Acer Aspire Timelinex 5830TG – Affordable Sandy Bridge laptop Review

The Acer Aspire TimelineX 5830TG comes at a very affordable price of Rs. 40,990. We call it affordable as it has a good Sandy Bridge processor, its aesthetics are brilliant for the price and it performs well in most tests as compared to the other entry level Sandy Bridge laptop we tested this month. Although it may seem a bit on the higher side for students, we would still recommend it to those who are looking at purchasing a new affordable laptop.

Look and Feel:

The first thing that attracted me to the laptop was the clean cobalt blue matte finish on the top with the embossed silver Acer logo. Apart from the slight bit of tapering at the two edges, the lid has a minimal design elements. The display hinges are placed outward in effect providing more stability to the monitor.

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Chiclet Keyboard	Isolated Keys

On opening the lid you will notice that the cobalt blue finish continues on the palm rest. The keypad comprises a black chiclet keyboard on a silver plate. A complete numeric keypad is present on the right hand side, so the mouse trackpad is located off centre. Above the keypad you have the speaker section which is slightly raised from the keypad section and looks aesthetically pleasing thanks to the finely minute openings for the sound to emanate from. The power button is located on the left hand side.

[RELATED_ARTICLE]There are a variety of connectivity ports on either side. On the left hand side you have the LAN port, VGA port just below the air vent, an HDMI port, a USB 3.0 port and the audio and mic jacks. Coming to the right hand side, you will come across three USB 2.0 ports and a DVD drive. A power connector port is placed just beside the DVD drive. This may cause the power cord to sometimes block the DVD tray as you eject it, if the power cord is not pointing in the direction opposite the keypad. On the left hand side of the front edge just below the palm rest, you will notice the status indicators with an SD card slot.

There is a silver button with a battery symbol which provides charging for devices such as phones, PMPs etc even when the laptop is switched off. I couldn't find much information on how it achieves this, but i am guessing that there is a separate battery that charges when you have your laptop plugged in and when your laptop is off, the charge on this battery is used to charge devices.

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Right Edge	Left Edge	Battery Meter
Glossy Screen	Speaker Design	Numpad & Arrow Keys

Under the hood:

The labelling on the palm rest gives a you quick specifications of the laptop. The Acer 5830TG houses the Intel Core i5-2410M Sandy bridge processor clocked at 2.3 GHz and capable of scaling upto 2.9 GHz using Turbo Boost 2.0 technology. The monitor as told above is an 15.6-inch LED backlit LCD monitor with a maximum resolution of 1366×768 pixels. The 5830TG has a 500GB hard drive (which can be upgraded to 750GB) and has 3GB DDR3 RAM.

This model houses the NVIDIA GT540M graphics solution and supports the NVIDIA Optimus technology which allows you to switch between integrated Sandy Bridge graphics and discrete NVIDIA graphics. Using the NVIDIA control panel, you can select from three modes: Auto – this mode selects the iGPU or dGPU depending on the workload; High Performance NVIDIA processor – selects the NVIDIA GT 540M graphics for all tasks and Integrated graphics – selects the integrated Sandy Bridge graphics for all tasks.

This laptop battery has a recharge cycle of 1000 charges which should be good for at least two years.

Read about the TimelineX 5830TG's performance, and our verdict, on the next page…

Comparable Reviews:
Dell Inspiron 15R – An everyday use contender
ASUS N53Jn – Sounds as good as it looks
Sony VAIO S (VPCSB16FG) – Balances performance with portability
Dell Vostro V130 – Sleek and lightweight travel companion
HP Pavilion g6 – Multimedia and gaming on a budget
Dell Inspiron M501R – An affordable quad-core laptop, with a catch!
Gateway ID59C notebook – Perfect blend of performance, looks and price
 

Performance:

Keyboard: The keypad is well laid out with isolated keys which produce minimal sound and are a joy to type on. The numeric keypad on the right is a good utilisation of space. The singular Enter and the key looks a bit out of place from the otherwise beautifully designed keypad. Arrow keys are smaller in size to fit in the limiter space that is alloted to them.

Trackpad: Due to the presence of the numeric keypad, the optical trackpad is slightly off-centre. The 5830TG uses the Synaptics multitouch Pad V7.2 which recognises multiple finger gestures for vertical and horizontal scrolling. The left and right click buttons have a good feedback which make an audible click sound.

[RELATED_ARTICLE]Display: The LED backlit LED display is crisp as far as text is concerned. We did not have any issues reading text at highest resolutions. Movie viewing experience was not exceptional for two reasons. The glossy screen for one tends to reflect things in the background in dark scenes. The other annoying aspect was the poor contrast ratio. The difference in the black level of the bezel and the blacks in the scenes playing is quite high. Backlight bleeding is quite noticeable in dark scenes and we also noticed quite a bit of noise in some scenes. Skin tones appear quite flat. Another niggle we found with the display is the extremely poor viewing angle.

Sound: Sound quality is pretty decent thanks to the Dolby Sound support. In terms of loudness, we would not rate this model as the loudest as we found Dell N5110 to be considerably louder. But the sound output while playing music and movies was quite decent for casual listening. Bass is quite subdued and there is minimal sound separation when a lot of instruments are playing simultaneously.

Gaming: FarCry2 gave a dismal 44 FPS at 1024×768, medium settings, 4x AA and Doom 3 gave around 206.5 FPS at 800×600, medium settings. We didn't even bother trying Crysis Warhead as this laptop is definitely not meant for gaming unless you are going to play at a low resolution of 800×600 with all the other bells and whistles off. Unlikely.

Synthetic Benchmarks: PC Mark vantage gave an overall score of 6679 which was higher than Dell N5110 and in the same league as the Sony VAIO S and Lenovo X1. It scored the highest in 3D Mark 06 with 8734 marks, the only Sandy Bridge laptop we've seen that crossed 8000 marks in 3D Mark 06. Cinebench R11.5 rendering gave an overall score of 2.6 and WinRAR compression / decompression rate of 2375 KB/s.

Encoding a 100MB VOB file to DIVX took around 75.41 secs in the iGPU mode and slightly longer 76.10 secs in the NVIDIA dGPU mode. This was the slowest conversion time as compared to the lower end Dell Inspiron N5110 as well as the Sony VAIO S.

The battery lasted for a good four and a half hours on integrated graphics which is quite good when compared with similarly specced Sandy Bridge laptops such as Lenovo X1 and Sony Vaio S.

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Specs at a Glance

Nvidia Optimus

Verdict:

The Acer Aspire TimelineX 5830TG comes are a very affordable price of Rs. 40,990. We call it affordable as it has a good Sandy Bridge processor, its aesthetics are brilliant for the price and it performs well in most tests as compared to the other entry level Sandy Bridge laptop we tested this month. Although it may seem a bit on the higher side for students, we would still recommend it to those who are looking at purchasing a new affordable laptop.

Price: Rs. 40,9000

Contact:

Acer India Pvt Ltd
Phone: 91 80 3940 8700
Email: ailenquiries@acer.co.in
Website: www.acer.co.in
Price: Rs. 40,990

Comparable Reviews:
Dell Inspiron 15R – An everyday use contender
ASUS N53Jn – Sounds as good as it looks
Sony VAIO S (VPCSB16FG) – Balances performance with portability
Dell Vostro V130 – Sleek and lightweight travel companion
HP Pavilion g6 – Multimedia and gaming on a budget
Dell Inspiron M501R – An affordable quad-core laptop, with a catch!
Gateway ID59C notebook – Perfect blend of performance, looks and price

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Nimish Sawant