Ultrabook Acer Aspire S3 Review : Ultra Thin, Light, and Fast

Performance

SysMark 2007

Performance benchmarks that we get at Sysmark 2007 quite surprising, we didn’t think the results are gonna be this high! With these results it can be said Intel Core i5 ULV Intel Sandy bridge processor is equivalent  to non-ULV Core i5 Arrandale which is famously fast enough. By this numbers, you can even run applications that are quite serious matter such as Adobe Photoshop smoothly.

Battery Life Rating

5 Tabs browsing: This online test using the FireFox browser and refresh a website alternately with a predetermined time (example: A website refresh of 30 seconds, 40 seconds refresh the website B). We use a variety of websites, ranging from mild one to ones that used flash in considerable amounts, until the notebook reach its shutdown process (the battery is discharged). It is noteworthy that

the simulated browsing this aggressively will drain more battery power than the user’s browsing habits in general.

720 WMV Movie and 1080 MOV Movie : We simulate to obtain the value of battery life when a notebook is used for watching movies in a variety of HD resolution in a non-stop up until the notebook reach out the shutdown process(the battery is discharged). The results we get were recorded using the log-time applications.

Battery power which is embedded in the Acer Aspire S3 is not very big indeed. The battery of 3200mAh can only turn this ultrabook for 3 hours 25 minutes to make browsing aggressively with 5 tabs via WiFi and can last for 3 hours 46 minutes to watch movies HD 720P continuously. Does this mean that what  Acer claims was wrong? When reviewed again, we do use testing methods that are quite heavy battery drain. Meanwhile, a scheme that used Acer (and Intel) are in daily use which tend to be mild. In fact, you could just reach over 5 hours of use if you use this Ultraboook for browsing (not browsing aggressively in a long time) and several light applications such as Microsoft Office are essential. This is evident from MobileMark 2007 test that was still reaching over 5 hours.

Transcoding

The Transcoding process is also quite fast and will run faster if you use applications that support Intel QuickSync.You don’t need to linger  waiting for the results to be included into the gadget, be it a tablet or smartphone.

Intel GMA 3000 Performance

Intel GMA 3000 graphics performance felt enough but  too close with the lower limit (3000). With the results obtained, you can play a variety of 3D games on medium settings and a certain resolution. The values ​​obtained made ​​us want to know more performance than the Intel GMA 3000 graphics are.

It seems, in this game, you have to settle for playing at a resolution of 800 × 600 in the setting of the low to medium. When you force at high settings, FPS will drop to below 30 and will make the eyes uncomfortable.

Another story for the Left4Dead 2 game. You can’t play this game comfortably on the resolution to 800 x600 on low settings, this settings results that FPS doesn’t show the numbers above 30fps.

In the Resident Evil 5 game, you have to do the settings to a resolution of 800 x 600 with low quality to get above 30 FPS. Quite good, considering this is an embedded VGA at ULV processor.