The case of the Aspire 5253 is suited for mobile use. Hands feel good on the matte and structured surface. Fingerprints don't stand a chance. The only weak spot is the black reflective display frame, which is prone to scratching (see Webcam photo).(VGP-BPS9/S ,VGP-BPS9/B,VGP-BPS9A/B,VGP-BPS9 )

The case is stable and gives a durable impression. We were only able to bend the base unit marginally with VGP-BPS13 both hands. The base of the keyboard does however give way with VGP-BPS13A/B a little pressure on the left side. The lid could only be bent a small amount, but the rigid and the grippy surface give a stable impression. The grippy structure once again provides for good daily suitability, even without a Notebook bag.

The hinges hold the display in place very well, vgp-bps13b/q without any teetering. They are rigid, and hence two hands are required to open the display. The hinges themselves are firmly attached to the rest of the chassis. The maximum opening angle for use on the lap is more than enough, and is about 160 degrees.

Input Devices

Keyboard

The keys have a clear pressure point and a medium key travel. Depending on the position the end stop is however a little on the soft side (left and right), or firm (middle). The keys clearly give way on the left and right sides, which provides for a bouncy typing sensation. The arrow keys are only half the size Latitude D420 Battery of normal letter keys, but at least separated by a small space from the shift key. This makes "blind" operation easier.

Touchpad

The mouse replacement is an Elan-Smart pad. Its surface is smooth and can be operated easily and accurately. The touch-surface has markings for a vertical scroll bar.

The keys give a relatively loud clicking sound, although this is quite muffled. The pressure point doesn't require much force, vgp-bps13s and gives good feedback. Altogether the pad is sensitive up to the edges and makes a good impression, although the button travel is too short and the buttons are too deep in a depression, for the perfect office touchpad.

Performance

Acer has equipped its 15.6 inch Notebook vgp-bps13a/q with the dual core APU AMD E-350 (2 x 1.6 GHz). This Accelerated Processing Unit with a TDP of 18 Watts contains an integrated graphics unit with DirectX-11 and UVD3 Video Decoder for decoding HD videos (MPEG-2, H.264, VC-1). The APU E-350 uses the HD 6310. With 80 shaders and the aforementioned UVD3 video processor the GPU races ahead of the current Intel HD, and should be on a similar performance level as the Nvidia Ion.

The CPU merely has an L2 cache of 1.024 KB. The APU sits on the AMD A50M chipset, and is supported by 2.048 MBs vgp-bps13/s of DDR3 RAM. For the best possible utilization of the 64-bit APU, 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium is included.

When it comes to the processor benchmarks we compared the AMD E-350 (2 x 1.6 GHz) vgp-bps13/b with Intels current Atom dual core processors, which can be found in the same price class and also target mobility. Parallel multitasking operations can be processed on two cores. In the multi-core benchmark Cinebench R10 32-bit the tested system achieves 1.957 points. An Atom N550 achieved 1.463 points. N455/N450 only reach 840 (Acer One 533-13Drr) and 938 points (Asus Eee PC 1008P). The N550 is 30% slower on average. The AMD Fusion APU C-50 (Toshiba NB550D) cannot keep up in this case, it falls behind by 35 percent vgp-bps13/q with 1.271 points in Cinebench R10 multi 32-bit.

When it comes to single core processing in the Cinebench R10 single 64-bit benchmark, the E-350 only achieves 1.125 points. Compared to the faster clocking Pentium P6100 (2.584) or the Pentium Dual Core T4500 (2.447), 1.6 GHz don't stand a chance. They do however against the Atom N550, which just about manages to achieve 512 points. The AMD Fusion APU C-50 (not 64-bit test) manages to achieve 634 points (-66%) in the single core benchmark.(vgp-bps13a/s,vgp-bps13as,vgp-bps13b/b,vgp-bps13b/s)

Gaming Performance

In the 3DMark2005 benchmark the tested system achieves 3.588 points. With this the Radeon HD 6310 only lies 12% behind the GeForce 9400M GeForceBoost (Ion2) VGP-BPS10 with 4.075 points. It does not even come close to dedicated entry level GPUs such as the HD 5470 (+55%) though. The HD 6250 that is used in the Fusion Netbooks (AMD C-50), shows itself to be 19% slower. For this result we used 3DMark2006 (1280 x 1024). The result: 1.987 points vs 1.710 points.

Looking at the scores from 3DMark06 results in the following order of HD Netbooks and our Fusion Notebook: The Pavilion dm1-3180 (E-350) is on the same level pa3535u-1brs with 1.982 points. The Asus Lamborghini VX6 (Atom Dual Core D525, Ion2) beats both without difficulty (2.397). The AMD based Aspire One 521 (1.046) and the Asus Eee PC 1015PN (1.155) fall behind. The smaller C-50 sister in the Toshiba NB550D (1.448) also has to get to the back.

For the sake of completeness we also completed the DirectX-11 benchmarks. The performance score from 3DMark 11 lies at 277 points (NB550D: 188 points). Unigine Heaven finishes PA3534U-1BRS with 1.2 fps (NB550D: not completed).

In short: On a small scale the 3D performance of our 15.6 inch Notebooks can keep up compared to the Atom-N550 and the Nvidia Ion. Compared to entry level GPUs such as the Geforce 310M (Lenovo B560, 3.114 points) the Fusion doesn't stand a chance though. The following three game tests remain vgp-bps21/s without commentary since the low fps values show the meager gaming performance.

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