Acer is known for manufacturing notebooks with very solid price-performance ratio. It often seems their laptops are a bit cheaper than competitors, albeit having the same level of components and features. Lately, the company has released a new Gaming notebook: Acer Aspire V 15 (VN7-593G-73KV). Early reviews talk good things about it, let’s see what’s my take on this rig…

It works good for gaming?

Name of the graphics card is GeForce GTX 1060. It’s a dedicated graphics engine, belonging to the newest 10xx series of Nvidia’s cards. This model comes with 6GB of GDDR5 video RAM. Especially for Full HD gaming the GTX 1060 is very sufficient, with frame rates being over 60FPS even when higher settings are used. In fact, The Witcher 3 – one of the most demanding titles to date – would run at ~60FPS while other popular titles like GTA 5 and Battlefield 4 would get more, +80FPS.

Acer says this model supports Virtual Reality.

General performance

The components inside Acer Aspire V 15 (VN7-593G-73KV) suffice for heavyweight use. For example, let’s take the processor. It is Intel Core i7-7700HQ, one of the company’s high end units with clock speed starting at 2.8GHz and turbo boost taking the frequency to 3.8GHz. It’s definitely a quad core processor which increases usefulness for, say, multitasking. A solid ~9000 points is received in CPU Mark so don’t be afraid to run heavy applications, either!

The notebook in question features two drives. The first is a hard drive, offering terabyte storage on 5400RPM spindle speed. That is the unit you should use for less frequently accessed files, like images. The second drive is a 256GB M.2 solid-state drive. If I recall correctly, Windows 10 Home is installed there. The interfaces supports SATA3 and PCIe (but no NVMe) in case you want to upgrade the M.2 drive. Also remember, the hard drive can be replaced if you want to.

The 16GB DDR4 memory might feel like an overkill, but some more demanding games might need that much. It’s tough to find out if there are one or two RAM sticks currently, but the maximum would be 32 gigabytes. For RAM and storage upgrade, you will need to remove the laptop bottom.

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Ports and interfaces

As it is, Acer Aspire V 15 (VN7-593G-73KV) has a good amount of ports available. Two regular USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 are there for starters, but also USB 3.1 Type-C connector is included. It supports Thunderbolt 3 standard with up to 40Gbps transfer rates. However, keep in mind there is no charging of the laptop through the USB C port.

True with any modern notebook, also the Acer has HDMI port (HDMI 1.4a). That is most useful when you want to connect an external display – like television or desktop’s monitor – to the laptop. You can of course use the USB Type-C / Thunderbolt port for that too, but if you prefer the familiar approach go with this dedicated HDMI output!

The laptop doesn’t have an optical drive, the manufacturer counts on the fact that you probably download the majority of files (including games) from the Internet. If you absolutely need access to discs you can buy a twenty-dollar external drive and use that. Do not forget the laptop also comes with SD card slot which can be used with common memory cards.

Getting Internet access is no problem here. You can choose the Gigabit RJ-45 port on the side if you want the reliability of cable. But if I had to guess, you probably want to use the wireless card – especially when it supports the fast 802.11ac 2×2 dual-band standard and Bluetooth 4.0!

Miscellaneous features

The display on this Acer sports 15.6 inches diagonal which is still the most common laptop screen size. The resolution is comfortable 1080p and the color gamut 72%. Refresh rate stands at 60hz and brightness seems to be 300 nits. Panel type is IPS, these are no touch screens.

A 4-cell 70Whr battery gives power to Acer Aspire V 15 (VN7-593G-73KV). The manufacturer promises 6 hours operating time; some user reported getting close to this under lightweight use. However, it’s always the case that under gameplay, the battery life will drastically drop – to around 1-2 hours only.

The notebook contains a backlit keyboard.

Particular reasons to buy this?

For persons interested in budget gaming this Acer Aspire V 15 (VN7-593G-73KV) rocks. Even though it’s not that pricey compared to many other gaming notebooks the Acer still packs a lot of gaming performance. The GTX 1060 card, in short, is a wonderful choice for Full HD gaming!

You might also enjoy doing other things while gaming, which is also known as multitasking. Well, the quad-core i7 processor and 16GB memory are only going to help you with that. Running other processes while you are shooting terrorists in CS: Go is a piece of cake for this machine.

Particular reasons NOT to buy this?

For sure, if you don’t have a knack for gaming it doesn’t make great sense to buy this Acer. Everything about it is centered around gaming; for example the high price partly comes from the dedicated graphics card. If you want a basic laptop you’d better buy something cheaper and simpler.

Summary

For this price it’s hard to get a better gaming laptop. Acer Aspire V 15 (VN7-593G-73KV) offers everything a player would be looking for: Core i7 processor and solid-state drive for snappy performance, and dedicated GeForce GTX 1060 for frame rates worthy of appreciation. If you want to experience latest games without slowdowns, go and get this Acer – chances are high it’s exactly what you were looking for.