Acer Aspire V 17 Nitro VN7-792G-55SF Notebook Review

At the first glance, the VN7-791G (Haswell) and the VN7-792G (Skylake) appear to be identical and it requires a closer examination to see the differences. The most important addition is the (reversible) USB Type-C port on the right edge of the chassis, which is starting to appear on smartphones more frequently now. From a technical standpoint, Acer's implementation is simply a regular USB 3.0-port (called USB 3.1 Gen1) with transfer speeds of up to 5 Gbit/s - Intel's Skylake platform does not natively support the USB 3.1 Gen2 standard, which is twice as fast. By the way: those who opt for the more expensive VN7-792G "Black Edition", can also connect Thunderbolt 3 devices to the Type-C USB port. For the sake of completeness we should also mention that Acer omitted one of the USB 2.0 ports on the left side at the same time. It's unlikely that this port is going to be missed by anybody, however.

In addition, the keyboard layout has undergone a slight modification (larger left/right arrow keys; power button now integrated into the keyboard) and the status LEDs have changed as well. Since neither changes warrant further explanations we are going to take a look at the display instead.

As the name implies, the Aspire V 17 Nitro is equipped with a 17.3-inch display, which offers a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels and a pixel density of 127 ppi. In our opinion that's a good compromise between screen real estate and sharpness on one side and readability on the other. The optional 4K panel might have four times the pixels, but without scaling, text and icons are almost impossibly small. In addition, higher resolutions also increase the power consumption significantly. 

At about 261 cd/m², the display of the new V17 Nitro unfortunately isn't quite as bright as the predecessor's, which reached 317 cd/m². For the situations one might normally encounter, the brightness is still more than sufficient. Praiseworthy is the completely flicker-free backlight thanks to the lack of PWM and the decent brightness distribution of the 88 %. The display is not adversely affected by backlight bleeding or similar issues.

Unlike panels based on TN technology, the IPS display of the Aspire Nitro remains readable from nearly all positions. It doesn't matter if the display is viewed from below, above, or from the sides: both the color and gamma value remain stable for a long time, so more than one user can work together or watch a movie. Notebooks with TN panels like the Asus N751 or the MSI GP72 are inferior in that regard.

Since the introduction of the Core-series of processors in 2009 ( ("Clarksfield"), only the high-end Core i7s have been available with four cores - but that has now changed. With Skylake, even the more affordable i5 CPUs are quad-cores, although Hyper Threading has been eliminated at the same time. Despite that, the Core i5-6300HQ, which features a base clock speed ranging from 2.3 to 3.2 GHz (4 cores: 2.8 GHz, 2 cores: 3.0 GHz) should be vastly more powerful than the i5 dual-core predecessors. The fact that the 14 nm CPU has a very high TDP of 45 watts tarnishes the favorable first impression somewhat, although the actual power consumption should likely remain way below this threshold.

In addition to the integrated HD Graphics 530 (24 EUs, 350 - 950 MHz), the VN7-792G also features a dedicated Nvidia GeForce 945M. Although the name might suggest an amped-up version of the GeForce 940M (GM108-Chip, 384 Shader, 64-bit memory interface), the GPU is actually a downgraded GeForce GTX 950M (GM107-Chip, 640 Shader, 128 bit memory interface). The 945M has one of the 5 Shader-clusters deactivated and now comes with 512 ALUs and 32 TMUs. The frequency range is between 928 and 1045 MHz (Boost) for the core and 1000 MHz for the 2 GB of DDR3 RAM (still with a 128-bit interface).  

Another Skylake-novelty is the fact that the chips can utilize modern DDR4 RAM, which promises higher clock speeds at a lower voltage. Equipped with 8 GB of RAM (2x 4 GB DDR4-2133, both slots occupied) the Aspire should be adequately equipped for the foreseeable future. A 1000 GB SSHD with 8 GB of SSD cache is responsible for the OS and data storage.

Let's compare the specs of the Core i5-6300HQ with one of the direct predecessors, for example the Haswell-generation Core i5-4210H: four cores clocked at 2.3-3.2 GHz compared to two cores running at 2.9-3.5 GHz, but with Hyper Threading enabled and capable of handling four threads at the same time. The improved Skylake-architecture should be good for about 10 % performance increase per MHz - but what, exactly, is the bottom line?

When running sufficiently parallelized software, the Core i5-6300HQ has a performance plus of 40 to 50 % compared to the Core i5-4210H and even manages to threaten some older Core i7 CPUs. Compared to a current i7-6700HQ, the 6300HQ doesn't stand a chance, but the CPU is still able to outperform the lower-tier Skylake Core i3-6100H by a significant margin. The difference in single-core performance is much less noticeable with a gap of about 15 % between the Core i3 and Core i5 as well as Core i5 and Core i7.

In summary it can be said that Intel now has a clear technical as well as performance differentiation between Core i3 (2C/4T), Core i5 (4C/4T) and Core i7 (4C/8T) CPUs. That's only true for the standard-voltage processors however - all Skylake ULV CPUs from Pentium to i7 have two cores and four threads, so the performance is mostly dependent on the clock speed.

Thankfully, our review Aspire Nitro doesn't come with a standard hard drive, but a 2.5-inch 1000 GB Toshiba MQ02ABF100 SSHD with 8 GB of SSD cache. An intelligent algorithm transfers frequently-used data to the flash storage automatically, which improves the boot process as well as the startup times of important applications.

Typical benchmark programs like HD Tune can't really take advantage of the cache, however. Even so, the drive does pretty well with an average sequential transfer rate of 87 MB/s and an access time of 17.5 ms. True SSDs are of course significantly faster.

The hardware specs already hint at the fact that the GeForce 945M doesn't trail the GeForce GTX 950M by much and significantly outperforms the GeForce 940M. Only the GeForce GTX 960M with GDDR5 RAM is about 50 % faster, which is noticeable when playing games even without the aid of frame-counter software. By the way: since Acer doesn't throttle the CPU or the GPU performance when the notebook is running on battery power, users can expect full performance - at least until the battery runs out.   

The Skylake-CPU integrated HD Graphics 530 (automatic graphics switching via Optimus technology) doesn't stand a chance performance-wise, but is a lot more frugal and comes with a modern H.265 decoder as well. This decoder can handle even 4K videos at 60 fps and with minimal hardware utilization.