Acer Aspire R7-571 review

The R7-571’s keys comfortable to type on. They’re noisy compared to other keyboards we’ve tested, but they’re well-spaced and provide plenty of tactile feedback. The large all-in-one touchpad took a little getting used to, as it’s positioned above the keyboard. If you’re sitting back in your chair you have to stretch further to reach it, but its smooth surface was very responsive. We’ve never seen such fluid pinch-zooming, but it took a few attempts to display the Charms bar and switch between windows.

The R7-571 is powered by a 1.8GHz Intel Core i5-3337U processor that can Turbo Boost to 2.7GHz when there’s enough thermal headroom. Paired with 8GB of RAM, it scored a respectable 45 in our multimedia benchmarks. This is one of the fastest scores we’ve seen from this type of processor, putting it on par with the Samsung Series 7 Ultra. This is more than enough power for everyday tasks and it has the speed to tackle more demanding programs that benefit from multithreading.

You can even play 3D games on the R7-571 as long as you’re willing to compromise on resolution and graphics quality. The R7-571 produced an average frame rate of 19.7fps in our Dirt Showdown test on High quality and a resolution of 1,280×720. That isn’t smooth enough for comfortable play, but it produced a much smoother 40.1fps when we disabled anti-aliasing and set graphics quality to Low. This means you shouldn’t have too much trouble with older 3D games or 2D titles from the Windows 8 Store.

We were also pleased with R7-571’s battery life. It lasted 6 hours and 7 minutes in our light use test with the screen set to half brightness, which is what we expect from this type of laptop.

The R7-571 has a good range of connection ports. There are three USB ports, two of which are USB3, an HDMI output for connecting the laptop to an external display, an SD card reader, a combined headphone and microphone jack and a volume rocker. There’s also a port for the supplied VGA and Gigabit Ethernet adapters.

The Acer Aspire R7-571 is a great laptop with a fantastic design. It’s by far one of the most innovative laptops we’ve seen this year. It strikes the perfect balance between powerful hardware and fun, touch-focused design. It’s one of our favourite hybrids.