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Acer’s 6920G is the same shape and size as its £500 6530G, but this laptop has no number pad. Instead, the keyboard has been shifted to the right of the case to make room for a touch-sensitive multimedia control pad. Whether you find this futuristic or tacky is a matter of taste; we think a Media Center remote control would be more practical. Otherwise the keyboard differs little from the 6530G’s and has the same glossy keys. The touchpad is built into the panel under the keyboard, and we found the see-saw mouse buttons a bit stiff. A grille above the keyboard conceals stereo speakers, and there’s a subwoofer in the hinge tube to beef up the sound. It’s quite loud, but while the extra bass is commendable, the sound lacks depth in the mid-tones. Dolby Home Theater helps to create a wide sound and is great for headphones. The 6920G came last in our Windows benchmarks in this group, despite having the same 2GHz Core 2 Duo T5800 processor as two other laptops here. That said, it’s performance is far from terrible and this laptop is more than capable of most tasks. Its 3D performance is considerably better, and the integrated Nvidia GeForce 9500M graphics chip put this laptop at the top of the group for games performance. A score of 14.6fps in Call of Duty 4 doesn’t sound great, but if you drop the resolution to 1,024×768 and reduce quality settings, it’s capable of a playable 25.3fps. This also shows that it will cope with older titles and strategy games. As with the cheaper Acer laptop, the 6920G has a 16in widescreen display with a resolution of 1,366×768 pixels. The quality was excellent, with warm colours and even backlighting. Battery life was also similar at two hours and 45 minutes in our light-usage test.
If you don’t play games, Acer’s 6530G is a better choice, but if you play the odd game and want slightly better performance all round, the 6920G is well worth the extra money. It wins a Best Buy award.
