Acer Aspire 8943G

With its mammoth dimensions, 3.91kg weight and large 18.4-inch screen, the Aspire 8943G falls firmly into the desktop replacement category.
 
Unfortunately under the hood there's a surprising lack of power because the Acer packs an entry-level dual-core 2.13GHz Intel Core i3 330M processor and only 2GB of DDR3 RAM. With these two core components the Acer falls behind every other notebook here.

In our benchmarks these components restricted the 8943G's performance; its PCMark Vantage Suite, TV & Movies and Productivity scores of 5511, 3446 and 4619 are the lowest results here. Thankfully Acer saw fit to use ATI's Mobility Radeon HD 5650 GPU with 1GB of memory and this gives the Aspire reasonable graphics credentials. It returned figures of 49fps and 17fps in Street Fighter IV and World in Conflict at 1920 x 1080 pixels with both games running in high detail. Reducing some of the detail brought the World in Conflict figure up to 32fps.

In terms of build quality the 8943G inspires confidence; the notebook exhibits little keyboard flex, both keyboard and trackpad are great to work on and the 18.4-inch LCD produces fantastic visuals. The Acer also has a clever trick up its sleeve; pressing the silver button situated in between the left and right trackpad buttons causes multimedia controls to appear on the trackpad itself. Very cool and functional too.