Acer Aspire V3-772G review

The Acer Aspire V3-772G is rather more imposing than your average desktop replacement, but this huge 17.3in laptop has some seriously powerful components inside its chunky chassis.

Its quad-core 2.2GHz Intel Core i7-4702MQ processor can Turbo Boost up to 3.2GHz when there’s enough thermal headroom, giving it near-desktop levels of processing performance for intensive media programs. Paired with 8GB of RAM, it breezed through our multimedia benchmarks, scoring 86 overall. This isn’t far off our reference desktop processor, a 3.4GHz Core i5-3570K, so you can be sure the V3-772G will be able to handle almost any task you throw at it.

The V3-772G’s 2GB Nvidia GeForce GT 750M graphics chip also turns it into a capable gaming laptop as well. It produced a silky smooth 64.2fps in our Dirt Showdown test on High quality settings at a 1,280×720 resolution, which is very impressive for a laptop that costs less than £800, as we normally only see this kind of frame rate on laptops that cost more than £1,000. It’s even fast enough to handle games at the laptop’s native 1,920×1,080 resolution as well, as we managed 40.4fps on High quality at this resolution and 52.8fps on Medium.

The graphics chip may struggle with the very latest 3D games at 1,920×1,080, as we weren’t able to get a comfortable, playable frame rate in our Crysis 3 test on any quality setting at this resolution. We had to lower the resolution to 1,280×720 and set the quality to Low before we saw a playable 31.8fps, but even this is still quite respectable for a non-gaming laptop.

We liked the Aspire V3’s 17.3in display. Its Full HD resolution means everything looks sharp and its matt finish diffused all reflections in our brightly lit office. Colours were a little on the cool side, but otherwise its image quality was very good. Our colour calibrator showed it was displaying 83.5 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut, which is above average for a laptop, and our solid colour image tests looked bright and vibrant.

We were particularly impressed with its deep black levels. We recorded a black level of reading of just 0.17cd/m2 with our colour calibrator, which is excellent for sub-£800 laptop and our solid blacks were almost the same shade as its glossy bezel.

The screen’s contrast levels were also excellent. With our measured contrast ratio of 910:1, we were able to see a great level of detail in our high contrast test shots and shadow detail in particular stood out brilliantly. Our only minor complaint came from the screen’s narrow viewing angles, as tilting the display backwards and forwards created a noticeable shift in contrast which affected how much detail we were able to see onscreen. Fortunately, its viewing angles were just wide enough to see the screen clearly from a comfortable working angle, so it shouldn’t make too much difference in everyday use.

The keyboard is very similar to those used on other Acer laptops, making it a joy to work on. Its bouncy keys gave a superb level of feedback while we were typing and the addition of a numeric keypad is a welcome extra.

The large all-in-one touchpad was responsive as well, and at no point did we hanker for a pair of dedicated buttons when dragging files across our desktop. Windows 8 gestures sometimes took a few attempts to work, particularly swiping from the left to switch windows, but otherwise multi-touch gestures all worked perfectly.

With such a large chassis, the V3-772G has a great range of ports to choose from. There are four USB ports, two of which are USB3, VGA and HDMI video outputs, an SD card reader, a Gigabit Ethernet port, separate headphone and microphone jacks and a DVD optical drive.

The laptop’s battery life was around average for a 17in laptop, as it lasted 5 hours and 8 minutes in our light use battery test with the screen set to half brightness. This shouldn’t be too much of an issue, though, as the V3-772G’s size means it’s likely to stay tethered to your desk rather than carried around in a backpack.

The Acer Aspire V3-772G is an excellent desktop replacement. It’s one of the most powerful laptops we’ve seen for less than £800, and wins a Best Buy award.