
The Acer Aspire 7 A717-72G
The Acer Aspire 7 A717-72G has 16 GB of memory and can easily handle multiple applications. The Acer Aspire 7 A717-72G has an excellent pixel density of 127.3 pixels per inch, resulting in sharper text and picture quality.
Acer Aspire 7 A717-72G 16 GB Memory 256 GB SSD
The Acer Aspire 7 A717-72G delivers excellent gaming performance, with an average frame rate of 56.95 frames per second. The battery life of the Acer Aspire 7 A717-72G is limited, and you may need to keep the charger plugged in during extended gaming sessions. The battery life of 3.9 hours is inadequate for everyday use. The Acer Aspire 7 A717-72G is heavier than its competitors. The Acer Aspire 7 A717-72G is extremely expensive. The 256 MB of storage space is insufficient for installing multiple modern games.
Case
Acer’s notebook wasn’t smaller. The enormous black Aspire 7 A717-72G-72VY has large bezels. The base unit lid and top cover are cold, fingerprint-prone brushed aluminum. Below, we battled to remove fingerprints. Non-slip plastic covers the casing. Silver Aspire hinge, lid logo, touchpad, and base strips.
The base is sturdy and silent, barely bending under pressure. The pressure-proof lid resists torsional stresses. It seals. Opening raises the base. Good news—no teetering. Acer engineers haven’t prioritized because the beast doesn’t move. The hinge’s protruding edges and tiny, consistent gaps are design aspects. Strong but ugly.
Three contenders are 3 kg and tall (6.6 lb). The HP Omen is the thinnest yet 2 mm/0.08 thicker than our evaluation device. Acer Aspire Nitro is 5 mm/0.2 in thicker. Aspire 7 is only a few millimeters wider and deeper.
Size Evaluation
One of the Acer Aspire 7 A717-72G weaknesses is connectivity, as was previously discussed. Only one of the four USB 3.1 Gen. 1 ports has a USB Type-C connector, while two of the four USB ports are only USB 2.0. There has a full-sized HDMI port as well as a fold-out Ethernet port. Due to the Aspire 7’s solitary 3.5 mm combo audio jack—which is unusual for gaming laptops—most gaming headsets will not function on it. On both sides of the laptop, the ports are placed in the back, where protruding parts and wires are less irritating than they would be in upfront.
SD Card Reader
It appears that the Acer Aspire 7 A717-72G SD card reader is connected through USB 3.0 (the same as on the HP Omen), yet when benchmarked with our 64 GB Toshiba Exceria Pro SDXC UHS-II reference card, it falls short of the HP Omen in the real-world JPEG copy test. Nevertheless, it quickly defeated the dreadfully slow USB 2.0 card reader on the Aspire Nitro.
Communication
The Intel dual-band Wireless-AC 8260 module can outperform the Atheros/Qualcomm QCA 6174 modem, although its transfer speeds were well below the theoretical maximum of 867 Mbps without the overhead. It was consequently far slower than the majority of MIMO 2×2 Wi-Fi modems, while it’s possible that the antennae are to blame rather than the wireless modem. We took measurements with our Linksys EA8500 reference router at 1 m (around 3 ft).
Security
To our surprise, Acer Aspire 7 A717-72G has also decided to integrate a fingerprint reader in addition to the TPM 2.0 chip, which is found in the touchpad’s upper left corner and has shown to be incredibly dependable and quick.
Accessories
Budget accessories and notebooks are frequently referred to as no accessories at all. There were no extras in the bare box, which is now oh-so typical for most Acer notebooks, other than the charger and the customary warranty, and quick start guides. There are no accessories designed particularly for the Aspire 7.
Maintenance
We would expect that disassembly is a fairly difficult process given that the bottom cover is quite high and practically stretches all the way to the top cover and the number of screws that must be removed. Most often, the bottom pan must be taken out before the top cover can be removed. Thankfully, the Aspire 7 has two maintenance hatches for the RAM slots and hard drive.
Some vendors claim that the Acer Aspire 7 A717-72G comes with a complimentary PCIe 3.0 M.2 slot, but we were unable to confirm this. Because the notebook was a store unit, we decided against disassembling it. The A717-72G-735Q model, which is now available in the US, comes with a 1 TB hard drive and an extra SSD drive.
Warranty
Devices sold in the US are only covered by a 1-year limited warranty, but devices sold in Europe come with a standard 2-year bring-in limited warranty.
Devices for Input Keyboard
Pressure-resistant keyboards are a few millimeters smaller and almost as wide as desktop keyboards. Despite having more space than needed, the number pad is nevertheless smaller than on standard keyboards, making it uncomfortable for large-handed people. The moderately concave and somewhat roughened keys should be fine for touch-typists. As with other Acer notebooks, the keyboard layout is very similar. The bottom row is unusual because the arrow keys make the CTRL and ALT keys smaller than the others.
Touchpad
The touchpad, which is suitably large and is framed by a silver ornamental strip, is situated too far to the left, where it can obstruct a hand that is resting on the WASD keys. Although it did not sense movement or inputs at its edges, it gave reasonable gliding qualities even with slightly moist fingers. Fast movements were consistently identified with reliability, and precision and response times were above average. Every time, drag and drop by double-tap worked.
Display
Excellent and substantially brighter than both of its competitors, who were both assessed at roughly 300 nits, was the 17.3-inch matte FHD IPS display. The display’s 86% brightness distribution was respectable, but we did detect some slight screen leaking at the edges, which made the blacks less uniform. However, this was just a problem with completely black display contents; as soon as bright portions appeared on the screen, the screen bleeding disappeared.
Performance of Acer Aspire 7 A717-72G
Processor
Like its predecessor, the i7-6700U (4 x 2.6 – 3.5 GHz), the Core i7-7700HQ (4x 2.8 – 3.8 GHz, Hyperthreading, 45 W TDP) quad-core is relatively widespread in mainstream gaming notebooks. It is the gaming equivalent of the mainstream office notebook Intel Core i5-7200U CPU. The most recent Kaby Lake CPUs are often up to 15% faster than their predecessors because of the higher clock rates. Thanks to Nvidia’s Optimus technology, the extremely energy-efficient integrated Intel HD 630 GPU is utilized for less demanding tasks, and the processor also includes a DDR4 memory controller.
System Efficiency
The HP Omen 17 outscored both Acer laptops in the PCMark 8 benchmark despite having a slower GPU, while the Aspire 7 came in last. In general, the faster the storage device, the higher the PCMark 8 score. Our evaluation machine, which came in third place, had a standard hard drive, the Aspire Nitro, which came in second place, had a SATA III SSD, and the HP Omen, which came in the first place, had a blisteringly fast PCIe NVMe SSD.
Storage Equipment
Our review device had a Toshiba MQ01ABD100 hard drive with a 5400 RPM speed, as was specified in the section above. This hard disk drive is comparatively slow even for hard disk drives.
GPU Efficiency
After the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 GPU is the third-fastest GPU that is currently on the market (and its respective Max-Q variants). It is based on Nvidia’s current Pascal architecture and has 6 GB of GDDR5-VRAM that operates at a speed of effectively 8000 MHz and a 192-bit bus interface. The GeForce GTX 980M, the top model of the previous generation, was outperformed by the 16 nm GP106 GPU, which was originally announced in August 2016 and has 1280 shader units.
The Aspire 7’s GTX 1060 GPU placed somewhat in the middle of other GTX 1060 GPUs, with the fastest and slowest cards differing by about 4% on average. The score decreased to 5129 points (-54%) on battery.
Battery Life
Regrettably, we don’t have enough information to draw conclusions about the Aspire 7’s battery life. Our evaluation unit’s battery was a pitiful 48 Wh (-36%), while the majority of similarly equipped 17-inch notebooks have substantially larger batteries starting at around 65 Wh. In this category, we’ve included the MSI GS73VR 7RF (65 Wh) to demonstrate how much battery life suffers if G-Sync is used instead of Nvidia Optimus by manufacturers.
Pros
- High-quality brushed aluminum construction
- A nice keyboard, a functional touchpad
- Excellent IPS panel with high contrast and a wide sRGB color gamut
- PWM is not used by the display to control brightness.
- Good value for the money
- Even when working hard, the cooling system is quiet and efficient.
- Runtimes for decent web browsing
Cons
- Only 8 GB of RAM
- Difficult disassembly
- Small Numpad
- A rather spongy keyboard feedback
- Clattering touchpad
- Subpar color fidelity (out of the box)
- Subpar color space coverage
- Excessively long response times for gamers
- Sluggish hard drive
Conclusion of Acer Aspire 7 A717-72G
Therefore, from the perspective of a budget-conscious gamer, the RAM configuration, the most likely extremely difficult disassembly, and the display’s poor response times are the only things left on our list of drawbacks. Look elsewhere if you’re searching for a business 144hz laptop or a compact photo editing tool. Otherwise, we do not see any reasons why we shouldn’t advocate buying the new Acer Aspire 7 A717-72G, especially given its inexpensive price.