Acer Aspire V3-571G-6407 15.6-Inch Laptop (Black)

My old faithful home-built tower PC finally stopped working the week of Thanksgiving, which conveniently worked out for some Cyber Monday shopping. Aside from the automatic star from my wife for any laptop that allowed me to stop borrowing hers, I have been pleasantly surprised with this computer.The i5 processor has blown through installing all my old programs. This has been one of the fastest re-setups I have had in a while. I ran through a batch of video rendering and compression to give it a good test run. I knew that it should run much faster than my old single core system, but I had a reduction in runtime of around 70%, which was more than I was expecting.My days of hardcore gaming have passed, but I still play around every week or so. The system had no trouble running Civilization V and Neopolian: Total War at close to max video settings. I did get some long processing time on the larger maps for CivV, but I think that is to be expected. Good screen size, average screen resolution. The dedicated video card was a big plus when I bought this system, and it worked well for the games I have. I would recommend this as a great budget systems for games or for a gamer who wants to play the old games he has laying around.Not overly heavy at 5 lbs. I like the full size keyboard with a numpad, again great for gaming. I have not had the problems that the other reviews have had with the touchpad, but I use a wireless mouse most of the time. Speakers have good volume and quality for built in speakers. Not a lot of bloatware pre-installed like a lot of systems I have bought. Wildtangent had to go but some of the others actually look useful.I could not end this review without talking about Windows 8. The jury is still out for me, and since I have a license for Win7 that is not being used, I may revert. But I am going to give it some more time first. The Start tile screen freaked me out at first, but once I got to the desktop tile I felt much better. Once there everything runs pretty normally. For all those on the fence because this laptop has Win8, the old desktop look and feel is still there if you want it to be. Do not let that hold you back if you like the rest of the specs.This is my second Acer laptop. I have had three HPs, a Toshiba, a Dell and a Sony. My past Acer has been reliable as most of the laptops I have owned and much better than the year my Dell ran before the motherboard blew. I will have to update later if any problems develop on this one.

This laptop is overheat central. Meaning at times, it will randomly shut itself down.Let me give you the rundown of how bad of an issue this is.For reviewing purposes I will use League of Legends as my game of choice to compare my old laptop to this one.I own a very old Toshiba Portege which houses a Centrino chip. A CENTRINO PROCESSOR GUYS. That is ancient. Anyway, I play LoL on the LOWEST graphics settings and only get about 30 fps, and yet, that laptop NEVER overheats.I've owned this Acer laptop since February, and I play LoL on the HIGHEST graphics settings and get great fps of around 60-80. This means that the laptop is perfectly capable of handling the game. Though, obviously and to no surprise as with many Acer products, over time it WILL overheat. So I thought to myself, "Okay, maybe the graphic settings are pushing this laptop too far."Wrong.I then proceed to play LoL on the LOWEST graphics settings and yet, it STILL overheats. You know what's the worse part about this? LoL is not even a graphic intensive game! Meaning if this laptop overheats with a game like LoL, it will definitely fry itself over games like BF3 or Skyrim.Before you think to yourself, "What an idiot! There are many remedies to this problem!"- I bought a cooling fan to place underneath the laptop as I play games, STILL OVERHEATS.- I even use Throttlestop to limit the processor and its load so that the temperatures can be reduced, which they did, STILL OVERHEATS.- I constantly monitor the temperatures with CPUID as I play games, the temps NEVER REACH 70 Celsius (they only go to high 60s, which is actually quite low) thanks to my tweaks with Throttlestop, STILL OVERHEATS.Ultimately, I will give it 3 stars simply because it is quite fast in its own right. BUT! Since it houses a graphics card which will naturally catch the attention of budget gamers, and is one of the main reasons why I bought it, I cannot help myself but tell potential buyers this: "DO NOT BUY THIS LAPTOP IF YOU ARE A GAMER! If you are NOT a gamer, it's a pretty solid laptop." Is there a way to bold texts on Amazon? Because I will have to repeat myself.I mean honestly, why throw in a graphics card if the vent system sucks? The graphics card raises the price of the laptop, and yet, you can't even enjoy the graphics card to its fullest potential with such a terrible vent system.In other words, you can find a different laptop JUST AS STRONG as this one, and WITHOUT a graphics card, for a CHEAPER price."DO NOT BUY THIS LAPTOP IF YOU ARE A GAMER! If you are not a gamer, it's a pretty solid laptop."