Hands on with Acer's Aspire One 532G: the first netbook to use Nvidia's Ion 2 graphics chip

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Posted on 18 Feb 2010 at 15:02

MWC 2010: Acer rather sneakily had a relatively non-descript 10-inch Aspire One 532 series netbook on display at Mobile World Congress, but after delving a little deeper, we realised that this is the first netbook to use Nvidia's next-generation Ion graphics chip.

The original Ion chipset was able to transform a netbook from something that could do little more than browse the web and create email or Word documents on into a device that could play 3D games and watch HD video.

Acer's Aspire One 532G is, in many ways, very similar to the Aspire One 532h, which we reviewed last month. The keyboard and trackpad are unchanged, as is the display which still has a 1,024x600 native resolution, but there are some changes to the port layout down the right and left hand edges of the machine.

There are now only two USB ports - one on each side - but one of those has been replaced with an HDMI port, enabling you to connect the 532G to your HDTV and watch HD videos at full resolution. The rest of the Aspire One 532G's connectivity options are exactly the same as the earlier 532h.

The guts are also remarkably similar to the 532h's, but there is one key difference. There's the same Atom N450 processor, 1GB of RAM and 250GB hard drive, along with the inclusion of Nvidia's next-generation Ion 2 graphics chip - the headline feature for the 532G. Nvidia hasn't actually announced Ion 2's release officially, although the company has acknowledged that it has been working on it for some time now.

Before Acer's reps realised what we were doing, we managed to run a quick benchmark using 3DMark03. It scored 3,049 3D Marks, which is about the same as the original Ion chip, so performance doesn't look to have been improved.

With that said, we weren't expecting to see major performance increases and instead a continued focus on improving power consumption and efficiency. Ion was ultimately released to raise the 'good enough' bar and it doesn't need to be raised again at the moment - we'll learn more about Ion 2 later this month and bring you more information as we get it.

Acer hasn't announced pricing or availability for the Aspire One 532G, but we'll bring you that information as soon as we can get our hands on a review unit.

Author: Tim Smalley in Barcelona