Acer TravelMate
5720
A jackrabbit of all trades
With a 15.4-inch screen, Acer’s TravelMate
5720 skirts the edge of what qualifies as
a mainstream notebook. But at 7.5 lbs. of
carry weight, it’s still pleasantly portable
for a device that offers respectable mul-
timedia and gaming functionality with a
good-size battery.
The TravelMate didn’t ace our bench-
mark tests across the board, but it put up a
strong showing. You won’t be able to max
out next-generation games, but the
rig holds its own in older titles.
The laptop’s 15 frames
per second in
our FEAR test
makes for a
“playable” ex-
perience, but we
shudder at the thought of
playing newer titles on this machine.
On the flip side, we saw excellent
performance in our application bench-
marks. ProShow and MainConcept encodes
sped by, both coming within minutes of
faster mainstream models we’ve reviewed.
For this you can thank the 2.2GHz Core 2
Duo processor: That’s a speedy clock for
the laptop’s size, and the CPU’s 4MB of L
cache helps the TravelMate nail these two
encoding benchmarks.
Also aiding the laptop’s performance
are two gigabytes of DDR2 RAM. They
pushed the TravelMate to peak perfor-
mance on our Premiere and Photoshop
tests. On the former, encoding ran smoothly
and quickly, but it was in our intensive
Photoshop script that the memory proved
its mettle. The Acer sailed through both
tasks, pushing out times that were twice as
fast as those of a comparable laptop sport-
ing just one gig of RAM.
The TravelMate’s battery isn’t the
best we’ve seen, but we appreciate its
performance-to-battery-life ratio. With a
two-and-a-half-hour time in our rundown
test, this laptop should make it through a
typical feature-length film before dying
out—more, if you reduce the display to its
lowest brightness setting.
We love the responsiveness of this
laptop’s keyboard. Pressing the keys feels
almost like using a desktop keyboard.Function-key hotkeys allow you to pull up
your laptop specs and power-management
settings at the touch of a button, and you
can launch full applications with the lap-
top’s seven hotkeys.
It’s not a perfect experience, but the
laptop’s screen holds its own in outdoor
use. Even with the sun beating down on the
TravelMate, we were able to see a decent
picture with no reflections or annoyanc-
es—aside from the glare. Just don’t expect
to store much on this machine. While
acceptable for this class, we’d prefer a hard
drive a bit bigger than 160GB.
The TravelMate’s external connectionoptions are numerous. You get five USB
ports and a single mini-FireWire out, as
well as a trifecta of video output options:
VGA, DVI, and S-Video. The laptop even
comes with a built-in SD card reader.
We question Acer’s OS choice though.
Since the TravelMate comes with Vista
Business, not Home Premium, it lacks mul-
timedia functionality like Windows Media
Center and DVD Maker as well as the
ability to create high-definition movies in
Windows Movie Maker. In place of that,
you get Windows Complete PC Backup
and Restore—a program that’s rendered
irrelevant by Acer’s inclusion of the NTI
Shadow backup application.
Minus this lapse, the TravelMate is a
strong laptop choice. It presents the best
mix of gaming and application perfor-
mance without suffering critical flaws in
either, and its usability and battery life help
sweeten the deal. –D MBeneath the hood of Acer’s TravelMate is
a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 2GB of
DDR2 RAM.MAINSTREAM
VERDICT$1,050, http://www.acer.com^8
ACER TRAVELMATE 5720SPECIFICATIONSCPU Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 (2.2GHz)
RAM 2GB DDR2/
HARD DRIVE 160GB, 5,400rpm
SCREEN 15.4-inch TFT (1280x800)
LAP/CARRY WEIGHT 6 lbs. 9 oz./7 lbs. 11 oz.PC Notebooks vs. MacBooks
34 | MAXIMUMPC | AUG 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com