Designed to provide great multimedia capabilities at a low price

Sep 28, 2011 09:42 GMT  ·  By

Acer has recently brought to Europe two new 15.6- and 17.3-inch entertainment laptop models that are powered by AMD's Sabine platform and promise to deliver improved multimedia performance at entry-level prices.

Both Acer Aspire notebooks are available with a wide series of accelerated processing units from AMD's A-Series models, including high-end A8 chips with quad processing cores and 4MB of Level 3 cache.

These APUs can be seconded by as much as 8GB of system memory, while storage options include various hard drive units, ranging all the way up to 750GB.

The spindle speed of the drives was not made public by Acer, but let's keep out fingers crossed these are actually 7200RPM drives.

Graphics wise, Acer allows its customers to pair the Radeon HD 6480G , HD 6520G and HD 6620G (depending on the processor) integrated graphics with standalone GPUs, such as the AMD Radeon HD 6650M, in a special CrossFireX mode to deliver improved graphics performance.

The rest of the specifications list includes a DVD writer or Blu-ray driver, a 5-in-1 card reader, a 1.3-megapixel webcam, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth 3.0 connectivity as well as a HDMI video output.

The batteries used include 6-cells, and Acer claims the notebook are able to run more than five hours without requiring a recharge.

Sadly, the 15.6-inch Aspire 5560 can't be configured with nothing else than a low-res 1366x768 panel, but the 17.3-inch model comes equipped with a 1,600x900 resolution display.

Both the Aspire 5560 and Aspire 7560 run Windows 7 Home Premium (64bit) and have a base price tag of €499, which roughly translates into $676 US. The 5560 comes in three color versions, Lava Red, Volcanic Black and Ice Blue, whereas the Aspire 7560 is available in just two (Volcanic Black and Ice Blue). (via Notebookinfo)