Acer Aspire TimelineX 4820-TG-6847
- Category: Notebook Computers
March 15, 2011
Editor's Rating
- Great performance
- Dual-graphics system
- Dolby Home Theater sound
- Quirky graphics switching
- Mediocre display quality
The Acer Aspire TimelineX AS4820TG-6847 has really good performance thanks to its Intel Core i5 CPU and AMD's Radeon HD graphics. It's a really great multimedia machine, but the quality of the 14-inch display left a little disappointed. However, the 640GB hard drive and 4GB of memory make up for it.
The design of the Acer Aspire TimelineX AS4820TG-6847 is rather simple, but it looks professional and elegant. The lid has a brushed metal finish, but on the inside surrounding the display and keyboard, a glossy black plastic is a big fingerprint magnet. In total, it measures 13.5 x 9.5 x 1.1-inches and weighs about 4.5-pounds.
The 14-inch LED backlit display has a resolution of 1366 x 768-pixels, which make it 720p high-definition. This display is a little unique in that it can almost lay completely flat except for maybe 20 degrees. There is a slightly glossy finish on the screen, but it didn't result in many reflections. While testing, we felt that the screen's colors were a little washed out and seemed dull. We aren't quite sure why this was but because of it, it fell short of other comparable models.
Acer's keyboard is pretty comfortable and the buttons were very adequately sized and we had no issues with any weirdly sized or placed keys. The trackpad measured about 3.5 x 2-inches and was very smooth and responded well. Multitouch gestures are supported and worked well.
We should mention the audio quality on the Acer Aspire TimelineX AS4820TG-6847 because it's Dolby Home Theater sound with Dolby's Audio Enhancer. As a result, the quality was very good and the virtual surround sound system imitated 5.1-surround sound pretty well. The speakers were also very loud, which won't leave you listening for more while watching videos.
On the right side of the Acer Aspire TimelineX AS4820TG-6847, there are three USB 2.0 ports and on the left side, there's one more along with an HDMI-out, VGA-out, Ethernet and headphone/microphone ports. There is also a tray-loading SuperMulti DVD drive and a 5-in-1 memory card reader too. The 1.3-megapixel webcam on the top of the display can capture 1280 x 1024-pixel images and VGA video.
In terms of specifications, the Acer Aspire TimelineX AS4820TG-6847 has an Intel Core i5-480M (2.66GHz) CPU, 4GB of RAM (upgradable to 8GB), a 640GB 5400RPM hard drive and an AMD Radeon HD 6550M graphics card. There is also 802.11b/g/n wireless connectivity built-in. The operating system of choice by Acer is Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit).
This system has dual-graphics, meaning it also has an integrated Intel HD graphics processor, which is a much lower power graphics card compared to the AMD Radeon that's also in this notebook. You can switch between the integrated Intel and discrete AMD Radeon graphics by pressing a button above the keyboard. While not as well-designed as the Nvidia Optimus technology, which automatically switches, it is designed with the same principal in mind: getting better battery life or better performance depending on what you're using the laptop for at the moment. When the button is pressed to switch between graphics systems, the screen does flicker a few times really quick, so the transition isn't as graceful as the Optimus either.
Performance with the Acer Aspire TimelineX AS4820TG-6847 was very impressive as it beat out most of the other laptops in this same category in testing. The system had no problem playing steaming video from the Internet, playing DVD movies, video encoding and doing the average computing tasks. Gamers will be happy to know that this laptop, thanks to the AMD Radeon discrete graphics, can play today's 3D games without much trouble. You might have to dial down some graphics settings just slightly, but in most games, it works good at the default settings.
Battery life with this laptop averages around 5 hours, which is about on average with other models.
Acer does include several applications with this laptop, including trials of Norton Online Backup and McAfee Internet Security. There is also Microsoft Office Starter 2010 pre-installed, which is an ad-supported version of Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Acer also installs the Barnes & Noble Desktop Reader software that lets you read books, magazines and newspapers.
