Acre Aspire V3-531 for £299

Liveray

Is this laptop any good? It seems to be a really good price. I need it mainly for college work, watching movies and the Internet.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/321019652550?item=321019652550

Alanstrainor

Liveray wrote: »

Is this laptop any good? It seems to be a really good price. I need it mainly for college work, watching movies and the Internet.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/321019652550?item=321019652550

Very poor processor. It's made seem like a great deal because of the 8GB ram, and relatively large hard drive. In reality RAM is cheap, and so are hard drives. The processor is the important part.

freestyla

Still very good price would say, for watching movies/youtube and college stuff - not good for editing long multimedia clips etc professional tasks tho!

This with Pentium 2.3GHz PEntium B970. It could have been worst, you can find otherwise the same specs and the same low price except comes with awful Celeron 1.6ghz or some low end AMD.

more specs here
http://www.euronics.cz/notebook-acer-aspire-v3-531-b9706g75makk-cerny-pentium-b970-6gb-750gb-15-6-dvd-super-multi-intel-hd-bt-cam-w7-hp--acenxm35ec001/p313840/

Battery life should be min 4 hours with Intel HM77 chipset, non-turbo processor.. it does come with slow HDD and 1066Hmz RAM but their good enugh for your purpose - invest €150 next year into SSD or SSHD and 1600Mhz RAM and you got good laptop for another year.

Take in mind this is not lightweight portabe to carry much around.

Alanstrainor

freestyla wrote: »

Still very good price would say, for watching movies/youtube and college stuff - not good for editing long multimedia clips etc professional tasks tho!

This with Pentium 2.3GHz PEntium B970. It could have been worst, you can find otherwise the same specs and the same low price except comes with awful Celeron 1.6ghz or some low end AMD.

more specs here
http://www.euronics.cz/notebook-acer-aspire-v3-531-b9706g75makk-cerny-pentium-b970-6gb-750gb-15-6-dvd-super-multi-intel-hd-bt-cam-w7-hp--acenxm35ec001/p313840/

Battery life should be min 4 hours with Intel HM77 chipset, non-turbo processor.. it does come with slow HDD and 1066Hmz RAM but their good enugh for your purpose - invest €150 next year into SSD or SSHD and 1600Mhz RAM and you got good laptop for another year.

Take in mind this is not lightweight portabe to carry much around.

The price is not that great. Similar priced machines would blow it out of the water in most respects. And it's an Acer...and I don't like Acer's.

This is a lot better imo.

http://www.saveonlaptops.co.uk/ASUS_X54C-SX461V_1218871.html

If the OP is only using this for basic stuff, then 8GB of RAM is not needed.

Better all round, and better make.

OP, do you know how much the postage would be on the Acer? You'd have to add that to the total.

Liveray

Alanstrainor wrote: »

The price is not that great. Similar priced machines would blow it out of the water in most respects. And it's an Acer...and I don't like Acer's.

This is a lot better imo.

http://www.saveonlaptops.co.uk/ASUS_X54C-SX461V_1218871.html

If the OP is only using this for basic stuff, then 8GB of RAM is not needed.

Better all round, and better make.

OP, do you know how much the postage would be on the Acer? You'd have to add that to the total.

Postage is free. My da is in London and he can bring over at Christmas.

I've got no beef with acer. I've had one for the last 4 or 5 years and its still going strong with just some wear and tear damage. Like no battery and no left click!

I'm not a big fan of asus though!

freestyla

Asus has better build quality in that price range nowadays.

I will post some more details now if you are interested to see what's enough for web surfing and college work..

freestyla

Core™ i3-2310M over Pentium any time if needed more processing power - i3 has 2x Hyperthreading lanes which Pentium doesn't.

So how much processing power you actually need?

I'm not expert on software coding side and what apps are using Hyperthreading etc gimmicks but I'm working on software and hardware usability and troubleshooting, so I did some real world web usage speed tests with 5 different laptops last month:
YouTube 720p videos, Google maps, WebGL apps, TV video streaming and Flash gaming sites.
Network was good stable all the time.
The same Operating system and patches downloaded to all the testing devices.

Intel T2300 dual-core and 4Gb DDR2 800Mhz Intel GMA950
vs
Pentium B970 4Gb 1333Mhz Intel® HD Graphics (between HD2000 and HD3000)
vs
Core i5-2350M 4Gb 1333Mhz Intel® HD Graphics 3000
vs
Core i5-3317U 4Gb 16000Mhz Intel® HD Graphics 4000
vs
Core i5-3210M 4Gb 1600Mhz Intel® HD Graphics 4000

*Average results of two rounds with five attempts - one round with 4200rpm HDD and another with 500Gb SSHD.

Faster HDD did the same positive difference in every test no doubt.

I took in concern RAM and Intel HD graphics speed and power differences as fair as possible, based on the results what I found on other respectable web sites.

Final results were almost as I expected - you can still surf any web pages with 6 years old Intel T2300 but you can do it all a good notch smoother with other 4 guys (Pentium B970, Core i5-2350M, Core i5-3317U and Core i5-3210M). Wasn't clear winner since these new 4 processors performed so similary --> differences between them only 0-10%

I don't think it's significant when Pentium is 5-10% slower vs Core processors when surfing all over web. For example, 720p video loads in average of 8.2sec with Core i5 or 9.0sec with Pentium.
Old T2300 loads the same stuff in 13sec so that's already a bit noticable lower performance. Still not a disaster for Intel GMA950/DDR2 system!

Pentium is not glitchy or stuttering slowness, it's working fine smoothly.. user just needs to adopt for a couple of hours and basically accept calm surfing rhythm - what's rush about?

I mean seriously, up-to-time real world test.. all new processors are just fine. Remove bloatware and run Disk cleanup/Defrag from time to time and your fine even with lower budget modern processors.

Real world tests convince me more than once off made benchmarks. Operating System, BIOS, apps updates, multimedia codecs, browsers etc.. these are updating every month which makes difference in the results.
And did I say remove all bloatware! <-- this maybe the most important thing to do

It's all about what you need from the whole package what comes to similar priced laptops.

2nd gen Core i3 2.1Ghz vs Pentium B970 2.3Ghz is hard call @ ~€400 mark.
I would look at other things to decide such as graphic card, scalability of RAM and HDD, style/thickness, weight, battery life, screen, touchpad, keyboard, expansion ports and build quality.

Now if I would go test 3D gaming and HD video encoding etc. that's a different story - you shouldn't buy anything slower/cheaper than Core i3/Core i5 + 7200rpm HDD/SSD.

Liveray

Thanks for getting back to me. But I'm well and truly stumped. I have a small understanding about computers but the one thing I can't wrap my head around is CPUs. It's like reading Chinese for me. I think maybe if I tell you what I want the laptop to do and how I use it, it may help.

I need it to be able to run a few things at once. On a busy day I could be on word, access, excel, google chrome with multiple tabs, windows explorer,iTunes and Skype all at the same time. I also watch a lot of downloaded videos. I may need it to do a bit of photoshop. I don't play pc games.

I would like it to have a decent battery, like 3 hours or so. A good webcam and usb3(I'm going to upgrade my external hard drive soon and the new one all have it).

I'd like all this for €400 max at a major push €500.

If you could help me and maybe recommend something, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Alanstrainor

Liveray wrote: »

Thanks for getting back to me. But I'm well and truly stumped. I have a small understanding about computers but the one thing I can't wrap my head around is CPUs. It's like reading Chinese for me. I think maybe if I tell you what I want the laptop to do and how I use it, it may help.

I need it to be able to run a few things at once. On a busy day I could be on word, access, excel, google chrome with multiple tabs, windows explorer,iTunes and Skype all at the same time. I also watch a lot of downloaded videos. I may need it to do a bit of photoshop. I don't play pc games.

I would like it to have a decent battery, like 3 hours or so. A good webcam and usb3(I'm going to upgrade my external hard drive soon and the new one all have it).

I'd like all this for €400 max at a major push €500.

If you could help me and maybe recommend something, I'd greatly appreciate it.

I reckon, no matter what you are doing the processor in the Acer you linked to originally is poor. Core i3 is the type you should be looking for at a minimum.

Liveray

I'm looking at these two. I really like the asus but the acer seems to offer more with the 20gb ssd and DVD.

http://www.saveonlaptops.co.uk/ASUS_X401A-WX350H_1287185.html#DetailTop

http://www.saveonlaptops.co.uk/Acer_Aspire_Timeline_Ultra_M3-581T_1215226.html

freestyla

Liveray wrote: »

I'm looking at these two. I really like the asus but the acer seems to offer more with the 20gb ssd and DVD.

http://www.saveonlaptops.co.uk/ASUS_X401A-WX350H_1287185.html#DetailTop

http://www.saveonlaptops.co.uk/Acer_Aspire_Timeline_Ultra_M3-581T_1215226.html

Acer definitely - only that storage combo is worth price different over the first mentioned £300 laptop plus Win7 Pro!

It's bigger screen than Asus but weights only 300g more so not a deal breaker.
Can tell you about Asus plastic looks cheaper, not full sturdy neither. Keyboard and touchpad nothing special.
Dunno hows Acer build quality but looks more business like.

and that's amazing: Battery Life 7-8 Hours

freestyla

Liveray wrote: »

....word, access, excel, google chrome with multiple tabs, windows explorer,iTunes and Skype all at the same time. I also watch a lot of downloaded videos. I may need it to do a bit of photoshop. I don't play pc games.

I would like it to have a decent battery, like 3 hours or so. A good webcam and usb3(I'm going to upgrade my external hard drive soon and the new one all have it).

I'd like all this for €400 max at a major push €500.

If you could help me and maybe recommend something, I'd greatly appreciate it.

That's already better explained

Technically speaking, in this case, €90 more for Acer Aspire Timeline Ultra M3-581T over the first mentioned Acer Aspire V3-531 it's mostly worth it because of the SSD+HDD storage. Core i3 add some value in terms of low TDP thus laptop battery life should be better than Pentium. Anyway both have long battery life!

Performance wise i3 is almost on a par with Pentium.

Average CPU Mark 1956
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+B970+%40+2.30GHz

Average CPU Mark 1889
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i3-2377M+%40+1.50GHz

Alanstrainor wrote: »

I reckon, no matter what you are doing the processor in the Acer you linked to originally is poor. Core i3 is the type you should be looking for at a minimum.

After OP explained his usage and seeing some numbers you still think so?

Whatever man, just saying plain truth that laptops are versatile things so each buys according his needs. And market is huge of choice!

Desktops are much easier, all you worry about is power-emissions ratio (unless customizing/tuning).

Boards is one of the biggest forum where people find info so I'm just trying to help less advanced users.