ACI Ethos V ACI Ethos V

We have been hearing and reading about laptops getting cheaper all the time. ACI is popular in India for value laptops. Combine the above two statements and you get the Ethos V, the cheapest laptop currently available in the country. Let's take a closer look at it and see what it is capable of.

For starters, let us take a look at its specifications. At the heart of the Ethos, lies a VIA C3 (Nehemiah) 1 GHz CPU with a 133 MHz FSB. Memory count stands at a respectable 256 MB DDR of which you will need to share 16, 32 or 64 MB with the onboard S3 Castle Rock chip on the VIA CLE-266-based mainboard. It sports a 14.1" XGA TFT screen with adjustable brightness. The storage is taken care of by a 20 GB hard drive. Input devices include a touch pad and an 88-keys keyboard with 12 function keys, 3 windows keys and 4 hotkeys for Internet, email and volume up/down.

On the multimedia front, a 24X plain vanilla CD-ROM drive is present to read your CD media and an AC-97 stereo sound card takes care of the audio crunching. The output can be heard on the built-in speakers or through an external audio output device that can be connected to the Audio-out port at the back of the laptop, next to the microphone jack. Talking of ports, there are four USB 2.0 ports along with a Serial, Parallel and a PS/2 port and a VGA out. And finally for communication purpose, ACI has thrown in a 56 Kbps internal modem and a 10/100 Mbps LAN card. To be precise, it's got almost everything that you could expect from an entry-level laptop. In case, I forgot to mention the weight, the laptop weighs 2.4 Kg.

Now, over to the performance. Before I proceed, I would like to add that this laptop is not meant to be a high-performance device. It is more of a general-purpose device that can be used to surf the Internet, check mail or for word processing or making a non-graphic intensive presentation or for accounting purposes. Multimedia applications are limited to watching movies or listening to music. This is not ideally suited for games. The test results will confirm the above statements.




SiSoftware Sandra Results

PC Mark 2002

The results speak for themselves. They can't exactly be termed as 'happening'. In fact, they are far from it. I mentioned that this laptop is not meant for gaming and a few runs of 3D Mark 2001 SE and Quake 3 provided the necessary evidence. A 3D Mark 2001 SE score of 634 points and 22 and 17 frames per second at 640 x 480 pixel and 800 x 600 pixel resolution, respectively, in Quake 3 is no great shakes.

The keyboard is comfortable, but the keys are a touch noisy. The touchpad is sensitive, but the left and right click buttons are slightly stiff. You need to press them hard. The battery takes almost an hour and a half to get fully charged and then lasts for just over an hour of standard usage, which isn't too impressive. So if you plan to use this laptop on a long road trip make sure you have a car charger. The same wasn't provided in the package that comprised of the laptop, a standard charger, an instructions booklet, utility CD and a neat looking carry bag.





The ACI Ethos V is available for a price of Rs. 29,999 (all inclusive) with a one-year warranty making it the first laptop officially available in this country for under 30K. However, note that you do not get any operating system along with this notebook. So add another few thousand Rupees for that. With this laptop, you basically get what you pay for. There is nothing extraordinary about this model except for the psychological satisfaction that you would derive out of owning a laptop for under 30K. Though it is extremely affordable, it's not meant for all, especially for gamers and those whose work involves heavy-duty graphics. However, if you just need a portable PC for primarily text-based computing, this isn't bad at all. Buy this and flaunt it. Laptops are still considered cool and there aren't too many smart dudes around who can judge their configuration by the looks.

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