Acer Aspire S7-392 Pro review

The Aspire S7-392 Pro is the business edition of Acer’s flagship Ultrabook, the S7. It comes with business-oriented features such as Windows 8 Pro, TPM and vPro security support, but doesn’t sacrifice looks to do so.

Apart from these extra features, the S7 Pro is almost identical to the ordinary S7. Its stunning ice-white chassis is beautifully designed, and its weight of 1.3kg and maximum height of 13mm makes it ideal for portable computing. As you’d expect, this doesn’t leave much room for ports round the laptop’s sides, but Acer has made good use of the available space, giving you two USB3 ports, one of which supports Sleep and Charge, an SD card reader, an HDMI video output, a combined headphone and microphone jack, and a proprietary port for Acer’s bundled VGA adaptor.

One major difference between the S7 and the S7 Pro is the hardware inside the laptop. The S7 Pro comes with one of Intel’s brand new Haswell processors instead of an older Ivy Bridge model, so it gets a boost in processing power, battery life and graphics performance.

This was certainly the case when we ran our multimedia benchmarks, as the S7 Pro’s 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-4200U processor and 4GB of RAM helped the S7 Pro score 47 in our multimedia benchmarks. This is four points ahead of last year’s consumer S7, and it did particularly well in the multitasking section of our test. This means the S7 Pro should be more than capable of handling several different applications at once, so it should have plenty of power for everyday office tasks.

The laptop’s integrated Intel HD Graphics 4400 chip also performed well in our Dirt Showdown test. On High quality settings at a 1,280×720 resolution, it produced a steady 21.7fps. The graphics processor isn’t powerful enough to play modern 3D games at the highest settings, but you can experience some acceptable average frame rates if you’re willing to sacrifice graphics detail and anti-aliasing. In fact, the S7-392 produced an average frame rate of 28.1fps in our Dirt Showdown benchmark at a resolution of 1,920×1,080, which isn’t bad for a non-gaming laptop.

A great feature of the S7-392’s i5-4200U processor is its low energy consumption, which helped the S7-392 last an impressive 10 hours and 52 minutes in our light use test with the screen set to half brightness. Last year’s Ivy Bridge-based S7 lasted just over four hours under the same conditions, so this is a huge improvement.