Here's a long story:
I have here an unopened Acer AS5920-6313 that I bought at Bestbuy yesterday. I can take it back for a full refund as long as I haven't opened the sealed box, which I haven't.
I bought it yesterday because I was thinking it would be pretty cool to have a notebook that could do HD-DVD.
I had never even considered the Acer. I had been following the Asus notebooks for a while because I heard good things about them and want something to replace an old mac that I use for browsing, reading email, etc. in the living room. I was going to get an F3SV-B1 and was pretty much sure that was the right model for me. But the day I finally made the decision, a week ago, newegg was out of stock on them. So I went down to BB to check what else was out there and saw a customer looking at the Acer and asking intelligent questions and having it do some processor and graphics intensive stuff and he liked it. And when I saw that it had HD-DVD I thought that was really cool because last year I bought a 1080P TV and have been figuring I'd like to upgrade my DVD player soon.
So I've been reading about the 5920. The version available in the US comes with a T5250 processor which is slower than what I've been looking at on the F3SV-B1. But the Acer has a faster graphic processor 8600M GT with HDMI out. It also is cheaper than the F3. So after a lot of reading of forums I came to the conclusion that it would be okay to have the slower T5250 processor to get the HD-DVD. So I went and bought one.
But now I'm thinking the whole thing doesn't make sense because it is going to involve getting more cables that I have to have running around my living room and modifying my AV setup in ways that I'm not really ready to do. By Christmas buying season stand-alone HD-DVD players will be down to a pretty good price point and I could get one then. Also AV receivers with HDMI inputs are finally coming out to make hooking things up eaiser.
Today, it makes sense to just get a fast nice notebook to do notebook stuff and not for its ability to do HD-DVD. I intend to take back the Acer and get a full refund from BB.
But during this saga I learned that the 8600M GS on the F3SV-B1 isn't as good as an 8600M GT and if I'm buying a computer based on specs I might want to be looking at one that has both the faster T7500 and the faster 8600M GT. What's out there with that in the $1200-1400 price range? Keep in mind that the Acer was $1200 at BB and came with 2G of RAM, a pretty good deal really. I'm tired of waiting and want to buy something this week.
And I should include what I want to use this computer for - I want this computer to do real standard stuff - browsing, email, itunes, word processing, a bit of dreamweaver, but also be able to occasionally do DX10 flight sim and driving games when they come out. I also will do a bit of work related 3D CAD (Autodesk Inventor) that I hear works okay on an 8600M chip.
I have here an unopened Acer AS5920-6313 that I bought at Bestbuy yesterday. I can take it back for a full refund as long as I haven't opened the sealed box, which I haven't.
I bought it yesterday because I was thinking it would be pretty cool to have a notebook that could do HD-DVD.
I had never even considered the Acer. I had been following the Asus notebooks for a while because I heard good things about them and want something to replace an old mac that I use for browsing, reading email, etc. in the living room. I was going to get an F3SV-B1 and was pretty much sure that was the right model for me. But the day I finally made the decision, a week ago, newegg was out of stock on them. So I went down to BB to check what else was out there and saw a customer looking at the Acer and asking intelligent questions and having it do some processor and graphics intensive stuff and he liked it. And when I saw that it had HD-DVD I thought that was really cool because last year I bought a 1080P TV and have been figuring I'd like to upgrade my DVD player soon.
So I've been reading about the 5920. The version available in the US comes with a T5250 processor which is slower than what I've been looking at on the F3SV-B1. But the Acer has a faster graphic processor 8600M GT with HDMI out. It also is cheaper than the F3. So after a lot of reading of forums I came to the conclusion that it would be okay to have the slower T5250 processor to get the HD-DVD. So I went and bought one.
But now I'm thinking the whole thing doesn't make sense because it is going to involve getting more cables that I have to have running around my living room and modifying my AV setup in ways that I'm not really ready to do. By Christmas buying season stand-alone HD-DVD players will be down to a pretty good price point and I could get one then. Also AV receivers with HDMI inputs are finally coming out to make hooking things up eaiser.
Today, it makes sense to just get a fast nice notebook to do notebook stuff and not for its ability to do HD-DVD. I intend to take back the Acer and get a full refund from BB.
But during this saga I learned that the 8600M GS on the F3SV-B1 isn't as good as an 8600M GT and if I'm buying a computer based on specs I might want to be looking at one that has both the faster T7500 and the faster 8600M GT. What's out there with that in the $1200-1400 price range? Keep in mind that the Acer was $1200 at BB and came with 2G of RAM, a pretty good deal really. I'm tired of waiting and want to buy something this week.
And I should include what I want to use this computer for - I want this computer to do real standard stuff - browsing, email, itunes, word processing, a bit of dreamweaver, but also be able to occasionally do DX10 flight sim and driving games when they come out. I also will do a bit of work related 3D CAD (Autodesk Inventor) that I hear works okay on an 8600M chip.
