Acer ConceptD 7

amazon Acer ConceptD 7 reviews

The Acer ConceptD 7 belongs to the elite laptops positioned between a normal laptop and a mobile workstation. They may lack independent software vendor (ISV) certification for specialized computer-aided design and engineering (CAD) applications but are designed to help professional creators with demanding 2D and 3D tasks such as image and video editing, graphic design, and online content creation. Combining formidable CPU and GPU power with a dazzling 4K display confirmed by Pantone, Acer takes the top spot as the 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro and Dell XPS 15 — offering an eight-core Core i9 processor for six cores of ConceptD Core i7, but that’s a mistake. That’s an impressive entry in a new line.

Descendants from Predator’s DNA

The ConceptD 7 resembles Acer’s slim Predator Triton 500 gaming laptop, rendered in stylish white instead of black and with a different 15.6-inch display — one with a native resolution of 3,840 x 2,160 pixels and the common 60Hz refresh rate instead of the faster G-Sync panel with 1,920 x 1,080 resolution.

Its aluminum frame (plastic screen bezel) measures 0.7 x 14.1 x 10 inches and weighs 4.6 pounds which isn’t light. By contrast, the MacBook Pro is 0.61 x 13.75 x 9.5 inches and 4 pounds, with the XPS 15 measuring 0.66 x 14.1 x 9.3 inches and 4.5 pounds. There’s a moderate amount of flex if you grip the corners of the screen, though not much if you’re crushing the keyboard.

Acer presents several ConceptD 7 configurations for you to choose from, all with the same central components: 4K non-touch screens, 2.6GHz six-core Core i7-9750H (4 5 GHz turbo), and 1TB PCI Express/NVMe solid-state drive. The $2,299.99 base model has 16GB of memory and a Max-Q version of Nvidia’s 6GB GeForce RTX 2060. My test unit (model CN715-71-73A9), which costs $700 more, flaunts 32GB of RAM and a Max-Q 8GB GeForce RTX 2080 Operating system, is Windows 10 Home (Windows 10 Pro versions sold over the channel at a higher price), one year warranty.

Ports are plentiful, though image editors won’t be pleased with the lack of an SD or microSD card slot. On the left side of the laptop are Killer Ethernet and HDMI ports, a USB 3.1 Type-A port, headphone and microphone jacks, and an AC adapter connector.

On the right is a Thunderbolt 3 port, a Mini DisplayPort video output, and two more USB 3.1 Type-A ports, plus a security lock slot.

Concept 7 doesn’t have a facial recognition webcam or a fingerprint reader, so you can’t use Windows Hello to bypass password entry—a glaring disappointment in this price range. The 720p webcam is enough for video chats; Its picture is noisy but with decent colors.

Acer says silent owl wings inspire the system’s cooling fan design and three really quiet fans; I could barely detect them even when running strenuous benchmark tests. That helps you enjoy the above-average sound, loud enough to fill the room without distortion or hum as the volume goes up. There’s not much bass, but the highs and mids are clear, and the complex tracks are easily distinguishable.

White keyboard backlighting will be hard to see amid Acer’s all-white design, so the keyboard glows with a yellow or amber hue at first glance but will quickly become familiar. The keyboard has dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys, which I’ve always been pleased to see and feel quick to type on. The vertical key travel is shallow, but the feedback is clear, even though the Escape and Delete keys are tiny. The buttonless touchpad glides and touches smoothly.

The 400-nit, 4K display is the highlight of concept 7’s components. According to Acer, it carries the Pantone certification mark for color accuracy and can display 100% of the Adobe RGB gamut to gamut sRGB is narrower. Brightness is good but not glare; while contrast is excellent, colors are rich and well saturated.

The ConceptD Palette utility in the Windows taskbar lets you switch between Adobe RGB and slightly more contrasting native color profiles, as well as audio, game, movie, and voice presets. It also provides:

• Access to the Waves MaxxAudio equalizer.
• Acer Care Center update, tuning, and recovery utility.
• A suite of Acer Collection apps like Netflix and Fitbit.

Quick for work

For our objective performance tests, I compared the Acer to four other high-octane luxury laptops. The 2019 revisions of the Dell XPS 15 and the Apple MacBook Pro 15-Inch are obvious contenders, though both have eight-core CPUs instead of six as tested, and Apple won’t be running the benchmarks only for our Windows. To give a fair fight against a few six-core competitors, I chose the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme and the MSI P65 Creator.

I suspect that the MSI will have the edge in our battery life test as its 1080p display means fewer pixels for illumination, just as I suspect the ConceptD 7 will outpace the graph benchmarks graphic because it has the fastest GPU. The latter prediction has proven correct, but Acer is also against the eight-core system in overall productivity.

where can you get a Acer ConceptD 7 online

ConceptD 7 CN715-71-73A9 Creator Laptop, Intel i7-9750H, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080, RTX Studio, 15.6″ 4K Ultra HD IPS, 100% Adobe RGB Color Gamut, Pantone Validated, Delta E<2, 32GB DDR4, 1TB NVMe SSD: Buy it now

Productivity, storage & media

PCMark 10 and 8 are overall performance suites developed by the PC standards experts at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we ran simulated various real-world productivity and content creation workflows. We use it to evaluate the system’s overall performance for office-focused tasks such as word processing, spreadsheets, Web browsing, and video conferencing. The test generates an exclusive score; a higher number is better.

Meanwhile, PCMark 8 has a Storage subtest that we use to gauge the speed of the boot drive. The result is also an exclusive score; Again, higher numbers are better.

We consider 4,000 points to be a great score in PCMark 10, so any Windows laptop is guaranteed to complete Word, Excel, and PowerPoint tasks. However, Acer’s win rate is very impressive. We’re also used to seeing modern solid-state drives beat PCMark 8’s storage test, so those scores aren’t surprising.

Next is the test of Cinebench R15, which handles Maxon’s CPU, fully threaded to take advantage of all available cores and threads. Cinebench emphasizes CPU rather than GPU to render a complex image. The result is an exclusive score that shows the PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.

More cores equal higher scores in the event, so the XPS 15 and MacBook Pro could lead with six-core laptops more or less constrained below them. A whole year is an overkill for everyday spreadsheets, if not 3D rendering work.

Cinebench is usually a good predictor for our Handbrake video editing test, another tough, threaded workout that is highly CPU dependent and splits well with cores and threads. In it, we put stopwatches on test systems as they transcoded a 12-minute standard 4K video (the open-source demo movie Tears of Steel) to a 1080p MP4 file. It’s a test of time, and lower results are better.

Pretty much the same result here. With a first-rate 4K display, the ConceptD 7 is a great choice for video editing, though laptops with eight-core CPUs are even better.

We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing standard. Using a version of Photoshop Creative Cloud released in early 2018, we apply a complex series of 10 filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. Finally, we time each activity and add up the total time taken (the lower the time, the better). The Photoshop test emphasizes the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM. Still, it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards can strongly see an increase.

Acer overtook Apple for second place, while the ThinkPad was an outlier with surprisingly slow times. Editing photos on ConceptD 7 would be fun if you could use them without an SD card slot.

Graphics test

3DMark measures relative graphics engine by rendering sequences of highly detailed gaming style 3D graphics with an emphasis on particles and light. We ran two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, suitable for different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suitable for mid-range laptops and PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to enhance their quality. The result is an exclusive score.

EVEN IN A SLIGHTLY DOWNSIZED MAX-Q FORM, the RTX 2080 isn’t Nvidia’s flagship mobile graphics line. The ray-tracing GPU had no trouble beating its GeForce GTX sibling, especially in the challenging Fire Strike subtest.

Next up is another synthetic graphics test, this time from Unigine Corp. Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and scans a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. This case is shown in the company’s Unigine engine of the same name, which provides a different 3D workload scenario than 3DMark, giving a second opinion on the machine’s graphics power.

Since ray-tracing is a feature of the RTX 2080, I also ran the POV-Ray 3.7 ray tracing benchmark that we use for mobile workstations, and the ConceptD 7’s time of 121.3 seconds was low enough to rival those of the competition, heavyweights like the HP ZBook 17 G5 and the Lenovo ThinkPad P72. However, it couldn’t compete with the Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000 in the MSI WS75, completing the task in just 84.1 seconds.

Battery Test

After fully charging the laptop, we set it up in power-saving mode (instead of balanced or high-performance mode) if available and made other battery-saving tweaks to prepare for the test. Check out our unplugged video summary. (We also turned off Wi-Fi, putting the laptop on airplane mode.) In this test, we looped a video — a locally stored 720p file of the same Tears of Steel movie we used in the Handbrake trial — with the screen brightness set at 50 percent and the volume at 100 percent until the system connects.

Battery life of no more than 7 hours when unplugged isn’t a bad result for such a powerful laptop — and surprisingly close to the endurance demonstrated by the MSI Creator, which I think will do better — but it’s less than half the runtime of Dell’s dominant XPS 15. The ConceptD 7 is better for a desktop replacement than a regular.

Fierce competition in its segment

At $3,000, the ConceptD 7 is expensive; The XPS 15 has the same specs, including a 4K Adobe RGB display, except for the much slower GeForce GTX 1650 graphics, which is $800 cheaper. I might as well wish it offered an option for a Core i9 CPU, which is a few ounces lighter and runs several hours longer on battery.

But the Acer is a beautiful Photoshop machine, blazingly productive and not to mention satisfying for an after-work gamer. It’s worth a look if you’re shopping in what we call the multimedia laptop aisle.