Acer Aspire Ethos 8943G review

As mobile processor performance has rocketed, the term desktop replacement has become ever fuzzier. After all, even a £500 laptop can perform most tasks with little effort, so perhaps a new label needs coining for laptops that really do try to replace every piece of kit you own. We’re talking real Swiss Army laptops, such as Acer’s Aspire Ethos 8943G.

With an 18.4in Full HD display and a quad-core processor inside, you can shift your intensive daily tasks onto it without it breaking a sweat. Even HD video editing if you like, as the Ethos 8943G packs a frightening 16GB of DDR3 into its four memory slots. It raced to a comfortable score of 1.48 in our application benchmarks, and it can handle multiple tasks at once like few other laptops.

But it’s also so much more than that. A lot of laptops now include Blu-ray drives for watching movies, but few go to Acer’s lengths: this drive can write as well as read Blu-ray discs, and when you slide one into the drive Acer’s own Arcade Deluxe media suite takes over the desktop to play it back without any further setup. The 5.1 Dolby Home Theater v3 speakers whomp you with a quality and volume of audio more in line with desktop speakers, and a button beneath the touchpad instantly converts it into a backlit media control pad.

Then there’s the Acer’s fine gaming ability, thanks to the inclusion of a 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5850 graphics chip. It’s ATI’s second-fastest mobile offering, and it treated Crysis like it was Doom with a few more trees. At 1,280 x 1,024 and Medium settings it averaged 57fps, and when we upped that to 1,600 x 1,200 and High settings it remained just about playable at 25fps.

To put that into perspective, the A-Listed Acer Aspire 8942G has the same graphics chip but managed just 20fps in that High test, and the Alienware M15x – with not one, but two high-end graphics cards inside – managed only 27fps. So the Ethos 8943G is a tremendously powerful laptop, and if you opt for a recommended mix-and-match, playing at the native 1,920 x 1,080 but with Medium settings, you’ll be gaming at a comfortable 37fps.

All this power is possible due to the Acer’s huge chassis: at 440mm wide and 3.9kg, it’s a real backbreaker for those few times you’ll be lumping it from the study to the living room. But the space allows for so much to be crammed in, not least those excellent speakers above the Scrabble-tile keyboard.

While it doesn’t stretch the full width of the base, it feels spacious and well laid out. Key travel is just right, and a nice firm backing means you won’t find the keyboard bowing under heavy fingers. There’s also a numeric keypad to the right, which, with a push of the Funtion key, also offers the same playback controls as the touchpad.