Notebook Hunter

The 15.6in Acer Aspire V3-571G-52454G75Makk is a good-value all-rounder for $697 at Officeworks, as the specs are excellent. It has one of NVIDIA’s new dedicated graphics cards, the GeForce GT 630M, which is definitely powerful enough for modern games. There’s also a 2nd Gen Intel Core i5, 4GB of RAM and a large 750GB hard disk drive, so there have clearly been no corners cut in the specs department. It includes HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet and USB 3.0 ports (among others), marking the V3 as a modern all-rounder machine.

See the product page online here.

See a summary of the specs below.

Processor
The V3 features a 2nd Gen Intel Core i5-2450M (2.5GHz), a mid-range processor that can handle productivity applications and most intensive software. It can burst up to 3.1GHz using Turbo Boost 2.0 Technology if a particularly demanding program is running.

Graphics
It comes with a mid-range dedicated graphics card called the NVIDIA GeForce GT 630M. It’s a reasonably powerful mid-range component that should have no problems with modern games.

RAM
4GB of RAM is enough to run several programs at once smoothly. This will be sufficient for moderately intensive image and video editing tasks as well.

Storage
A large 750GB hard disk drive provides plenty of room for a reasonably large collection of files including movies and music.

Screen
The V3 sports a 15.6in (1,366 x 768 resolution) gloss screen. It has rather ordinary viewing angles.

Portability
The V3 is a little on the heavy side, weighing 2.6kg and measuring 33.2mm thick.