Should I make a disassemble video for the Acer Aspire 5742G? Anyone have it?

I'm getting an Acer Aspire 5742G-7200 in a couple of days. I was wondering if other people own this laptop (any variant). Maybe I could make a how-to video on taking it apart. If you own one let me know. Also if you want to tell me how amazing it is that's okay too.

PS.....
I haven't been actively on this site for a long time, my last login in was 12-09-2009 :O.

So this is my early New years resolution. "retain my status as a true member of notebookreview".





PSS...

My new specs of MY NEW laptop:

Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
CPU Type: Intel Core i5 460M(2.53GHz)
Screen: 15.6" 1366 x 768
Memory: 4GB DDR3 1066MHz
HDD: 500GB 5400RPM
Optical: DVD burner
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GT 420M (1GB DDR3 VRAM)
Wireless: 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN
Battery Life: 3 hours
Weight: 5.74 lbs.

WITH

NVIDIA Optimus technology
(sidenote: how does your battery life fare?)



EDIT!!!!

My heart just went beep beep dirrrrrrrrrrrrr. Apparently the AS4820TG-7805 was the same price as the laptop I just bought. My current laptop is the older timeline. And this new one I just discovered has the 5650 with integrated graphics plus the f-ing amazing battery life. And the only downside is the hard drive being 320GB, which isn't to big of a deal. So now I'm stuck with the Aspire 5742G..... sigh....

Well since I'm now going to consider it my unwanted child, it needs a name (because it's now special). I will call you Flatline.

 

Haha my condolences. If you see my sig, I had the 5742G (the Canadian version, exactly same specs actually -,- just more pricey), but decided to RMA it because they lied about the GPU (same as 7200 GPU, but on acer.ca it says GT425M).

I'm getting a 5553G shipped to me right now, 50$ more pricey. BUT, quad-core processor, 6GB ram, ATI 5650 GPU, 4 USB ports instead of 3 (on 5742G), and Dolby audio speakers.

When I first looked at Acer laptops, was actually tempted to get the 3820TG but it was so small. I use my laptop mostly at home so, 15.6'' it has to be. Also we have no 4820TGs here in Canuckland.






edit:

have you tried RMAing it? depending on the seller you might be able to refund it for very minimal costs (or a lot).





And a bit OT (and back to ranting about my upcoming laptop), but to anyone else in Canada looking for the best bang-for-the-buck 15.6'' acer laptop, the 5553G is really an overlooked powerhouse.
- The AMD N930 CPU performs on par with lower end Intel i7's, but consume power at the level of i5's (35W)!
- Also, the AMD CPU + ATI GPU means even the switchable integrated graphics is more powerful than an i5+ATI GPU combination's. With the 5553G you get Radeon HD4250 as the switchable onboard graphics, which is tonnes more powerful than Intel GM4500 (sp?) with similar low power consumption. Can play L4D on low-med settings smoothly which says alot.

 

Ohhh when I get my HD5650, its going to be interesting comparing our benchmarks jerg.

 

The new laptops with Core i processors don't use the Intel GMA 4500MHD, it uses the Intel GMA HD (aka Intel GMA 5700MHD). Which is almost twice as powerful as the Intel GMA 4500MHD and is on par with the Radeon HD 4250. You were thinking of the old Core2Duo + 4500MHD combo.
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator HD - Notebookcheck.net Tech

 

What exact laptop are you getting?

Ah okay, yeah I thought I read about that before. Too bad a lot of cheaper i5+discrete GPUs don't actually allow you to switch to the onboard GMA HD (e.g. the Acer 5742G), so it's a lost cause unless the laptop has optimus.

 

It's not a laptop, I am getting an MXM 5650 graphics card for the one in my sig.

I'll dial my CPU back to 2ghz for the comparison, but I think I am still going to win

Phenom II mobile does not have level III cache at all, so it's more like an Athlon X4 desktop CPU, and they are less efficient clock for clock compared to intel's old core 2s

Each of your cores has 512k cache, each of my cores has access to a shared 3MB of cache per pair (my cpu is made of 2 duals together).

So I have 3x the cache.

 

What performance difference does L3 cache make? I'm not too read-up on this sort of thing, is L3 there for short-term performance to be faster? (e.g. opening up a software)

 

L3 cache is a general storage space for all the cores to use, it can be used to share data or be used to hold useful data for any core.

In single threaded apps any core can use all the l3 cache (6 megs) to give itself almost 6.5 megs of cache.

It helps a lot in games, over a certain amount it starts to make less of an impact (increasing it really helped the Phenom II over the phenom I (die shrink = can fit more cache).

Read up reviews of the Athlon II X4 vs Phenom II desktop to see the difference.

 

I think I get the gist, it's a buffer to compensate for the relative difference in data flow rate between the CPU and other parts.

So how would Intel i5 460M (which has L1/L2/L3 of 128kb/512kb/3072kb) fare against Phenom-II n930 (L1/L2 of 512kb/2048kb)?

If I understand what's said correctly, L1 is double the rate of L2 and quadruple that of L3, so would a larger L1 and L2 benefit vs smaller L1 and L2 but a large L3 extra?

 

The speed differences between cache levels is NOTHING compared to the latency of ram.

CPU talking to:

Cache is like talking to someone in the room.

System memory is like sending a letter by airmail.

An SSD is like sending a parcel by sea mail.

A m0echanical HDD is like using radio communication between solar systems.

I don't mind getting up to talk to someone on the far side of the room compared to sending them a letter in the mail.

At the end of the day it depends on the program. Some tasks like games love cache (up to a point), some database/server stuff scales linearly with it (see high end Xeons with silly amounts of the stuff) and some stuff like video editing could not care less.

Like I said, look up some athlon II X4 vs Core i5 dual core desktop reviews (plenty out there) and you can see the difference.

Gaming and the Athlon II X4 does not do so well:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3937/...thlon-ii-cpus-balance-price-and-performance/5

Video encoding, and sudenly it makes sense:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3937/...thlon-ii-cpus-balance-price-and-performance/4

The problem is that the AMD chups use more power, to get the quads into the power envelope their clocks are killed and suddenly even that vudeo encode lead fails.

 

Yeah it explains well that L3 CPUs confer better performance to software/games which need a lot of data-sharing between the cores.

Would this considerably impact, say, ingame framerates?



edit: I'm also reading from many posts in google-search that a larger L2 cache impacts gaming performance more than L3?

 

see my edited post.

 

Very cool. But um, these are all desktop CPUs right? What might mobile CPUs: i5 460M and Phenom-II N930, be equivalent to in those charts? I can't really compare anything without some reference to what I already have/will have .

 

you can look at ratios.

See how the dual core i5 is similar in frequency to the quad x4?

Now boost the i5 results by roughly 25% and thats where it would sit due to clock advantage.

 

so with i5 460M vs phenom N930, it'd be something like:

(2.53 GHz x2)(1.25) vs (2.00 GHz x4)(1)

6.325 vs 8.00?

 

Just use benchmark table at notebookcheck to compare them instead of doing math that doesn't make sense. As you can see i5 460M is actually faster than N930

 

Yeah this is much easier to understand .

The thing I'm concerned of isn't really which one is more powerful, but more of whether or not games will have a framerate drop because of the CPU difference here. I know modern games (except RTSs) are mostly GPU-dependent, but would the difference in CPU power here affect/bottleneck anything?


Edit: nevermind, it was answered here
http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...rds/537781-lack-l3-cache-impact-gameplay.html

 

The difference in games is 0-30% depending on the title.

 

K Meaker, I got the laptop earlier today, man it looks sweet (much more elegant design than 5742G), gonna install some essential wares then do some benchmarking.\

Can anyone recommend a 5650 overclocking tool? Does ATI catalyst have one built in?

 

No Catalyst doesn't have a built in OC utility but this works fine.

 

Thanks downloads.

Is this a tool that allows for automatic profile save (so the OC will remain if I reboot the laptop, for example)?

Also, does ATI HD5650 have the automatic downclocking function like NVidia chips? Where when it detects that there is no load, it reduces clocks to 50 or 100 mhz instead of 550 or something like that.

edit: never mind about the second question, it does downclock when idle, as shown in the ATI GPU clock Tool.

 

I guess I'm keeping this buggar! Already took it apart. Very simple.

Though I am having an issue with this guy. Maybe it has something to do with installing my own disc of windows 7 and installing the drivers afterwards. But it will not recognize the integrated Intel HD graphics. Even when I install the optimus drivers, it won't go through. I had to install the Verde one (260.99) which has support for more than just optimus. I look on everest and it says the integrated graphics controller for the Intel GMA HD is disabled. I also would like to mention I updated the BIOS to v1.10. This updates the nVidia VBIOS to a new version.

I tried uninstalling all drivers and deleting them. Then attempting to install the intel HD ones but it doesn't detect it. So I'm pretty stumped right now.

Any ideas?

 

Optimus doesn't work with AS5742G. Acer never wired the Intel HD up.

On a more positive note, how is it doing in 3DMark06?

 

How did you find this out? Just curiosity.
I hit 7000ish stock

 

Because I had this same laptop last month lol. Later returned it to seller and bought this (in signature) laptop.

What did you get for CPU scores there?

 

No idea. Let me rerun it at stock and overclocked. I'll get back to you.

By-the-way... how come the BIOS updates for this laptop were all optimus fixes? The latest one, 1.10 updated it to detect Optimus VRAM and Size.

 

Yup got this laptop can someone make an owners lounge thread for it ?

 

Yeah that would be a good idea AsusS.... and do you also have the same issue as me and Jerg, about not truly having the integrated graphics enabled?

 

I used 3DMARK06 for the benchmark.

Resolution: 1280x768
Anti-Aliasing: None

using nvidia Geforce GT 420M
and i5-460M 2.53GHz
with 4GB DDR3 1033MHz
While running Windows 7 Ultimate (64)


STOCK: 6959 Marks overall




Overclocked to
GPU: 700MHz
Memory: 900MHz
Shaders: 1400MHz

OC'd: 8874 Marks overall

 

lostboykev,

Were you not able to return the laptop to the store? I bought this, returned it because I wasn't satisfied with the GPU, bought another (sig) from same store, didn't have a good screen so I returned that a couple of days ago. Might have lost some $ due to return shipping but overall at least I'm not stuck with something that doesn't please me for a good year or two (or three if it's very well-built).

 

Is there a way to control the fan on this? Its going up and down all the time, its driving me nuts!

 

No- it's impossible.

 

Did you ever make this video? I could really do with it now