The design of Acer's 5000 series, which is known by the name 'Gemstone' has the potential of being a milestone in terms of Acer's notebook design. We do not like to be reminded to the old Aspire series, whose cases partly heavily suffered from stability problems. The Gemstone design changed a lot. The cases got essentially bigger and the stability improved at the same time. Nevertheless, they finally also look good and clearly distinctive from other brands.

Just one year ago, the introduction of the Gemstone design created a furore by Acer. At this time the Acer 5920G was one of the first models taking advantage of the new design. These days the Acer Aspire 6920G sets a new course. Once again, a new design is introduced, which is obviously based on the previous Gemstone design, but, brings a lot of changes about. The most important difference is the innovative display, which entails a new format of the case.

Overall, the introduction of a 16:9 aspect ratio display was not surprising, because watching films and TV via notebook gained more and more popularity throughout the last months and years. Although wide-screen displays, Blu-Ray respectively HD-DVD, HDMI, and HDCP originate in the film and TV technology, these are nowadays also omnipresent in notebooks.

Although, the new aspect ratio looks unusual at first, the display appears to be rather small, because of its aspect ratio. The new display obviously also gave reason to redesign the hinges, which now dominate the appearance. The case is attached by an elongated duct and the hinges located at its sides are strikingly blue illuminated. This design brings about, that the display folds open down and back and interfaces could, therefore, not be located at the back side. Furthermore, moving the hinges requires some force.

Because the back side can due to the opening mechanism not be used for interfaces, the interfaces can only be located at the other three sides. But also the front side is free of interfaces and provides only the integrated 6in1 CardReader, which supports SD, MMC, MMCplus, MS, MS PRO, xD.

The optical drive is at the right side near the front. The Aspire 6920G-814G32Bn is equipped with a Blu-Ray Drive by Matshita called BD-CMB UJ-120. After the competition between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray seems to be over, this notebook is best prepared for the future by the Blue-Ray drive. This drive can also burn media, but supports only the 'old' DVD standard.

Furthermore, there are three USB 2.0 port, user-friendly located near the back, at the right side and a Kensington lock at the outside of the hinge. In addition, this notebook is prepared for an antenna, which is only available in notebooks with integrated TV tuner.

All other interfaces are at the left side of the case, these are the power connector at the hinge, modem, LAN, and VGA port, another USB 2.0 port, and a HDMI port with HDCP support. The audio ports, which consist of a headphone port or a S/PDIF out, a microphone port, and a Line-In port, are near the front. Finally, the Acer Aspire is also equipped with an ExpressCard slot at the tapered part of this side.

That's the whole interface equipment, which is except of a FireWire port complete and sufficient. The order of the interfaces is also alright, but, better for right hander, because most of the ports are despite being near the back, at the left side.

Regarding data communication the Acer Aspire 6920G is equipped with a 10/100/1000 Gigabit LAN module by Atheros (AR8121/AR8113), which makes fast wired data transfer via network, and an Intel Wireless module (4965AGN) 802.11a/b/g/n. Provided you have a compatible router, which also support n-standard, the wireless transfer rates are also excellent.

Furthermore, the 6920G is equipped with an built-in 56k modem (V.92), a CIR port (Consumer Infra-red) and a Bluetooth module 2.0+EDR. Furthermore, this notebook comes with a web cam. So, video conferences via Skype are possible.

Acer took security of data and notebook serious and equipped this notebook with a fingerprint reader. The only anti-theft protection is provided by the available Kensington lock which can be utilized with an appropriate locking system.

The Acer Aspire 6920G is not generously equipped with accessories. You'll only find a printed user manual inside the box, but a recovery DVD is missing, the data needed for it is available at the hard disk only.

However, the most striking and innovate control element of the Acer Aspire 6920G is, nevertheless, the CineDash Media Console. This is a touch sensitive area left beside the keyboard, which can be used to control a number of functions. So, it supersedes separated hot keys. The design of this console basically reminds on science fiction classics, especially on Start Trek.

Although the Media Console did not react at once, this problem suddenly disappeared. According to an Acer technician, this should be a problem of the test sample only.
This input console convinced throughout the test. The single fields react well and also the volume can be easily, quickly, and optically impressing controlled by striking the area designed for it. In order to avoid unintentional activation of some functions, the Media Console comes with a Hold Button at its upper-most position, which can be used to deactivate the input fields.

An important design aspect of the Acer Aspire 6920G is the new 16 inch display with a 16:9 aspect ratio. This display is the first one which is able to utilize the whole screen for film playback, i.e., the black stripes above and below the pictures are missing. Although this sounds great, the question raises whether it makes sense to adjust the aspect ratio of a notebook display to one of current films. After all, a notebook is more than a device for watching DVD, sorry, Blu-Ray films and this aspect ratio might not be ideal for other applications. For good reason there are still notebooks with 4:3 display available.

Anyway, as the Aspire 6920G is according to Acer designed as reference for the ultimate entertainment, a display with an aspect ratio used for films is just right. The display of the reviewed notebooks has a resolution of 1366x768 pixels, so, it does not support full HD resolution (1900x1080 pixels), but only lower resolutions in 16:9 aspect ratio. Alternatively, Acer offers also an Aspire 6920G with a genuine full HD display, i.e. a resolution of 1900x1080 pixels. Of course this has an impact of the price. At the time of writing it costs about 200,- Euro more.

The reviewed display had a very good maximum brightness of 213 cd/m² in its middle upper-most area. Because the brightness diminishes down to only 170.3 cd/m² at the bottom corners, the illumination of 80% is only average. Nevertheless, the average brightness of this display of 190.5 cd/m² is good.

The Acer Aspire 6920G is equipped with above 4096MB DDR2 PC5300 667MHz RAM , provided by two memory models with 2048MB each. The dual-channel mode improves the performance, but only about 3GB can of the available 4 GB RAM can actually be utilized by the pre-installed 32 Bit operating system (Windows Vista Home Premium).

The Aspire 6920G utilizes the currently wide-spread WD3200BEVT hard disk by Western Digital. Its gross capacity is 320GB and its revolution speed is 5400 rpm. The HdTune benchmark test proved a good transfer rate and comparably low access times. The hard disk of the reviewed notebook was already partitioned in a system partition of 144GB capacity and an empty partition of 138GB. It's obvious that these partitions do not add to 320 GB gross capacity. An important part is occupied by recovery data. And also the operating system and various pre-installed more or less useful software, takes up a part. By the way, this Aspire notebook comes with quite a lot of pre-installed software.

The performance of Call of Duty 4 - Modern Warfare was also alright. When we started to play the first mission of a single-player story with a resolution of 1024x768 pixels, deactivated anti-aliasing and otherwise standard settings, we measured a frame rate of 30-45 fps. In native resolutions with otherwise identical settings the performance decreased to 25-40 fps.

Even the frame rates of Unreal Tournament 3 (Deathmatch, Map: Heat-Ray) of 35-55 fps with a resolution of 1024x768 pixel (standard detail) to 25-45 fps with native resolution of 1366x768 pixels is playable, but not outstanding.

The real-time strategy game Supreme Commander - Forged Alliance tested with a multi-player game of 2 vs. 2 with medium presets and a resolution of 1024x768 reached 15-20 fps. Decreasing the details to low improved the frame rate to 25-30 fps. However, the quality of the graphics is clearly worse with low details. The moderate result with Supreme Commander should be mainly caused by the T8100 CPU, because this game demands much calculation power. For this purpose you should consider to choose the more powerful T9300 CPU.

Loudness

It is clear that this notebook can due to the offered performance not run absolutely quietly. Nevertheless, we feel that the Aspire 6920G is a little bit too loud, if the load is low, e.g., in idle mode or when running undemanding office applications. Although the measured noise level of 36.8 dB(A) is de facto alright, the noise is subjectively annoying.

The maximum noise level under load and when running games was 41.9 dB(A), which is average. But, considering this is an entertainment notebook, the noise during DVD playback of 44.2 dB(A) is clearly too loud.

Temperature

The heating of the case is alright under load. Neither the top nor the bottom side got considerably warmer. The maximum temperature of 33.2°C was measured at the bottom side of the notebook.