ACi Impression

Expert Review

As of now, because of the split between ACi India and ACi UK, there are two ACi laptop companies in the Indian market, both selling laptops under the same brand name! But do not fear, for both companies offer good products. The laptop we have here is from ACi UK, whereas the ones we tested earlier (the Profile and the Xtreme), were products from ACi India. The foreign ACi is Allied Computers International (Asia) Pvt. Ltd., and the Indian ACi is Allied Computer Industries Pvt. Ltd. But enough of names - let's get on to the product itself...

Impressive specifications!

 
The least that can be said about the Impression is that it's impressive! Reading the specifications list is enough to impress most - you get a Pentium 4 1.5 GHz processor, 256MB DDR RAM, a 14.1inch TFT, DVD- ROM drive (which can be hot swapped with a 1.44MB floppy drive), a 20GB HDD and a smart media drive! There is something for the hardcore gamers - an impressive onboard nVidia GeForce4 Go 420 Graphics Card'with 32MB DDR RAM. The laptop has support for firewire and IR devices and has three USB ports as well. And the performance is matched by appearance - the Impression comes in a funky grey-blue colour and has blue LEDs that look cool! Even the carry bag is better than most, in terms of protection it offers, looks, and functionality. The manual for the laptop is quite detailed, and comes on a CD in the form of a PDF file.

Let the tests begin...The first test we ran on the Impression was Sysmark 2001 SE. In this test, the computer goes through a series of usual office and media applications to gauge performance. The Impression scored 135 Sysmarks, which is about average for its kind of configuration. In SiSoft Sandra CPU Arithmetic Benchmark, the CPU performed as expected, and the same goes for the CPU Multimedia Benchmark too. In the Memory Bandwidth Benchmark though, the Impression performed like a machine equipped with the lesser PC133 RAM, despite of it actually having PC2100 DDR RAM.





The machine has a 20GB 4200 RPM Hitachi Hard Drive, which exhibited average performance in most applications. The Toshiba DVD ROM drive (3X DVD and 24X CD-ROM) performed below average.

And now to the part you've been waiting for - the nVidia GeForce4 420 Go Graphics Card'with 32MB DDR RAM! We tested it with Quake III Arena Demo and it gave us an average of 95.1 FPS, at 1024x768 at 32bit colour depth with all details set to high - pretty impressive for a laptop! In 3D Mark 2001 SE the machine scored 3988 3Dmarks, which again is very impressive. The batteries were put to test using the SiSoft Sandra Burn-in test, where the Impression lasted for 1 hour and 31 minutes, which is not bad at all.
The floppy drive is hot swappable (can be changed while the laptop is powered on) but we would have rather had a USB floppy drive than a hot swappable one. The keyboard placement is slightly odd, and most people would need to spend some time on it before they get used to it. Also, the touch pad isn't very responsive, dampening the experience of working on this machine.


Does it make the cut?
 
The Impression is easily upgradeable has some good options offered on the warranty and service from the company. It comes with Win XP preinstalled, and has a modem and a LAN card built in. Because of the GeForce4 420 (which doesn't share the RAM and eat into system resources...), graphics performance is very good, and this machine is ideal for gamers! The Impression weighs 2.8 Kilos, which makes it light enough to be carried around. Also, it doesn't generate a lot of heat, in spite of using a Pentium 4 processor.When you consider the performance and quality it offers, the ACi Impression is well worth its Rs.120000 price. Certainly recommended!

Test unit sourced from Allied Computers International (Asia) Pvt. Ltd.