Acer Aspire S3-392G review

With its ice-white exterior and sturdy aluminium chassis, you can instantly tell the Acer Aspire S3 belongs in the same range as the more expensive Aspire S7. It’s been completely redesigned from the previous model, transforming what was once a high-powered business laptop into a desirable consumer product.

Acer has also completely revamped the hardware inside the S3-392G, and it now comes with a low-powered discrete graphics chip. This is still unusual for an Ultrabook, but the S3-392G’s Nvidia GeForce GT 735M with 1GB of graphics memory will be good news for gamers.

In our Dirt Showdown benchmark, the S3-392G produced an average frame rate of 35.42fps at a resolution of 1,280×720 resolution with High Quality graphics and 4x anti-aliasing, which is superb for a non-gaming laptop. It can even handle games at the screen’s native resolution of 1,920×1,080, producing an average frame rate of 32.76fps with medium quality graphics and x4 anti-aliasing.

We were so impressed with the S3’s graphics performance that we decided to run our demanding Crysis 3 benchmark. Remarkably, the laptop produced a fairly playable average frame rate of 28.7fps at a resolution of 1,280×720 with Low quality graphics. This is excellent for an Ultrabook

The S3-392G’s processor is powerful, too, being a 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-4200U processor paired with 4GB of memory. The S3-392G scored 46 overall in our multimedia benchmarks, which puts it on par with the more expensive Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 2 Pro, a convertible laptop that uses the same processor. It did particularly well on the multitasking section of our test, so it should handle multiple tasks simultaneously without slowing down.

The Aspire S3 has a good range of ports, including three USB ports, two of which are USB3, an SD card reader, an HDMI video output, a combined headphone and microphone jack and a proprietary port for Acer’s VGA adaptor.

We liked the S3-392G’s keyboard. We’d prefer the keys to have a fraction more travel between them and the keyboard tray, but the keys provided enough tactile feedback. However, we did notice the arrow keys were a little less responsive than some of the other keys, and they sometimes didn’t register our touch at all unless we pressed them dead in the centre. This proved frustrating when editing text documents and spreadsheets, but we didn’t find the unresponsive arrow keys too troublesome overall.

The keys were positioned much higher up the S3-392G’s front panel, which meant there was more room for our hands on the palm rest and the edge of the laptop didn’t dig into our wrists. The extra space also allows for a larger all-in-one touchpad, which proved handy for navigating the Windows desktop. The cursor remained stationary when we used the lower half to click files and icons, and we could perform multitouch gestures and Windows 8 shortcuts with ease.

The S3-329G’s Full HD 13.3in touchscreen was delightfully responsive. We could easily perform Windows 8 gestures, and the scaling options in Windows 8.1’s Control Panel made it easy to tap files and icons accurately. We did notice a couple of issues with the touchscreen digitiser, though, as the touchscreen would sometimes tap or select something on its own when we tilted the screen back.

These phantom taps were mostly confined to the top left-hand corner, so it would sometimes switch tabs while we were browsing the internet for example. This issue with the digitiser wouldn’t put us off buying the S3-392G, and the phantom taps didn’t happen every time we moved the screen, but it’s certainly something of which you should be aware before purchase.

The image quality of the S3’s screen was pretty good. We measured a relatively average sRGB colour gamut coverage of 68.4 per cent, but our subjective test images looked great. Reds, greens and blues were bright, rich and pleasing to look at. Our calibrator reported a low black level of just 0.11cd/m2, and the solid blacks displayed on the screen almost matched the same shade of as the glossy bezel. Whites were clean and evenly lit, too.

We were equally happy with the S3-392G’s contrast levels. Having measured a huge contrast ratio of 1,086:1 with our colour calibrator, all of our high contrast test images were packed with detail. A few areas of ultra deep shadow were lost to its deep black levels but, on the whole, images looked superb.

As for battery life, the S3-392G lasted exactly 9 hours in our light use test with the screen set to half brightness, which is around what we expect to see from an Ultrabook at this price.

The Acer Aspire S3 is a huge improvement on its predecessor. It’s expensive, but it’s easily one of the best value Core i5 Ultrabooks currently available. You certainly get much more for your money than the Acer Aspire S7 and we think it’s much more comfortable to use. We’re certainly not happy with the phantom screen taps that occasionally occurred when we moved the screen, and there were some very minor flaws with the keyboard. However, these issues aren’t enough to detract from a stunning design, powerful hardware and a great display.