Acer Aspire Gemstone 6920G-6A4G25Mn review

This laptop is a bit of a beast.

It was the joint heaviest machine on test; still light enough to be portable, but you won't ever forget you have it with you. Lumbering leviathan, however, it is not. It scored an amazing 150% in our 3D gaming benchmark, a huge result for a laptop, so it'll have no problem running even quite demanding games at good quality settings.

Unusually, the display is 16 inches across, with a resolution of 1366x768 pixels. That matches the resolution of some HDTV sets, allowing you to watch HD content at 1080i resolution, the second highest option, with standard downscaling. Because the ratio of width to height is 16:9, like a modern TV, rather than 16:10, like a widescreen monitor, you can watch widescreen movies with no black bars at the top and bottom of the screen.

Choosing a completely different screen from other laptops may seem like a heck of a lot of effort for Acer to go to just to get rid of something that most people forget about five minutes into a film. But it also gives them some space to play with in the case, and they've filled this with their nifty CineDash console, a backlit set of touch sensitive controls for the Acer Arcade Deluxe media software. This immediately set off our gimmick alarm, but it's actually very easy to use, much better than fiddling with the mouse. And it looks cool as well. The built-in Harman Kardon speakers are lovely, too. They're loud enough to annoy the neighbours (we know, we did) yet still sound refined and not too bassy. The only downer on the entertainment front is that this particular model doesn't have a Blu-ray drive, just a humble DVD writer.

We weren't so keen on the Acer's weight, but it's inevitable that the more you pack into a PC the heaver it gets. Less forgivably, the keyboard was a bit shiny and slick for our taste, and the keys didn't have enough travel to let us type confidently. But it wasn't uncomfortable enough to prevent us giving the Aspire a Good Buy award.