With the refreshing Gemstone Blue design the Acer Aspire 6930G does not only look good, it also stands out of the masses. However the dark blue lid is sensitive to fingerprints. The top side of the case is dark and does not really attract attention.

In contrast to the Aspire 6920G, the direct predecessor, and the similar Aspire 6935G, the 6930G comes without CineDash multimedia  console. However, its functionality was in the opinion of many users anyway debatable. For it, this notebook has an extra number pad right of the standard keyboard.

The workmanship of the Aspire 6930G is good. Despite of being with 3.2 kg quite heavy, it is no problem to pick this notebook up on its front edge. Thereby the plastic parts only slightly creak.

However, there are also some weaknesses here. In the tested notebook the top edge of the screen and the front of the base unit did not close flush. While the notebook closed almost perfectly and without gap on the right the lid projected the base unit by about 0.5 mm on the left. Furthermore, there was a tiny bump in the already mentioned part of the lid. It actually turned out that this part is not really well designed: If you open the lid as usual, that is in its middle, a little right of the web cam, the plastic considerably creaks.

The surface of the palm rests is quite coarse, and not that nice to the touch as for example the one in the Aspire 8930G.  
 
The maximum opening angle is limited to almost 120 degrees and therewith also the freedom of handling.

The Acer Aspire 6930G comes with a slightly unusual screen, a 16-inch panel with a native resolution of 1366x768 pixel (WXGA). The non-standard 16:9 aspect ratio is not supported by some of the games. So, there will be either black bars on the sides or the picture will be stretched.

This LCD panel is made by Samsung and has a quite good  picture. However, on maximum brightness, the picture appeared to be too bright and the colors washed out. Warm colors proved to predominate in the color gamut, because of the evident excess of red. However, on areas supposed to be white, we only noted a slight violet overtone. Compared to the very good Dell M4400 WXGA+ (WLED) screen, black and gray areas also appeared to have a slight blue tint.

The reviewed Acer Aspire 6930G was equipped with a Core 2 Duo T5800 CPU. This processor has a 800MHz frontside bus and 2MB L2 Cache. The only difference between this CPU and the equally cloced Core T7250 is, that the later utilizes the Intel Dynamic Accerleration (IDA) technology. This brings extra performance for single-thread programs, because it allows to increase the clock-speed of a single core. The performance of the two processors mentioned above and also of the numeruous comparably clocked Intel CPUs is relatively similar. So, the user will hardly recognize a difference in standard applications.

An important pro of the Aspire 6930G is its video card, an nVidia GeForce 9600M GT with GDDR3 VRAM. As already mentioned this is one of the few Acer notebooks equipped with this graphics card. If you are looking for a multimedia notebook with a price tag below 1000.- Euro, the GeForce 9600M GT is a very reasonable choice. Furthermore, graphics cards with GDDR3 VRAM are faster than those with DDR2 VRAM. E.g., this video card is faster than a GeForce 9650M with DDR2, which is used in some Asus laptops. However, the performance in demanding games will likely only differ by some or few frames-per-second. But, especially here, even a small increase can be valuable.

If you want to buy a Aspire 6930G, you should carefully check the specifications of the model. There are some with an inferior dedicated video card (GF 9300M GS).  

Attention: The 3DMark06 score is maybe higher, because the test was run in 1024x768 resolution instead of the usual 1280x800.

System Noise

The cooling system of Aspire 6930G works properly. Although the heat emitted by the hardware is considerable, the computer stays even under load relatively calm. Under light load the fan is inaudible, and only a faint whir of the hard drive can be heard.

The maximum noise level we measured, was just 34.4dB. Not only is the noise level moderate, but also the noise characteristics is absolutely harmless.

Temperature

The Aspire 6930G is not only rather quiet, it also stays rather cool. Even after applying heavy load for a longer time, the temperature stayed low. That is everywhere except of close to the fans. On the bottom side it reached a temperature of 46.5 degrees Celsius there (above 53 degrees inside).