mm of keyboard play on the left side, but typing is unaffected. The plastic casing isn't the sturdiest. You'll want to be careful grabbing it one handed on the side with the DVD burner. The touchpad is a little stubborn at times and needs a hard press to move the cursor. When writing in Works or OpenOffice the cursor kept jumping around and I had to disable tapping to make it stop. The touchpad control panel does not have an option for 'Stop tap when typing”. Perhaps I need to update the drivers. The sound port was a little loose and I had to jiggle it to get stereo sound in my headphones. The speakers are weak and tinney, big surprise on a laptop. They were loud enough for me to get some glances when I started playing Half Life at the coffee shop.

Many gamers probably wonder why the heck I'm even considing IGP for gaming. Well, basically this is the laptop I could afford. Period. Anybody doing any research will know you don't buy a laptop like this for gaming. But sometimes you just don't have much choice. I'm a student, and my money goes out, not in. Or maybe you may have a life change. Maybe you're self employed and in the middle of the recession your company laptop/gaming laptop/only computer you own gives up the ghost two weeks past the warranty. The Aspire will work for work and you can't justify more when you're waiting by the phone for customers. Or you have an X-Box for gaming and bought the Aspire for websurfing and such. Then your father-in-law has surgery and you need to go over and help out. He sleeps and watches TV a lot, but you need to be there 'just-in-case'. Bringing the X-Box over is impractical and would cause major wife aggro. So you have to fall back on the Aspire. I could make up more stories, but whatever the reason, you have an Aspire and a gaming itch to satisfy.

So how did the Aspire do? I measured the frames per secound (fps) using fraps. The first game I tried was Half Life. The resolution was 1024x768. I used Direct3D mode. Screen size and glare sliders were over to the right. The game looked great, for Half Life at least. The Aspire can easily hit 50-70 fps, depending on whats going on. The part I tried it on was near the beginning where you take a loading elevator down and headhuggers are falling on top of you. Later, when you duel the commandos, I wouldn't be surprised to see the frame rates go down some, but I'd be surprised if its below 30 fps. (I haven't gotten that far.) I have Blue Shift but didn't load it, deciding to skip forward in time a bit more.

The next game I tried was Call of Duty. I downloaded the Dawnville demo from the cnet site. This game got about 20 fps during firefights and could hit 70 when I was hiding in the church. (I'm out of practice with FPS games and suck even more playing on a touchpad.) During the most intense fights frame rates dropped to about 15. Resolution was 1024x768, character and general textures were maxed out and texture filtering was trilinear. The game looked great.

Moving forward a couple more years, I'm sad to say Call of Duty 2 (British North African demo) brought the lappie to its knees. On 640x480, fps was about 7, occasionally jumping to 22 or even 30 (again when I was hiding). The game looked awful at that resolution, so I tried 800x600, turning as many options down as I could. Zfeather smoke: off, texture filter : bilinear, AA: off, Dynamic Lights : off, Model detail : Extra Low. Corpses : Tiny. Half Life and CoD were tested on Balanced Power Management, so I reset Power management to High Performance. The fps was still about 4 during the firefights, jumping to 15 or 16 when bullets weren't flying around. I suppose you could play the game this way, but I'm not sure why.

I seem to recall reading some tweaks to the Performance settings and maybe downloading the new drivers from Intel would help. I doubt they'll increase performance by a factor of four and bring the framerates on COD2 up to 16 or so. Therefore, I haven't bothered. If somebody has suggestions for vastly improved performance, I'll give them a try.

I downloaded the Civilization IV demo and played 100 turns just fine. I haven't tried Medieval 2 Total War yet. Medal of Honor : Airborne demo would not play. A message popped up saying the video card was unsupported. I haven't tried World of Warcraft yet as I don't want to put my addiction on my laptop. I have Half Life 2 but hate Steam and don't want to mess with it. Oddly, systemlabrequirements.com said none of the games (including Civ IV) would run on the Aspire. Not sure why.

I left most of the Acer software on. Not sure how what I might want in the future so didn't remove it. You don't get any install disks with a $399 dollar laptop. I did remove McAfee and replace it with Avast. Getting the school VPN to work required replacing Avast with Norton. I didn't try any of the standard benchmarks, mostly because those downloads are enormous, and the results are hard for me to wrap my head around. I can understand frame rates. The Windows Experience Index is 3.1, determined by the lowest score (Graphics).

So there you have it. More options than Solitaire, but still almost four years behind the curve in first person shooter games. But if you want a laptop to surf the internet, download songs, play Civ IV or similar games, write papers for class, the Aspire can do it.

 

Nice review. +rep