Acer Aspire 1710 Review - Page 5

It;s very sturdy and well built. No keyboard flex, no heat issues. The vent is on the right and warm air does get pushed out on your hand a bit. I've been unable to get this notebook to run over 48C even after 6 hrs of heaving gaming. I haven't had any artifact issues as of yet either and I'm assuming it's running at 450MHz in Desktop mode. Since I'm returning this one due to a bad pixel, I haven't put any clocking programs on it which may void my warranty. Is there a way to confirm the clock speed with out using overcloking software?

If you look at the pics I submitted, 2 of them have a cigarette box in them to give you some scale. The thing is huge. Very very huge. It looks cool though.

The hard drive/ bios issue will make gaming unplayable at the moment. But the rumour is that they are fixing it.

This site has a reg change for geforce cards that adds options for overclocking and setting the vsync for direct 3d. The file you'll need is vsync.reg.

http://www.planetshogo.com/

My 1712's 5700 was clocked at 350/580 when I checked it.

Adam,

Can the CPU be changed to a 3.4 or did they solder it in place ?

Also what is your ETA of the BO Units and are the newer units coming in will have any spec changes ?

Will the 9700 from the Sager plug in the Acer ?

7200 120gig drive and the Bios fix is what is pushing me over the edge. The Sagers have duel drive ability but those 60's don't come cheap. I may add a 250 in the future.

JCHIMPO,

Have you tried clocking it to the core speed of 450 any Stability at the setting ?

I've clocked the 5700 to 450/580 and that was unstable but 400/580 works fine and I've used that setting for a while now. I imagine it will work at 415-425 but I wanted to give it a good test at 400. 400/580 does make a noticable difference from the default 350/580 so it's worthwhile overclocking it.

I just returned my 1712 after playing around with it over the weekend.
Not a bad machine, but in the end it was just too HEAVY for me.
I mean, i dont mind having a big 10lbs bulky laptop to carry around (after all it IS a desktop replacement), but the 15lbs of laptop this beast is, is just too much for me.

Over all though, the machine was great for gaming...i was able to get the geforcego 5700 overclocked to 400/650 without ANY stability problems (ran 3dmark03 benchmarks over and over again, and played Far Cry, UT2004, and MVPbaseball 2004 for hourse and was fine).
Scored about 3000 in 3dmark03 without overclockign the GPU and about 3400 with overclocking the GPU

At any rate, the other great thing about this machine is the fact that it takes more Desktop hardware/parts than any other laptop. I was able to put my PC4200 512MB OCZ Sticks (from my main desktop computer) inside the Aspire 1712, and it worked fine (although because of the heat spreaders on the RAM modules, it was a tight squeeze inside the machine)

Also i was able to put in a 3.2ghz processor to replace the 3.0ghz CPU that it came with, and the CPU swap-out was a peice of cake. The only thing i didnt have time to try was swapping out the 120gb seagate 7200 RPM drive (which has only 2MB cache), with a Western Digital 200GB (8mb cache) drive.

I would love to see this machine and how it would perform with a Radeon 9700 video module.

Finally, the screen was gorgeous although i had one lit red pixel on the right side of the screen, otherwise the rest of the screen was flaw free.
I think the reason the laptop is 15lbs is mostly because of the screen (which is very sturdy and seams heavy) and the desktop hard drive.
Maybe they will work on coming out with a new model which still takes desktop parts, but will shave off a few of the pounds in weight.

Now that i have sent back that beast, i am now awaiting my Sager 8790 to test out and compare with the Acer....I ALSO have an Acer Travelmate 8003Lmi on order and looks like it may arrive as early as Friday! (4-16)
So i'll post my thoughts on that laptop as soon as i get to play with it for a while.

-Scotty

Why haven't you experimented with overclocking the memory a little bit?

Also, i overclocked memory a little past 650 and it worked ok (at 660.00) and GPU at 410
-Scotty

What part of too heavy for you was the problem ? Actual LAP use or just the carrying around.

I have no intentions of using on my lap. Todays laptops get too hot for that anyway. It is more of an in bag out of bag twice per day kind of thing for me so.

Power, Stability, durability... And saving about $500 over the sager. I'll deal with the broken back..... Is 5 pounds that much more..????

For the lucky guys with in home the 1712, can you do a simple fullpalette color test (for example using the program aida32) to view if exist banding/dithering in the screen ??

This request because I have read again the specification in the acer site and I have found a bad (maybe) info :

- in the 1700 series the display has 16.7 mil colours
- in the 1710 series the display has 16.2 mil colours

so, this is making in me the doubt that they do not use anymore the true 24bit lcd, but now use one of the lcd that have less color (262K ???) but that using dithering (and so little degradation and delay in response) to reach a simulated (for the eye) max of 16.2 mil colours.

Can someone try this to give to all of us a final word about 24bit lcd panel true or fake in the new 1710 family ???

Thanks.

I ran the fullpalette color test and noticed no banding and on acer.co.uk their specs say

17.0” SXGA TFT colour LCD, 1280×1024, 16.7M colours

I've had my 1712 for 2 weeks now and I'll give a brief review of my experience. Granted I am not as knowlegeable as alot of members here, I'll add my thoughts. This is my first notebook BTW.

First of all let me say that the CPU is upgradable. It is a ZIF socket. The system guide shows how to preform the upgrade.

The screen is very nice and bright. I have one dead blue pixel about 2 in. from the top and 2.5 in. from the right. It doesnt bother me though.

The keyboard is, from what I know, just your average notebook keyboard. One thing that perplexes me though is that it has two backslash keys on it! One above and below the "Enter" key. I don't know if this is normal but it seems to me like they had extra space so they decided "Why not throw in another backslash key!" Also the right "shift" key is less than half the normal size of one due to the fact that they cram in the arrow keys there. But none of that bothers me because I only use the left shift. (Bad typing habit) It is easy to get used to typing on it but I don't like using it to play video games on. So I went out and bought a 10 dollar keyboard just for that reason. Nothing beats the feel of a desktop keyboard. That is one thing I would like to see be changed on a notebook. The keys are just too flat and I like the indent feel of a regular keyboard.

Game playing: So far I have played 3 games: Warcraft 3, UT2k4, and FarCry.

War3 runs perfectly fine with the settings maxed. It is not a very graphic intensive game.

With the settings maxed in UT2k4 I get about 30-35 fps during heavy fighting. Not too bad...With the settings on medium there is an obious increase.

FarCry is a different story. I keep the settings on low and the resolution one setting below the 1280x1024 native. I tried playing with the settings on max but I only got about 4 FPS. It really is intended for high end desktop cards. Even with the settings on low the game is very playable and still is nice graphics-wise.

About heat: When I am playing and alt-tab out the GPU temp is around 80-85 celcius but within a minute it drops below 70. During just windows use it stays between 50-55 celcius.

Overall I am pleased with my purchase. I am anticipating the release of the new Bios to fix the power management issue.

I just have a couple of questions.

1) What third party program do you use to OC the GPU?
2) Is the firewall that comes with XP home good enough for my DSL connection or should I get some other software?
3) Adam says that the GPU is removable...Is it possible to purchase mobile GPUs and be able to swap it with the go5700? (not that I am interested in doing it now but in the future sometime when there is an advancement in technology)

thanks

80 to 85C are you sure ??? over 70 will fry a CPU.. 85 is pretty hot .

With the GPU clocked to 400 is Farcry playable on high settings at 1024x768 ?

The graphics card gets that hot not the CPU.
I would like to know what program I should use to OC the graphics card.

powerstrip ( for overclocking)
http://www.entechtaiwan.net/ps.htm

Does the 1712 have built in GPU temp monitoring ?

yes it does. Thanks for the link.

Heres a pic.

Just placed an order.. I am pretty much sold on this bad boy.....

For EightCounts ...

what is the clock freq. setting that you are using for cpu and memory of 5700 ???

Farcry on low setting at 1024 ?? But Adam do not has utilized it well on his when wrote the review ??

What setting Adam had used ???

And for Adam, readed the 80-85 Celsius of the gpu of EightCounts , what do you think is a dangerous temp for the chip in gpu ???