Product Listing

Acer Aspire Timeline 4810T - Time After Time

By Aloysius Low & Vijay Anand - 21 May 2009

Time to Perform

Time to Perform

While we aren't expecting similar performance as traditional notebooks, but against the other ULV-class notebooks, we expect to see at least comparable results given the similar nature of the platforms. We also expect the Acer Timeline to perform better than the HP Pavilion dv2, which uses AMD's Yukon Platform (with a single-core processor). To put our comparison notebooks to the test, we've used our standard suite of benchmarks from PCMark05, PCMark Vantage to 3DMark06. We also expect the performance results to be indicative of how the other upcoming ultrathin notebooks from other manufacturers would fare considering that the platform and processor choice used wouldn't vary much.

Notebook Comparison Table
Specifications/Notebook Acer Aspire Timeline 4810T Toshiba Portege R600 HP Pavilion dv2
Processor Intel Core 2 Duo processor ULV SU 9400 (1.40GHz) with 3MB L2 cache Intel Core 2 Duo processor ULV SU 9400 (1.40GHz) with 3MB L2 cache AMD Athlon Neo-MV40 (1.6GHz) with 512KB L2 cache
Chipset Intel GS45 Intel GS45 AMD M690G
Memory 4GB DDR3 3GB DDR2 1 x 2GB DDR2
HDD 1 x 500GB SATA - 5400RPM 128GB SSD 1 x 320GB SATA - 5400RPM
Video Intel GMA 4500HD Intel GMA 4500HD ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3410

From the results below, in both PCMark05 and PCMark Vantage, the Acer notebook did remarkably well when pitted against the much more expensive Toshiba Portege R600 despite not having a Solid State Drive (SSD). While the inclusion of one will add even more power savings and better performance to the unit, the final retail price would probably rocket up too much to be out of reach for most consumers. The Intel CULV processor based Timeline completely pulls ahead of the AMD Yukon-based HP Pavilion dv2, which was actually quite expected since the Yukon is still running on a single-core processor (and that entire system costs less too).

On the 3D side of things, the Timeline isn't a gaming notebook or even remotely approaching one. The Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics engine expectedly doesn't fare well here, and it's quite a shame that a single-core system based HP Pavilion dv2 performs a lot better with its outdated but still superior graphics engine. On the upside though, you probably won't have any problems with playback of 720p high definition video content, which is really what the graphics engine in the GS45 chipset is good for - decent video playback without a discrete GPU.

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