Design
Like its brother, the Acer Aspire 8920G, the 6920G is certainly an attractive laptop. The lid is finished in glossy piano black and the Acer logo in the center lights up when the laptop is turned on. Open up the laptop and you'll find a spacious keyboard that's flanked on the left by Acer's CineDash console.
Essentially, this is a backlit touch-sensitive panel that's decked out with a plethora of media controls. It looks very futuristic and slightly complicated at first glance, but it's actually very straightforward to use. It's especially useful for controlling Windows Media Center or Acer's own Arcade Deluxe media player software. The panel also has a hold button so you can temporarily disable it to avoid inadvertently triggering its controls when you're doing more boring stuff like editing work documents.
On the whole there isn't much to complain about on the 6920G. As we're picky, we'll complain about the keyboard. The keys are well-spaced, but they feel plasticky compared to many other laptops we've used.
Features
It has to be said that movies and games look great on the 16-inch display. It's crisp and sharp, thanks to the 1,366 x 768-pixel resolution, and because it has a proper 16:9 aspect ratio — rather than the 16:10 used on most laptops — you don't get any black bars when watching widescreen movies. But to really make the most of HD movies on Blu-ray, some people might prefer a 1080p screen. This option is available if you are willing to shell out extra for the higher-specification model.
Toshiba has raised the bar somewhat for audio on laptops by opting for Harman Kardon speakers on its entertainment models, but here Acer has added a subwoofer, mounted just under the display, and support for Dolby Home Theatre virtual surround sound. As you would expect it never sounds like a true 5.1 surround setup, but the subwoofer does help to add more meat to the bottom end and the spatial effect succeeds in widening the stereo imaging to a pleasing degree.
If you want, you can also use the S/PDIF digital audio output to hook it up to an external surround sound receiver, and the HDMI port also makes it easy to connect the laptop to an HD-ready TV. In fact, connectivity is very good as you get four USB ports, a VGA monitor connector along with Bluetooth 2.0 and Draft-N Wi-Fi support. To top all this off there's also a fingerprint scanner for security and a Webcam and mic at the top of the display for making video calls over the net.
Performance And Battery Life
The 6920G is no slouch when it comes to performance. The combination of the Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 2.1GHz processor and 3GB of memory helped it push itself to an impressive score of 5,044 in PCMark05, making it one of the better-performing Core 2 Duo-based laptops we've seen lately.
It's pretty handy when it comes to gaming, too, as Acer has used a dedicated Nvidia GeForce 9500M GS chip with 512MB of RAM. It's not surprising that the laptop turned in a healthy score of 4,024 in 3DMark06. The 9500 chip also has another trick up its sleeve — it features Nvidia's PureVideo HD technology that offers hardware decoding of HD video; it's useful when you want to watch HD movies via the Blu-ray drive while still having spare processing power for performing other tasks in the background.
Unfortunately with all this power, battery life becomes an issue. In our rundown test, it managed to keep going for just 1 hour 20 minutes. Bear in mind that this is an entertainment laptop that's not really designed to be used on the move for long periods. Plus, our rundown test is designed to really tax the battery, so you can expect it to last longer when dealing with day-to-day tasks.
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