The Acer Aspire S7-393 Review: Broadwell Comes To Acer's Ultrabook
by Brett Howse on October 5, 2015 8:00 AM ESTGPU Performance
Broadwell brought along some major changes to the GPU architecture, including more execution units and less execution units per subslice. The total of EUs went from 20 in Haswell to 24 in Broadwell, but each subslice only has 8 EUs rather than 10 on Haswell to reduce some of the bottlenecks. The i7-5500U model is an Intel HD 5500 branded GPU with a frequency range of 300-950 MHz. This is the maximum before Intel moves into their Iris branded products.
As with the system benchmarks, the second generation Acer S7 with Haswell is included to give a reference of where we have gone in a year or so. Not all of the tests were run on it, but some of the 3DMark test scores are available.
The other note about GPU performance is our one gaming test that was decent to run on integrated graphics has been significantly changed. DOTA 2 was recently updated to a new version of the Source engine which has changed everything pretty dramatically. While we work out a good way to benchmark it again, it will be left out of this review. Any scores we obtained would not be comparable with the older benchmark.
3DMark
FutureMark’s 3DMark has a list of different tests which go from very difficult to very easy. The Broadwell S7 on Windows 10 does very well here with pretty much the highest scores across the board, with the exception of Ice Storm Unlimited Physics which is more CPU bound and the faster CPU in the X1 Carbon surpasses it. For light gaming, the S7 should be able to hold its own.
GFXBench
GFXBench is basically a mobile benchmark, but it has also been released as a DirectX benchmark as well in the Windows Store. Once again the Core i7-5500U does well against its Ultrabook brethren.
As far as performance, with the amount of systems we have seen with Broadwell there are not a lot of surprises left. Skylake should make some nice changes here and we should see devices with Skylake very soon.
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Kristian Vättö - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link
RAID 0 SSDs in an Ultrabook just doesn't make any sense. A single SATA 6Gbps SSD is more than capable of pushing the bottleneck to the CPU under most workloads. Two SSDs just add cost, consume more power and eat up PCB area that could be used for a larger battery for instance.zepi - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link
Not to mention of M.2 PCI-e SSD's if manufacturer wants to offer more performance.LoganPowell - Friday, November 27, 2015 - link
It's a lot of money to drop on Acer Aspire... in my opinion. When there are much more price-worthy options on the market /Billie from http://www.consumerrunner.com/top-10-best-desktops...retrospooty - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link
You lost me at "Acer". Nothing they do makes sense. Nothing they make makes me want to buy.lmcd - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link
Highly disagreed. I find the Acer Aspire Switch 12 (2014 model) highly compelling as a current owner, especially in its heavily-discounted state. Core M and an active digitizer for $500?Samus - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link
That's $500. I'd consider an Acer in the $300-$500 ballpark, but not $1300.retrospooty - Tuesday, October 6, 2015 - link
Wait till it dies on youEthos Evoss - Tuesday, December 15, 2015 - link
bunch of usa moaners..on purpose trolling on acer..
Kutark - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link
I bought a V Nitro Black Edition a little less than a year ago and it was the best laptop purchase ive made in 15 years. I absolutely love it. I have another friend who bought the same laptop after seeing mine who is a PHD student doing research in genetics. He took the laptop and had the processor pegged at 100% for quite literally 3 weeks straight crunching numbers and it had no problems, not a single crash, nothing.rxzlmn - Friday, October 9, 2015 - link
I bought a V15 (non-black edition since I wanted a ULV with better battery life) and I am also absolutely happy with it. Happens that I also do my PhD in genomics - I could probably leave the laptop running for years without getting far though. I'm using HPC clusters with >2000 CPUs and terabytes of RAM. whatever your friend is telling you, a consumer computer won't be able to do any real PhD-grade genomics ;)