Acer Aspire S7-393 review – a bump to Broadwell

21 Comments

  1. fokka

    February 9, 2015 at 1:13 pm

    i like the overall look of the s7 and it’s still one of the slimmer machines, which is nice. i also wouldn’t lament about the weight or the footprint, but i would surely appreciate if manufaturers would work to get battery life more reliably in the range of 10 hours, instead of 5-6 hours when you’re really using the machine.
    i’d happily sacrifice at least some of the thinness for improved battery life, since battery life is only to get worse in the time you own the device.

    what i don’t like about the design is the mix of metal, glass and plastic. i can understand having glass on the lid for design reasons, but plastic on the bottom is a cheap move from acer, even if it’s slightly more affordable than some of the competition.

    i like that you can open the lid a full 180 degree, more laptops should be able to do that, but as the author, i think the keyboard should come with at least an extra row for the function keys. i hate having to press key combos for each and everything and having to use two hands for simple things like screen brightness is just stupid, imho.

    i also think the trackpad should be centered, i don’t really see the benefit of moving it so far to the left.

    it’s kinda sad you can’t reliably judge performance and battery life with pre-release samples like this, because on an iterative upgrade like the s7, what else is there to change?

    still, thanks for the review, the s7 seems to remain a nice little ultrabook, the competition isn’t getting any lesser though.

  2. Fil

    February 11, 2015 at 10:17 am

    Thanks for the excellent review on this one!
    I was wondering how this compares to the newly available broadwell-upgraded Asus UX303LN (I7 5500U, e.g. here: cyberport.de/?DEEP=1C28-1X1&APID=6)

    As you rated the haswell UX303LN very highly, I was wondering how the broadwell version compares, and how you would see its competitiveness nowadays.

    • Andrei Girbea

      February 11, 2015 at 10:55 am

      The UX303LN remains a top pick if you want the dedicated graphics. In fact, the only viable 13 inch option. The Broadwell update will have a minor influence on performance and might have some influence on battery life. But it won’t be a major upgrade from the Haswell model. In fact, it’s only a minor one.

      The performance boost in games offered by the Nvidia 840M chip is still massive and well worth the money if you plan to run modern games. the Intel HD 5500 solution is 20-40% faster than the older Intel HD 4400, but still miles after a dedicated chip.

      BTW, does that shop have the Broadwell model in stock? I can’t seem to figure it out from the page, my German sucks :P

      • Fil

        February 11, 2015 at 2:19 pm

        Thanks for that assessment!
        Yes, it is on stock. And since I got the alert today, I guess its newly available.

  3. Fil

    February 11, 2015 at 10:31 am

    As an afterthought of ASUS UX303LN (Broadwell) vs other newer Broadwell ultrabooks like this one:
    I understood that the Broadwell processors pack strongly improved graphics. Is it still worth to go for a medium performance dedicated graphics liek the 840M on the UX303LN? Or is the perfomance gap so small that it does not justify?

  4. Incognito

    February 13, 2015 at 4:04 pm

    Nice review man, was wondering whether you heard any news on the lenovo yoga 3 14inch laptop. This is supposedly coming with an Nvidia graphics card as well as a 1080p IPS display which perfectly suits my needs, but haven’t heard any news from it.

    I also saw your review with the Dell XPS 13 which I am also interested in getting but waiting for an ultrabook with dedicated graphics below £1000 in the UK (worse choice of laptops ever).

    • Andrei Girbea

      February 15, 2015 at 8:55 am

      The Yoga 3 14 is already shipping in the US if I’m not mistaken and should land in Europe soon. Can’t say much about it for now, we’ll have to wait for the reviews.

  5. JMAN

    February 20, 2015 at 10:08 pm

    This is definitely a beautiful laptop. As someone who had the S7-392 laptop, I would say this is high on my list for an Ultrabook. However, I had to return the S7-392 last year because there was a serious WiFi connectivity issue that Acer didn’t have a resolution for. More specifically, the WiFi connection would fail every few minutes, and there were over 40 pages of people reporting the same issue on the Acer Support S7-392 forms. And none of the wireless driver updates from the Acer site seemed to address the dropped connections issue. My question is, did you experience the same on the older S7-392 model and have you seen the same issue on the new S7-393?

    • Andrei Girbea

      February 21, 2015 at 2:11 pm

      I’ve read about these issues but I haven’t experienced them on this test model. That doesn’t necessarily mean Asus got a fix…

      • Sietse Vliegen

        June 10, 2015 at 9:28 pm

        No wifi issues with this ultrabook. Works like a charm!

    • ML100

      February 23, 2015 at 2:05 pm

      JMAN re wireless – The wireless issue is related to W8 power management on wlan and nothing to do with drivers – this issue seems to be present on a relatively large proportion of intel 7260 chips >6%. It is a shame MS refuse to admit the problem, upgrading to W7 fixes this on every device. I had the same issue with my 392 until I purged W8 from the device

  6. Anton

    February 24, 2015 at 10:55 pm

    Hi Andrei, I bought GIGABYTE p34w-v3 that have 970m. Laptop itself superfast and light only 1,71kg. However there are a few things i don’t like about that laptop. It overheats during common activities. E.g surfing a web boosts its fan to a speed making noise similar to jet taking off. I don’t do a lot gaming, particularly i play only 10% of all the time. Is there a way to disable something inside BIOS or NVIDIA panel ? I want to be able to use laptop with lower settings that it won’t overheat and turn it ON when I want to play video game. please help ?

    • Andrei Girbea

      February 25, 2015 at 2:48 pm

      Hi Anton. I’m not that familiar with Gigabyte laptops, but most units allow you to disable the dedicated graphics, if they come with Optimus. You can do that in BIOS, from device manager or even better, from the Nvidia Control Panel. However, are you sure the graphics are determining the overheating? Like I said, you can select when the dedicated chip becomes active from the Nvidia Control Panel.

  7. Guy

    May 7, 2015 at 3:12 am

    Don’t be fooled by the appearance. It looks nice, it’s fast no doubt. The only major issue is bad Image Retention. It can be an annoying factor or a major problem especially for those who deal with graphics. Do consider the image retention factor when buying.

    • Sietse Vliegen

      June 10, 2015 at 9:35 pm

      What do you mean by “bad image retention”? Color accuracy?

      Very few displays have perfect color reproducion out of the box. The display on my S393 is slightly on the blue side, but this can easily be tuned.

      However, if you work a lot with graphics, I would probably not buy a glossy display in the first place.

  8. Syed Alam

    June 30, 2015 at 6:29 am

    Did you guys review the 1440 p or the 1080 p? Where did you find the 1440 p in US? I am confused?

    • Andrei Girbea

      June 30, 2015 at 10:01 am

      1440p, it’s stated clearly in the article. This model is not available in the US from what I know, but it is here in Europe.

  9. Brian

    February 25, 2016 at 3:46 pm

    Hey in this article you said that charging takes around two and a half hours. Do you mean this when the laptop is off or in sleep mode? Because mine takes around 3 and a half hours while i’m still using it, which I’m not sure if it is slower than usual despite the Acer care saying my battery condition is ‘good’

    • Andrei Girbea

      February 25, 2016 at 5:06 pm

      Charging times depend on what you’re doing on the computer during this time. It will take 2.5 hours when the laptop is used lightly – text editing, some browsing.

  10. Nathaniel

    May 5, 2016 at 9:31 am

    Great Review. Please could you email me your colour calibration file?

    • Andrei Girbea

      May 5, 2016 at 2:55 pm

      Sry, I didn’t use to keep it at the time of this post, so I don’t have it.

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