The wait appears to be finally over for those that have been waiting for Intel’s new mobile Sandy Bridge processors to launch, well, at least as long as you live in Taiwan as Acer has started selling its Aspire 8950G which packs some serious hardware. Not only does it have a Core i7-2630QM processor, but it also has an AMD Radeon HD 6850M graphics card which means this 18.4-inch monster should offer near desktop performance.
As much as we have to say that an 18.4-inch notebook isn’t attractive to us, the Aspire 8950G does offer just about everything you’d want in a computer and then some. The quad core Core i7-2630QM processor features 6MB of L3 cache, a stock 2GHz clock speed, but it will Turbo boost all the way up to 2.9GHz in single threaded applications and Acer has paired it up with 4GB of DDR3 memory, although for whatever reason they decided to use 1066MHz modules rather than 1333MHz modules which this new CPU supports. The Aspire 8950G has no less than four memory slots and can as such be kitted out with up to 16GB of memory.
Did we mention it has a pair of 750GB hard drives as well? That gives you roughly 1.5GB of storage space, although you’ll most likely lose a fair chunk of that when the drives are formatted. As far as we know, this is the first notebook with Radeon HD 6850M graphics as well and Acer hasn’t skimped on the memory either as the card has been fitted with no less than 2GB of graphics memory, albeit of the slower DDR3 kind rather than GDDR5. The graphics card is connected to the 18.4-inch which has a native resolution of 1920×1080 pixels and it’s of course LED backlit.
Acer has also included a Blu-ray combo drive that will read Blu-ray dics and burn DVDs and CDs. Throw in a 1280×800 capable webcam, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, an HDMI port, a D-sub connector, three USB 2.0 ports, a USB 3.0 port, a USB/eSATA port – of if you prefer eSATAp – a FireWire port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, three audio jacks with optical S/PDIF out a finger print reader, a touch pad that doubles up as media player controls and built in 5.1-channel speakers and you have a pretty serious contender for the most kitted out notebook so far this year.
It puts its older sibling, the Aspire 8943G to shame by quite some margin in pretty much every aspect, although we have as yet to find a battery life figure four this beast, but considering it packs an 8-cell battery we’d expect that it should come in at around the same rated 4.5h as the 8943G. Not that any sane person would want to lug around a 3.8kg notebook with them and we know what we’re talking about, as we used to own a Dell back in the days with a mobile Pentium II that weighed in at about as much as it was no fun to travel with. Hopefully you’ve saved up your pennies though, as the Aspire 8950G isn’t coming cheap at NT$62,900 or US$2,160/€1,615, but then again, it’s not like you’re going to have to buy another computer this year.
