New Article: Acer Aspire 7 A715-75G Laptop Review: The King of Budget Gaming?

Aspire series notebooks have not visited the 3DNews test lab for a long time. Meanwhile, these mobile PCs are very popular in our country. The Aspire 7 A715-75G, equipped with a 6-core Core i7 chip and GeForce GTX 1650 Ti graphics, shows just how successful Acer's new generation of fast laptops has been.

⇡#Specifications, equipment and software

As I said, the Aspire 7 series is very popular in our country, and therefore it is not surprising that a large number of different modifications of laptops are presented on the Russian market. The Aspire 7 A715-75G laptops are based on the Intel platform and are equipped with 4th generation (Coffee Lake) 6- or 5-core Core i7 or i715 chips. However, the A41-4G series is also on sale, which uses 3000-core AMD Ryzen XNUMX processors.

The table shows the characteristics only for the A715-75G models, since in the framework of the review we are dealing with the Intel platform. You can get acquainted with all versions of Aspire 7 A715 here - on the page of the Acer online store.

The most sophisticated modification of the Aspire 7, which is relevant at the time of this writing, came to us for testing. The A715-75G-778N (NH.Q88ER.00B) laptop version is equipped with a 6-core Core i7-9750H processor, GeForce GTX 1650 Ti graphics, 16 GB DDR4-2666 RAM and a 1 TB SSD. At the time of writing, at the end of June, this laptop was on sale and cost 89 rubles. For a model with Core i5-9300H, GeForce GTX 1650 Ti, 8 GB DDR4-2666 and 512 GB SSD, they asked for 69 rubles.

The Aspire 7 A715-75G is powered by an Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200 processor that supports IEEE 802.11b/g/n/ac/ax standards at 2,4GHz and 5GHz with a maximum throughput of up to 2,4Gbps. With. And this controller provides Bluetooth 5.1.

The laptop came with an external power supply with a power of 135 W and a weight of 450 g. Additional accessories were not found in the box.

⇡#Appearance and input devices

Appearance Aspire 7 can be called classic - it has a strict design, devoid of any flashy elements. Here, there was no backlighting of the case, as well as various color inclusions, as, for example, in laptops of the series Predator Helios 300.

The case of the test sample is entirely made of plastic - this is where the constructive technical differences between the Aspire 7 and the previously designated Predator series begin. However, everything is collected quite well. The lid with the display "plays" only when you press it very hard, and the area with the keyboard completely refused to bend.

And once again: we have a standard "tag" in front of us - with a mass of 2,15 kg, the thickness of the laptop is 23,25 mm. As you can see, taking a laptop or two with you to university is not difficult. As well as take it to the country, putting it in a backpack along with a power supply.

Lid Acer Aspire 7 A725-75G quite easy to open with one hand: hop - and you can get to work. At the same time, the hinges allow you to open the screen 180 degrees, and this opportunity will definitely come in handy for someone. As for the hinges themselves, there is no doubt about their reliability, because the lid turns with effort and is clearly fixed in the position in which you need. However, you can't check the reliability in a couple of weeks.

The manufacturer claims that the display occupies 81,61% of the entire lid area. This was achieved by narrowing the frames, the thickness of which on the sides is only 8 mm. The top and bottom bezels of the Aspire 7 display are quite thick.

The left side of the laptop is equipped with an RJ-45 connector, an HDMI output, and three USB 3.1 Gen1 ports, one of which is Type C. On the right, the Aspire 7 has an input for connecting an external power supply, a USB 2.0 A-type and a 3,5 mm headset jack. Well, such a set of interfaces will be quite enough to comfortably use the device in most situations. For those who work a lot with photography, perhaps only the built-in card reader is not enough - you will have to constantly carry an external SD card reader with you.

Keyboard Acer Aspire 7 full-size, with a numeric keypad. The buttons are equipped with single-level white backlighting. The brightness of the backlight is chosen so that the engraving on the keys is clearly visible both day and night.

In general, playing and working with text behind the Aspire 7 keyboard turned out to be quite convenient. The key travel is short, but physically felt clearly and has a pronounced and well-audible click. The only thing I didn't like was the location of the power button and the tiny up/down arrow keys. I would make the same power button of the device more visible and place it away from the digital block. Once, while working blindly on a calculator, I accidentally turned off my laptop. But both Shift, Backspace and Enter are gigantic, and the left Ctrl, Tab and Fn have a standard area.

I had no complaints about the touchpad - it is not as small as in 13- and 14-inch ultrabooks. Fingers glide well on the touchpad, gestures are recognized normally, pressing is accompanied by a distinct and loud click. The touchpad is equipped with a fingerprint sensor.

The laptop uses an HD webcam. It's not great for game streaming, but it's fine for video calls via Skype, Zoom, and so on. A good quality image can only be obtained in bright sunny weather, in all other cases the picture turns out to be nondescript and rather noisy.

⇡#Internal arrangement and upgrade options

The laptop is easy to disassemble. The bottom panel is completely removed without any problems - you just need to unscrew a few screws using a regular Phillips screwdriver.

The cooling system for the CPU and graphics chip in the Aspire 7 is shared. The video core gets more heatpipes than the processor, but both use a massive copper heatsink and a pair of tangential-type fans placed close together.

Some users will consider this a disadvantage, but the motherboard of the hero of today's review is equipped with only one M.2 port that supports the installation of a 2280 form factor SSD. In our case, it has a terabyte Intel SSDPEKNW010T8 SSD - you are unlikely to change it over time . But those who buy a model with a 256-gigabyte drive and eventually want more space will have to make a replacement, and not additionally install an SSD in the laptop motherboard.

And two Samsung DDR4-2666 modules are installed in both SO-DIMM slots. The total amount of RAM in the laptop is 16 GB, and this will be enough for games for a long time to come.

⇡#Testing technique

We tested in games using maximum or close to maximum graphics quality settings. The full list of games and settings used for testing is given in the table below.

Gaming performance was measured using the well-known FRAPS program. With it, we get the rendering time of each frame. Then, using the FRAFS Bench Viewer utility, not only the average FPS is calculated, but also the 99th percentile. The use of the 99th percentile instead of the minimum frames per second is due to the desire to clean up the results from random bursts of performance that were provoked by reasons not directly related to the operation of the main components of the platform.

CPU and memory performance was measured using the following software:

• Corona 1.3. Testing rendering speed using the renderer of the same name. Measures the build speed of the standard BTR scene used to measure performance.
• WinRAR 5.40. Archiving a folder of 11 GB with various data in RAR5 format and with the maximum degree of compression.
• Blender 2.80 RC1. Determination of the final rendering speed in one of the popular free packages for creating three-dimensional graphics. The duration of building the final model from Blender Cycles Benchmark rev4 is measured.
• x264 FHD Benchmark. Testing the speed of video transcoding to H.264/AVC format.
• x265 HD benchmark. Testing the speed of video transcoding to H.265/HEVC format.
• CINEBENCH R15 and R20. Performance measurement of photorealistic 4D rendering in CINEMA XNUMXD animation package, CPU test.
• Fritz 9 Chess Benchmarks. Testing the speed of a popular chess engine.
• JetStream 1.1 and WebXPRT 3 (browser - Google Chrome). Performance testing of Internet applications built using HTML5 and JavaScript algorithms.
• Adobe Premiere Pro 2019. Project rendering in 4K resolution.
• PC Mark 10. A comprehensive benchmark that determines the performance level of all laptop components.

Display testing is performed using the X-Rite i1Display Pro colorimeter and the HCFR application.

The laptop's battery life was tested in two modes. The first, web surfing, involved opening and closing tabs on 3DNews.ru, Computeruniverse.ru, and Unsplash.com at 30-second intervals. This test utilized the current version of Google Chrome. The second mode played Full HD .mkv videos in the OS's built-in player. Windows with the repeat function activated. In all cases, the display brightness was set to 200 cd/m², and the keyboard backlight (if present) and sound were disabled. The laptop was in airplane mode during video playback.

In games and other applications, the results of the following laptops are considered:

⇡#Display and sound

The Aspire 7 uses a 60Hz IPS-matrix equipped with an anti-reflective coating and supports Full HD resolution. The quality of the display in a laptop can be described as above average - such a screen will be quite enough for work and entertainment. Although some users who work with photo and video content may not be satisfied with the image quality of the LG LP156WFC-SPD5.

The screen has a high (for laptops) contrast ratio of 1076:1. Watching movies on such a laptop is quite comfortable and pleasant, although I would like to see a higher brightness level: the maximum white luminosity is 245 cd/m2, and the minimum is 18 cd/m2. Matrix calibration is medium. Thus, the average deviation on the gray scale is 2,01 with a maximum value of 5,23. The fact is that the color temperature of the screen is slightly higher than the reference 6500 K; gamma with an average value of 2,26 also jumps and, in general, turns out to be slightly higher than the standard 2,2.

The average deviation in the ColorChecker24 test was 5,22 with a maximum of 8,56. The color gamut of the matrix does not correspond to the sRGB standard - the area of ​​the triangle is noticeably smaller than the reference value.

Otherwise, the LG LP156WFC-SPD5 is doing well. Viewing angles in all planes are excellent, except that there is a Glow effect, but this sore haunts all IPS matrices. On the other hand, no glare was detected at the edges and, most importantly, there is no PWM at all brightness levels - you can play on the Acer Aspire 7 for a long time without serious damage to your eyesight.

The sound in Aspire 7 pleased with a good margin of volume, without unwanted wheezing, knocks and vibrations. There is a bass, and a top, and a middle - when listening to your favorite musical compositions, the hand did not reach for the headphones.

⇡#Processor and RAM efficiency

The capabilities of the 6-core processor Intel Core i7-9750H are well known to regular readers of 3DNews. Now the situation on the market is such that laptops with Core i7-8750H, Core i7-9750H and Core i7-10750H chips are often on sale - in all three cases we are talking about very similar processors, because they use the same microarchitecture , as well as the same number of threads. As a result, the difference between these processors in various tasks is provided by the individual characteristics of the laptop. Quite often you can see a situation where the Core i7-9750H is ahead of the Core i7-10750H, although on paper everything should be exactly the opposite.

Source: 3dnews.ru