Notebook: Acer Aspire 2930
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo P8400
Graphics Adapter: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 4500MHD
Display: 12.1 inch, 16:10, 1280×800 pixels, glossy: yes
Weight: 2kg
Price: 800 euro

Acer Aspire 2930 preview

The Aspire 2930 looks like it’s shaping up to be a very good option for those who need a powerful portable machine for life on the road. It looks stylish, uses the latest technology and has a good screen and keyboard. We’ll reserve judgement as we’d like to see Acer squeeze a little more performance form the final production model — expect a full review soon.
Display gut, Leistung mäßig
Single Review, online available, Medium, ACER Aspire 2930 Laptop BatteryDate: 07/31/2008
Rating: performance: 60% display: 80%

Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 4500MHD: onboard (shared Memory) GPU built in the GM45, GE45 and GS45 chipset (Montevina). Because of two more shaders and a higher core clock, much faster than the old GMA X3100. Still not advisable for gamers (DirectX 10 games not playable or only with very low settings). The integrated video processor is able to help decode HD videos (AVC/VC-2/MPEG2) , e.g., for a fluent Blu-Ray playback with slow CPUs.

Some modern games can be played with these graphics cards but only non demanding ones. Still, these cards provide enough performance for office tasks or video viewing (inconclusively for HD videos). The integrated cards offer usually the best battery runtime.

Intel Core 2 Duo: This is the Core Duo and Core Solo successor with a longer pipeline and 5-20% more speed without more power consumption. As an addition to the Core Duo design there exists a fourth decoder, an amplified SSE-unit and an additional arithmetical logical unit (ALU).

The Core 2 Duo for laptops is identical to the desktop Core 2 Duo processors but the notebook-processors work with lower voltages (0.95 to 1188 Volt) and a lower Frontside bus clock (1066 vs 667 MHz). The performance of equally clocked notebooks is 20-25% lower than Desktop PCs because of the lower Frontside bus clock and the slower hard disks.