14 DAY TRIAL // Acer has just announced during the CeBIT 2011 fair that it has updated its popular Ethos series of laptops to feature Intel's second generation Sandy Bridge processors and AMD's Radeon HD 6000-series mobile graphics cards as well as a higher-quality design.
The new chassis used by Acer for the Ethos series features a lot more aluminum than before, as well as other high quality materials, adding to the overall aspect of the notebooks.
As ComputerBase reports, the new Ethos series is right now comprised of only two models, one packing a 18-inch display while the other features a much more portable design that uses 15-inch screen.
Both use the 16:10 aspect ratio, but the 18-inch model supports Full HD (1920x1080) resolutions while its smaller brother is limited at 1366x768, less than what I would call usable for a 15-inch display.
The notebooks are powered by Intel's second generation Core i7 CPUs, which features quad processing cores, Hyper-Threading, Turbo Boost and Quick Sync support and graphics is provided by either a Radeon HD 6650M (for the 15-inch model) or a Radeon HD 6850M (for the 18-inch model) GPU paired together with 2GB of video buffer.
Performance wise, there's quite a difference between the two Radeon solutions as the first one packs 480 stream processors, a 128-bit wide memory bus and DDR3 memory while the latter uses no less than 800 stream processors and DDR3 or GDDR5 memory.
The 18-inch Ethos notebook features dual drive bays, while the 15-inch model has to make do with just one drive bay.
However, both units come pre-configured with an optical drive, that can be upgraded to a Blu-ray burner, if the user so desires.
As far as the available interfaces are concerned, there are no major surprises as we get all the usual USB 3.0 and FireWire ports as well as an HDMI video output.
Both notebooks are expected to become available this spring and prices will start at about 1,400 Euros.
