Acer Aspire One 521 in the test
The 329-euro Acer Aspire One 521 with AMD Athlon II Neo and ATI Radeon HD 4225 offers significantly more performance than atombasierte netbooks. The ZDNet-test shows that the 10-inch model can shine even in battery life.
If the speech is a netbook, you think to date automatically vgp-bps9 battery to Intel's Atom CPU. AMD Athlon Neo has prevailed because of its larger energy hunger barely. With the Athlon II Neo and ATI Radeon HD 4225 makes the company a fresh advance. The ZDNet trial of the Acer Aspire One 521 shows that the odds are much better this time.
The Aspire One 521 is in a handy plastic case of surprisingly high strength. With both hands, it is not possible to bend the base unit or somewhere einzudellen significantly. The base plate, the palm rest and keypad resist any pressure.
The lid can be open almost 180 degrees, which facilitates the reading of documents or websites. Unfortunately, the nice rectangle pattern that subtly put in the paint, quickly covered with fingerprints. This is a shame, because especially the Aspire One recessed lettering a quality image.
The keyboard has given the small size of vgp-bps2a battery the device is no perfect ergonomics. The hand rest is too small and the arrow keys are tiny. The buttons have a solid attack, but a short key travel. Thus it requires a bit wooden, but not rickety.
The mouse replacement is appropriate in size and embedded in the palmrest. So he has the same smooth surface like the palm rest right and left of it. The fingers glide accurately about it. Unfortunately, the mouse buttons click very loud and need a strong pressure. The pad with Synaptics-7.4 software controlled multi-finger gesture. The scroll bars (horizontal and vertical) are disabled in the initial state.
Display and interface
The 10.1-inch display, unfortunately, only solves Netbook typical 1024 x 600 pixels. While surfing the Internet you have to scroll down so often. A panel with 1366 by 768 pixels would have brought a much higher ergonomics. The price point of 329 € would then probably not have been possible.
The screen shows rich colors and expressive. His glare coating provides but for disturbing reflections. For outdoor use, the Acer is not suitable, as the display brightness is too low.
In contrast to most of the Aspire One Netbooks atombasierten 521 has a HDMI port. This may of local TV or external display can be connected without loss. The Aspire One 521 is to the video player: Full HD output of a video clip to a connected external monitor via HDMI works in the best display vgp-bpl9 battery quality.
Acer Aspire One 521 has given the three USB 2.0 ports, a card reader as well as connections for headphones and microphone. The network interface card (AR8152) can typically only netbook Ethernet (100 Mbit / s), but no Gigabit Ethernet. The latter is in a private environment, but in any case hardly ever occur. Furthermore, the netbook would seem to be mostly connected via WLAN to the Internet. The radio module AR5B95 Atheros also supports the fast N-standard.
The sound of small-diaphragm stereo is fine. The speakers sit at the front of the base and sound for the table. This reflects the sound waves and ensures an even spread. At least the sound is fairly balanced, although depths are missing entirely.
Athlon II Neo K125
With the Nile in May featured platform for netbooks AMD offers an alternative to Intel's Atom. The Athlon II Neo K125 with a computing core, 1.7 GHz and 1 MB of L2 cache is not a completely new chip, but is based on the K10 architecture. However, the evidence compared to the much higher TDP Atom N450 (12 instead of 5.5 watts) at a much higher power consumption down. The graphics device should be hinzugezählt even still, they sit at Intel on the CPU.
The atom has to be a low-power CPU has a name, its performance in connection with the slow GMA 3150 graphics but leaves much to be desired and has improved compared to sony vgp-bps2 the last generation no. AMD is thus quite a chance, a better overall package on the legs provide.
According to the benchmarks that has succeeded: In PC Mark Vantage, which examines a number of practical scenarios, the Acer reached 1686 points. It is thus clearly of Pine Trail based systems from reaching 1350 points.
The IGP graphics of the Aspire One earned 521 special attention: it has 380 MB of DDR2 own video RAM, DirectX 10.1-compliant and was produced in the 55-nanometer process. A hardware unit relieves the CPU when decoding HD video (MPEG-2, H.264, VC-1). In 3D Mark 2006 the unit reached 1046 points (1280 x 1024 pixels), Intel GMA 3150 comes with only 150 points.
Battery life and ergonomics
Terms play an important role in netbooks. After all, who wants to sit after two hours of films, look on the train with an empty battery. This can not happen with the Aspire One 521: When playing a movie from the hard drive holds the 10-inch by 5:36 hours. The brightness of the TFTs is reduced it by half and the radio modules are off.
Even surfing the Internet via WLAN can convince the battery life. Only after 4:55 hours of the 6200-mAh battery is empty. At maximum load on the processor (Battery Eater sony vgp-bpl8 battery Classic Mode) breaks the runtime in half. The test stops after 2:48 hours. This is the brightness of the display at the highest level and the wireless card is active.
Netbooks have Atombasierte forward in battery life remains the nose: a Samsung N150 (N450 CPU) provides the wireless surfing just under six hours, or about an hour longer. Still, AMD has finally managed to offer an economical processor for mini-notebooks. Compared to the previous platform, namely the gap with Intel, was considerably reduced.
The power measurement provides the justification for the good times: In idle mode, the Acer approved only 6.7 watts. Even under full load, the energy hunger of 25 watts moderate.
Both values indicate a low heat. In fact, the work environment beyond the normal business operation is not the temperature of 30 degrees. The 32 decibel fan can be heard most sony battery of the time significantly. Only at idle, it can happen that he temporarily shuts down completely. In this case, you hear only the faint hum with landscaped ear of the 250-gigabyte hard drive.
Conclusion
With the Acer Aspire One 521 amdbasierter a 10.1-inch model is on the table, which deserves the name netbook. One of the 521 provides much more than Pine Trail netbooks, which is not only the speedy CPU, but also due to the faster graphics. Even the playback of HD video is working fluently. Thanks to HDMI, you can even spend it on a television.
The battery life but not reach the top levels of some nuclear devices. The biggest drawback is the display with little ergonomic 1024 by 600 pixels resolution. Price is the Aspire One 521 and 329 euros, slightly above normal netbooks, which, given the additional power and the integrated HDMI port but ok.
