Acer Aspire 8950G-9839

Acer Aspire 8950G-9839

When I first hauled out the Acer Aspire 8950G from the backpack, I almost dropped it--not because it was that heavy, but because it was lighter than expected. This massive (I hesitate to say "notebook") desktop replacement system sports an 18.4-inch, true 1080p LCD panel. At 8 pounds, 5 ounces without the power brick, it's lighter than some smaller systems that have been through the lab here. Even with the 120-watt power supply, the weight falls just a little short of 10 pounds. It's still too big to carry around, but it could make for a useful living room PC. The system includes an Intel Core i7 2630M quad-core CPU clocking in at 2GHz and maxing out at a Turbo Boost clock of 2.9GHz. The CPU is complemented by 8GB of DDR3 DRAM and 64-bit Windows Home Premium. Driving that big, bright LCD panel is an AMD Radeon HD Mobility 6850M discrete GPU with 2GB of GDDR5 video RAM. Given the GPU's pedigree, I expected greatness when it comes to gaming performance as well as reasonably good video playback quality. The game tests brought me back to earth, however. The Aspire 8950G is a cut above many laptops when it comes to overall gaming performance, but you'll still need to dial back graphics settings to about "medium" to get good frame rates in current-generation games.