Acer Aspire TimelineU M5-581TG-6666

Acer Aspire TimelineU M5-581TG-6666

Welcome to a laptop battery specialist of the Acer Laptop Battery

Acer was the first company to add discrete graphics to Ultrabooks with the Timeline M3, and now it's back with the 15.6-inch Acer Aspire TimelineU M5. At $829, this sub-5-pound notebook packs with battery such as Acer BTP-73E1 Battery, Acer BATCL50L Battery, Acer TravelMate 290 Battery, Acer TravelMate 4000 Battery, Acer TravelMate 2300 Battery, Acer Aspire 1680 Battery, Acer Aspire 1410 Battery, Acer TravelMate 4500 Battery, Acer LCBTP03003 Battery, Acer Aspire 1300 Battery Nvidia Kepler graphics for playing some of the latest games and Intel Ivy Bridge power for a lower cost. The M5 seems like a good bet for college students and gamers on the go who consume a lot of multimedia content, but is this thin-and-light machine versatile enough?

Outfitted with a 1.7-GHz dual-core Intel Core i5-3317U processor, 6GB of RAM, a 500GB 5,400-rpm hard drive with a 20GB SSD and an Nvidia GeForce GT 640M LE GPU with 1 GB of VRAM, the Acer Aspire TimelineU M5-581TG-6666 can hold its own against both thin-and-light and mainstream notebooks. We easily watched movies on Netflix despite having eight tabs open in Google Chrome and Internet Explorer while running a full-system virus scan.

During Geekbench, the M5 scored 5,706, well above the 5,290 thin-and-light category average. However, full-powered processors fared better: The Sony VAIO E15 and its 2.5GHz Intel Core i5-3210M notched 7,090, while the Acer Aspire V3-571G-9435 and its 2.3GHz Intel Core i7-3610QM CPU took the prize with 10,896.

The M5's hard drive duplicated 4.97GB of mixed-media files in 2 minutes and 58 seconds for a transfer rate of 28.6 MBps, slightly below the 30 MBps average. However it was enough to speed past the Aspire V3 (500GB 5,400-rpm hard drive) and the VAIO E15 (750GB 5,400-rpm hard drive), which notched 19.6 and 23 MBps. The XPS 15 and its hybrid drive (750GB 7,200-rpm hard drive/32GB mSSD) dished out a faster score of 37.1 MBps.

The M5 lost a step during the OpenOffice spreadsheet macro test, taking 5 minutes and 51 seconds to match 20,000 names to their corresponding addresses. Although that's 9 seconds faster than the 6:00 category average, the Aspire V3, E15 and XPS 15 completed the task in 4:35, 4:48 and 4:54, respectively.

During the LAPTOP Battery Test (continuous Web surfing over Wi-Fi), the Acer Aspire TimelineU M5-581TG-6666 lasted 7 hours and 29 minutes. That's 61 minutes longer than the 6:28 thin-and-light average. The Aspire V3 clocked in with 4:46, and the VAIO E15 petered out at 4:24.

With most 15.6-inch notebooks, you're forced to lug around a bulky, heavy device, sacrificing thickness for power. The $829 Acer Aspire TimelineU M5-581TG-6666 is a happy compromise, stuffing a slim 0.81-inch chassis with an Ivy Bridge CPU, discrete Nvidia graphics, and more than 7 hours of battery life, which will delight mobile gamers and multimedia consumers everywhere. If the M5 had better port placement as well as higher-resolution display, it would be a killer system, but as it stands, it's a solid choice for the money.