Acer Aspire 1551 11.6" Notebook Review


SiSoftware Sandra & Multimedia Benchmarks


Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2009
Synthetic Benchmarks

We continued our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2010, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant.  We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia Memory Bandwidth, Physical Disks). All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default speed along with 4GB of DDR3 RAM running in dual-channel mode.


 
CPU Arithmetic Test; Click To Enlarge


CPU Multimedia Test; Click To Enlarge


Memory Bandwidth Test; Click To Enlarge


Physical Disc Test; Click To Enlarge

Our gauntlet of SiSoftware SANDRA tests show nice performance gains in terms of CPU performance compared to Atom processors of the past few months. AMD CPU options have always impressed us in the "netbook" category, and while this unit definitely gets warmer than we would like, you can tell that there is some performance benefits in exchange for it. The 5400RPM hard drive is obviously no race horse, but it's an easy thing to upgrade in the future should you choose to. SSDs are getting cheaper, you know.



To test multimedia capabilities, we attempt to play back a 720p WMVHD clip, a 720p H.264 clip and a 1080p clip. We've also included a screenshot of the 1080p clip from the Mini 311 (which uses the original NVIDIA Ion GPU) to give you a better idea of CPU utilization from a slightly different type of system.


Click To Enlarge; 720 H.264 - Acer Aspire 1551-5448


Click To Enlarge; 720p WMVHD - Acer Aspire 1551-5448


Click To Enlarge; 1080p - Acer Aspire 1551-5448


Click To Enlarge; 1080p on HP Mini 311 w/ Ion

In our video playback tests, we see that the Aspire 1551 is plenty capable of handling high-definition video. Both 720p and 1080p clips were perfectly smooth, even with applications running in the background. If you're only looking for good HD media playback (and don't much care about gaming), this netbook is a champ.  We'd definitely trust it as a media playback device for HDTVs via HDMI.


Related content