The hybrid market continues to plough on, attempting to fuse a laptop and a tablet into one device. Acer's Aspire Switch 11 is one of the latest to arrive so here's our full review.
Acer Aspire Switch 11 review: Price
The Switch 11 comes pre-installed with Windows 8.1 and is available starting at £379 which is a reasonable amount more than the £289 Switch 10 which we reviewed back in July. Our particular model, the SW5-171, will set you back a more laptop-like price of £449.
Read on to find out what you get for your money with the Aspire Switch 11.
Acer Aspire Switch 11 review: Design and build
The Switch 11 is, to put it simply, a larger version of the Switch 10 (Acer must have read our review suggesting a larger display). It uses the same magnetic 'Snap Hinge' which means you can completely detach the tablet part from the keyboard dock. When clipped together the hinge means it can be folded shut like a regular laptop.
Tablet and laptop are the two obvious ways to use the device but you can also use it in display and tent modes – the same as many convertibles on the market. The magnets are strong so hold well but it can be tricky to get the device snapped into place properly.
Unfortunately, the hinge doesn't go all the way around (like Lenovo's Yoga) so you have to remove the tablet and spin in 180 degrees for display mode. We also found that the device falls over backwards in laptop mode if you push the screen back far enough. It's a problem we saw with the Switch 10 so it's a shame to see it again.
Although the screen size is a mere 1.5in bigger, the device is a lot chunkier than the Switch 10. The tablet itself is 11 mm thick and a hefty 838 g and when you add the keyboard into the equation the device is 28.4 mm and 1.6 kg. That's heavier than even some of Acer's own 11.6in laptops like the Aspire E11 and Aspire V5.
It's heavy but the tablet does feel solid, well put together and has a nice brushed metal cover on the rear which is more than can be said for the plastic keyboard. The dock does have a handy USB port on the right side but we feel there is room for two.
We found the keyboard and trackpad on the Switch 11 to offer the same experience as the Switch 10. That is to say it's nothing special.
Acer Aspire Switch 11 review: Hardware and performance
As we've mentioned, the Switch 11 has an 11.6in screen which gives you more room for manoeuvre compared to the Switch 10's 10.1in display. Acer offers the device in a couple of models so you can choose from a bog standard 1366 x 768 resolution or a more exciting Full HD 1920 x 1080.
The latter is what our review sample came with. It's nice and crisp and either way, the display is IPS and coated in Gorilla Glass so you get good viewing angles. It's also a touchscreen either way and although Windows can be fiddly to use with touch, Acer sells an optional Active Pen stylus.
If you opt for the Switch 11 with the lower resolution screen, you get the same Intel Atom processor found in the Switch 10 and an identical 2 GB RAM. However, our Full HD model came with an Intel Core i3 (4012Y) 1.5 GHz dual-core chip and double the RAM.
That meant an extra 500 points in our PCMark 7 benchmark with the Switch 11 scoring 2984 which is about what we expect from an affordable i3 device. We also saw an improvement on the graphics side of things with results of 22fps and 11fps in Stalker: Call of Pripyat at 720p and 1080p respectively. It's an improvement but this is by no means a device for proper gaming.
Moving onto battery life and the Switch 11 failed to impress with a dismal result of four hours and 24 minutes – almost two hours less than the Switch 10. We test by looping an HD quality film over Wi-Fi at a comfortable 120 cd/ms screen brightness.
The cheaper model comes with 32 GB of flash memory while our more expensive one has a 60 GB SSD inside. Our review sample also has a 500 GB optical hard drive which we assume was inside the keyboard dock – hence why it weighs almost as much as the tablet. Acer doesn't mention this in any specifications, though. There was supposed to be an optional keyboard dock with a hard drive for the Switch 10 but it never materialised.
Beyond that full-size USB port on the dock, the tablet has 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, a microSDXC card slot and a potentially handy micro-HDMI port. Last but not least, is a 2Mp front facing webcam and front facing stereo speakers.
Style: That’s one thing Voodoo PC had in spades before HP bought the boutique builder a few years back. In the shadow of a nationwide economic recession, consumers' appetite for high-end gaming machines went on a long pause, and Voodoo soon vanished into the vastness of HP's oceans.
Now, rising from the depths like Venus on a half-shell, HP’s new Omen laptop offers good gaming performance in a svelte body with plenty of style. Let’s not trivialize the style part: Besides a few key standouts (you know who you are), most of the gaming laptops makers today would throw panache under the bus at 45mph and then stop to back over it, if it would save them the bus fare.
That’s not so with the Omen, which grabs your attention even before you lift it from the wedge-shaped box that mimics the laptop's actual shape. Flip up the 15.6-inch screen, and the Omen gives you the illusion that the base is razor-thin and levitating a half-inch in the air.
The Omen is actually about 15.5 mm thick in front and 19.9 mm in back. That's thin. The similarly equipped Alienware 13 is 26.3 mm in front and almost 28 mm thick in back.
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With the Omen's deeply beveled sides, HP had to put the the HDMI 1.4, Mini DisplayPort 1.3, four USB 3.0 and analog audio port on the back.
Pieces of Flair
Other pieces of flair include variable lighting that lets you set the backlighting on the speakers, WASD keys, power button and three zones of the keyboard. These aren’t innovative moves, but they’re appreciated. The hinge is another thing: HP intentionally chromed the lid’s hinge and then added a color shift to the ends to give it the feel of super-heated exhaust tips. LED lights shining out the rear vents add to the atmosphere. It’s a nice touch.
HP also integrates a dedicated row of programmable functions just to the left of the keyboard. The function keys are easy to set up, but they do seem pretty limited. I couldn't easily find a way to set up deep macro functions for a long key sequence that gamers might want, such as: Hit R to reload, then pause for 400ms and then hit 1 to switch back your primary weapon.
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Zones of the keyboard backlighting can be programmed to be patriotic or even French if you just reverse the color scheme.
The Hot Zone
HP said it spent an inordinate amount of time making sure the Omen could play games without sounding like an HVAC unit was parked on your desk. To do that, cool air is sucked in from the front, pulled over a chassis-wide array of bottom vents, and blown out the back. This design, HP claims, also helps keep the keyboard of the laptop cool during heavy gaming sessions.
You can see the distribution of heat on the Razer Blade Pro 2014 in comparison to the HP Omen after a one-hour GPU load.
I checked out that claim by taking thermal images of the top of the Razer Blade Pro (above) and the Omen (below), after both had been left looping the intro sequence for the Heaven 4.0 benchmark set to DirectX 9 “basic” mode for an hour. While the Razer Blade Pro’s top deck was almost uniformly hot, the Omen kept most of the heat toward the back of the laptop. It's actually very impressive cooling when you consider how small and thin this laptop is.
The Omen's cooling system does a fair job of keeping the keyboard and palm rests cool even after one hour of gaming.
Pure luxury
Some of the choices HP made are simply luxury, though. Gamers don’t need touchscreens, but the Omen has a ten-point touch digitizer over its display. The 15.6-inch panel itself is an IPS screen that HP rates at a 72-percent color gamut. I found no glaring weaknesses in color banding nor other issues after running it through a few test patterns. Light leakage was also fairly well contained.
The 1920x1080 resolution may seem low in the age of 4K laptops, but HP says it kept the resolution at a pedestrian one to reduce power consumption. Also, HP said, most gamers don’t play above 1920x1080 resolution even if the monitor supports it.
The bottom of the Omen is vented to pull air along the bottom and exhaust it out the rear.
Also in the luxury pile is the 16GB of DDR3/1600 and the 512GB M.2 SSD. We’re not complaining about either in the unit, but it does push up the price. The M.2 is a welcome change, as the newer storage interface finally breaks the mSATA limit on laptops that we've lived with for the last few years. The Samsung M.2 unit, for example, in the Omen gave me read and write speeds of 746MB/s and 671MB/s compared to the 496MB/s reads and 254MB/s writes of the mSATA drive in the Razer Blade Pro.
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The M.2 drive's write in the HP Omen speed really blows out the mSATA drive in the Razer Blade Pro 2014.
As reviewed, the unit PC World received cost $2,100. HP actually has nine different builds—I’ll get into discussing which one is right to buy later. Right now the more important features of any gaming notebook are the bread and butter parts: The CPU and GPU that HP uses across the models.
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The Omen features a chromed hinge with a color shift near the end to simulate an exhaust pipe.
Bread and butter
For compute grunt HP picks a quad-core Intel Core i7 4710HQ part using Intel's Haswell micro-architecture. More importantly for a gaming notebook are the graphics, which are handled by a GeForce GTX 860M. To keep us confused, Nvidia actually makes two different versions of the 860M. One uses the older Kepler architecture, while the one in the HP features the more power-friendly and faster Maxwell architecture. HP also makes the Omen available with either 2GB or 4GB of RAM for the GPU.
To see what the Omen was made of, I compared it to the 2014 model of the Razer Blade Pro. Spec for spec, the two gaming laptops are very close, with the 17-inch Razer Blade Pro featuring one step down CPU and the same Maxwell-based GeForce GTX 860M, albeit with 2GB of RAM onboard.
I ran both through 3DMark, Tomb Raider and BioShock: Infinite. Though the Omen was slightly faster, I’d say it's a wash, with both near-even.
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GeForce GTX 860M 4GB vs GeForce GTX 860M 2GB: Fight!
I could run another few benchmark graphs, but since both laptops are nearly identical in specs, it's not going to change much. But if you want another chart as proof, here it is.
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The HP Omen is technically faster than the Razer Blade Pro 2014 but we still call this a tie.
More good news: There's no sign of GPU or CPU throttling from either the HP Omen or Razer Blade Pro.
Why 4GB of video card RAM?
The beefy 4GB on the graphics card is probably questionable for most of today's games, as it doesn't give you much actual performance advantage. Generally video card RAM helps only at higher resolutions or with crazy amounts of anti-aliasing.
And that's an issue for the HP Omen. The GeForce GTX 860M is probably best running at 1080p resolution with most games at high, or slightly lower depending on your threshold for sub-60-fps rates. If the laptop actually had a higher-resolution screen where you might need the larger frame buffer, you couldn't drive the game at acceptable frame rates with this GPU.
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The HP Omen and its GeForce GTX 860M are best kept to 1080p and high quality setttings or lower unless you like to play today's graphically intense games at 38 fps.
When I set BioShock: Infinite and Tomb Raider to maximum image quality, the frame rates on both laptops dropped to the mid-40s. That's not bad, but the general rule for gamers is to play at 60 fps or higher for the best immersion. The one caveat on RAM in a GPU is the expectation that with consoles' large frame buffers, PC games may also start to use more graphics memory.
This made me wish HP had some how stuffed the next-level GPU into the Omen: An Nvidia GeForce GTX 870M. Afterall, that's the GPU Razer was able to shoehorn into it's incredibly thin (17.8 mm) Razer Blade notebook. Performance tests I've seen put that GPU about 20 to 30 percent faster than the GTX 860M.
The only problem with that wish is the 870M's architecture— still the older Kepler, not the newer Maxwell architecture. Such a change would come at the expense of heat and battery life. I haven't tested a Razer Blade, but considering the thermals on the larger Razer Blade Pro, I'd bet it's great in winter.
The top texture tends to attract finger prints but at least it looks nice.
Not bad gaming battery life
Gaming and battery life don't mix well, but Haswell helps. I ran a standard PC Mark 8 Home Conventional run down test and saw the Razer Blade Pro 14 actually fare a little better than the Omen, with a score of 9345 vs. the Omen's 8376. But here's the shocker: The Razer Blade Pro 2014's battery is 78Wh versus the Omen's 58Wh. Both screens were set at 130 nits.
Because both are likely to be bought as primarily gaming notebooks, I performed a gaming run-down test versus PC Mark 8's mix of video chat, browsing, photo editing and casual gaming. I decided to loop Heaven 4.0 set to the basic mode.
The Razer Blade Pro 2014 ran out of gas just after an hour. Not great. The Omen, however, continued to run another 45 minutes. That basically means the HP Omen should be good for a solid flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles or a commuter train trip, but you'll need external power for a transcontinental flight. Overall it's not bad gaming run time for the size and weight.
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The HP Omen's battery life while looping Heaven 4.0 set to DX9 mode is certainly better than the Razer Blade Pro 2014.
The CPU also matters
To gauge CPU performance, I ran both units through a Handbrake encoding task, where a 30GB file is transcoded down to a file that can be played on an Android tablet. The Omen is slightly faster, along with its CPU, and both will easily eat any dual-core CPU in thread-heavy tasks. Do you need a quad-core CPU with Hyper-Threading in a gaming laptop? That's debatable, but I don't believe in the 100-percent gamer. With transcoding video practically a mainstream chore for people who obtain video from different sources, the extra cores and Hyper-Threading are worth it.
There's a 100MHz difference between the CPUs in the HP Omen and Razer Blade Pro 2014 and you can see the impact on this CPU-intensive encoding task.
A welcome return...
Overall HP's new gaming laptop is one worthy of the Omen name. It offers bags of style and reasonable gaming performance in a thin and fairly cool chassis. Decked out with the larger 4GB of GPU RAM, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD storage, it's even reasonably priced at $2,100 compared to other notebooks in its class.
If I were buying the Omen though, I'd probably opt for the build with 2GB of video card RAM, 8GB of DDR3/1600 and the 512GB SSD for $1,800, instead of this jam-packed version.
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HP's new Omen marks the return of Voodoo DNA to a gaming laptop.
As someone who watched Voodoo PC grow from a fledgling PC company to a recognized player in the boutique market, I was sad to see it fade away, instead of flourishing like Alienware did after the Dell buyout. The HP Omen, however, gives me hope.
We don’t talk much about laptops these days. All the conversation about computing seems to be centred around smartphones and tablets. But there are still lots of people who are picking up their first laptops, especially in a country like India. College students, for instance, need a proper computer with a keyboard and an optical disc drive to do much of their work. The tablet falls short of much of their needs. But is it possible to buy a good functional laptop for the price of a tablet? I think I have found the answer in the new Acer Aspire E15.
Design: The E15 is a large laptop with a 15.6-inch screen, the type that has started becoming rare these days. But this means the laptop is ideal for those who need a lot of real estate to work on —for instance, those working on design needs and research. However, despite the size, the E15 is far from bulky. Yes, it is heavy at 2.4 kg, but it is relatively slim with a maximum height of 27.15 mm.
The review unit I got was all-black with a matte finished body. The wrist rest and the rear of the clamshell had a perforated texture. The trackpad is at the same level as the keys, while the keyboard itself was housed a level below. There is just one power button outside the keyboard, and this makes the design uncomplicated and simple.
The full size fine-tip keyboard is good to work on with just the right amount of travel on the keys. However, I found the edges of the laptop to be a bit too sharp and my wrists felt strained after I had written a 500-word piece using the E15. You might need to pad up this sharp edge if you want to use the computer for long hours. The ports are all in the rear, just under the screen. The lower half of the clamshell rises up towards the screen to accommodate all the HDMI, LAN and two USB ports. Even power point is at the rear.
Display: The HD display is good for all types of uses and does not have much glare. No, it is not a touchscreen and there is no FullHD, but then this is a budget laptop.
Performance: The E15, for obvious reasons, is not powered by a Intel Core i3 or i5 processor. What it has is the Bay Trail based Intel Celeron N2830 processor, which has better power efficiency than third generation Core i3 processors, but might be a bit lacking when it comes to processing and overall features. However, for the price point this offers a good value proposition. It is not as fast as the latest Core i3 processors and will groan a bit if pushed to the limit as I discovered by browsing the web using the Chrome and over a dozen tabs running. But I was pleased to see the laptop remains cool even under pressure. This one won’t trouble you much if you are doing regular stuff, but it is not built for anything more tiresome. The E15 starts up really quickly and wakes up from sleep in under 10 seconds.
Verdict: If you are looking for a very affordable, full function laptop then the Acer Aspire E15 is definitely a good option. I would recommend this for high school and college students, but not for those who are looking for a business laptop. But yes this costs just as much, or even lower than a lot of tablets and if you are looking to be productive then the E15 might prove to be the better bet.
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