ACi Emerald Pro

ACi has been extremely popular as a value-laptops brand in India, and has now also made foray into the high-end market. Emerald Pro is their flagship model and features a standard desktop Pentium 4 Processor at the heart of it.

Name Of The Game: Customization

 
ACi allows you to customize your laptop to a great extent; you can choose between four Pentium 4 CPUs from 1.8 GHz to 3.06 GHz (with HyperThreading), a maximum of 1 GB of DDR266 RAM, 60 GB HDD and your choice of optical drive (CD-ROM/DVD/COMBO). This laptop uses SO-DIMM DDR memory, which is a little more expensive than standard PC type DIMM memory being used by a few other laptop manufacturers. 

The base configuration is pretty feature packed too; it comes with a nice load of connectors and has got everything from three USB 2.0 ports to onboard 10/100 Ethernet, 56K modem, TV out to external display out, and even a FireWire port (other than the legacy parallel, serial and PS2 ports). One PCMCIA Type II expansion slot and an IR port are also standard. And oh! It still has a 1.44 MB floppy drive. 

An interesting addition is a small USB webcam built into the top frame of the TFT display. Though not as versatile as an external webcam, it is pretty sufficient for those who wish to videoconference on the move.





The Subsystem
The laptop's motherboard is based on the SiS 650 chipset; with the SiS 605 Ultra Integrated shared-memory graphics chipset taking care of the 3D and 2D accelerated graphics. The integrated graphics can be configured to share up to 64 MB of main system memory.

As this laptop uses a standard desktop version of the Pentium 4 processor instead of a Pentium M, it uses significantly more power and dissipates more heat, requiring a larger cooling duct and fan, which is prominently visible at the back and the bottom of the laptop. This cooling mechanism seems pretty adequate, and we didn't notice any overheating or system crashes associated with overheating.



Our test system shipped with a 2.4 GHz P4 processor, which would make you believe that the system is meant for a true high-end user who would use a lot of heavy multimedia applications and run a significant number of 3D Games. The onboard SiS graphics barely manage to live up to what the Pentium 4 has to offer and spoil the party for those who would wish to game on this machine. A 1.8 GHz P4 processor and a dedicated memory graphics chip like the Mobility Radeon 7500 or GeForce 4 MX 420 Go would have been a better balance.

On-board audio is taken care of by a Realtek AC97 chip, with connectors for line-in, microphone and line-out / headphones placed on the front right next to the IR port. The built-in speakers can be called nothing more than 'tinny'.

The battery life, despite all this, is at a healthy 1 hour 20 minutes in our resource intensive battery test. Not bad for a power hungry chip like the desktop Pentium 4.

What you see! What you feel!
The 15.1-inch TFT display is sharp, though has a very narrow view angle of around 45 degrees horizontally and vertically, which means looking at it from an angle wider than 45 degrees will not give you the right colour and contrast perception.

The laptop is pretty bulky and heavy, and though desktop replacements like this are supposed to be bulky and heavy, a weight of approximately 2.8 KGs is a bit above normal. This laptop ships with a UK style keyboard, which might take some time to get used to for most US style Keyboard users (almost all desktop keyboards sold in India follow the US Keyboard layout).





So how is it?
Priced at Rs. 1,05,000 for the base model, it is a little expensive, but certainly not 'heavily overpriced'. Then again, it's not the price which is the cause for us rating it just one point lower than optimal.

Though the system did very well in office productivity application benchmarks, scoring some of the highest PC Mark 2002 scores ever, nobody buys a 2.4 GHz laptop to run 'MS Word'. It truly lacks any real 3D capability (can't even do 30 FPS at high settings in 1024 x 768 resolution in Quake III, which is a four year old game now), and hence is horribly bottlenecked to sub-par gaming performance, which a cheaper, more balanced laptop will manage to beat in a jiffy.

Dell, IBM and HP / Compaq are selling a quite a few laptop models in the same price range, and though they don't have fast processors, and feature a screen that's an inch smaller than this, they do feature better, more balanced configurations with 'truly mobile' processors and longer battery life.

We would recommend you look around for a more balanced configuration in the same price range, or wait a few weeks until we review ACi's new Centrino-based laptop that comes with ATI's Radeon M9 GPU and a whole lot of other interesting features.

Test Unit Sourced From: Allied Computers International (Asia) Ltd. Mumbai