Holiday Buyers Guide, Part 6

6. Acer Aspire 5920 Notebook

by Ed Tittel

If you went shopping for notebooks at 5 am on Black Friday, I’m fairly certain you didn’t see any Acer Aspire 5920 Notebooks among the 50% off discount items. The Aspire 5920 is a high end in-demand notebook, with all the bells and whistles expected by gamers and professionals.

At the heart of the Aspire 5920 is a an Intel Centrino Core 2 Duo Processor running at 2.0 or 2.4 GHz. The notebook ships with 2 GB of DDR2 667MHz RAM, upgradeable to 4 GB. Plenty of storage space is provided with a 200 GB hard drive (2.0 GHz version) or 250 GB model (2.4 GHz version). Additional external storage can be added via the Firewire port and four USB 2.0 ports. The Optical Drive is a High Definition DVD-ROM, which also writes in a wide variety of CD and DVD formats, including DVD-RAM, DVD+R DL, and DVD-R DL.

If you enjoy gaming, using your notebook to play high definition movies, or video conferencing, you’ll truly appreciate the Aspire 5920’s audio and video features. There’s no motherboard graphics chip in use here, instead you’ll find the real deal: an nVidia GeForce 8600M GT graphics chip with 256MB dedicated GDDR2 Video RAM, connected to the Northbridge via PCI Express.

The display is a 15.4" WXGA (1280 x 800) TFT LCD, supporting up to 16.7 million colors, and featuring Acer’s CrystalBrite Technology. There’s also a built in AcerCrystal Eye Web cam; VGA, S-video, TV-out, and HDMI with HDCP ports; and support for simultaneous display on the notebook’s LCD and an external monitor.

There are also plenty of audio features, including Acer PureZone audio technology (for use with the Acer Web cam), a Dolby certified surround-sound system with two integrated stereo speakers and one subwoofer, Dolby Home Theater audio enhancement, headphones/speakers/line-out with SPDIF support, microphone-in and line-in ports, and Microsoft DirectSound compatibility.

You won’t need to buy any extra parts to get the Aspire 5920 ready for wireless, or even Wireless N; the notebook ships with full support for IEEE 802.11 a/g/n, and even Bluetooth. There are also wired ports for Gigabit LAN (1,000 Mbps home networking) and a V.92 modem for use when traveling in areas with limited broadband service. Card slots on the Aspire 5920 include an ExpressCard/54 slot, and a 5-in-1 card reader (Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, MultiMediaCard, Secure Digital card, and xD-Picture Card). An optional floppy drive can also be included.

The Aspire 5920 Keypad includes multimedia control keys, easy launch buttons for your Web browser, e-mail client, WLAN and Bluetooth access, an “Empowering Key” for launching Acer’s “Empowering Technology” software, and on the 2.4 GHz model, a Fingerprint reader.

The Acer Empowering Technology software is a suite of security, backup / restore, and configuration programs. The Aspire 5920 also ships with OEM versions of CyberLink PowerProducer, Norton Internet Security, and NTI CD-Maker. And, as you’d expect in a high-end computer, the Aspire 5920 includes Windows Vista Ultimate, the most full-featured version of Vista.

The Acer Aspire 5920 Notebook (2.0 GHz version) is available for $1,833.00 - $2,550.93. The Acer Aspire 5920 Notebook (2.4 GHz version) is available for $1,729.92 - $2,379.98.