Acer 6530G review

Acer's 6530G is a £500 laptop with a list of specifications you'd expect to find on a more expensive model.

These include a Blu-ray drive, a 16:9 widescreen display and advanced expansion options such as HDMI, S/PDIF and eSATA. The metallic blue pattern on the lid and the textured grey keyboard panel are smart and modern, and contribute to the impression that this laptop is more expensive than it really is.

The keyboard isn't the best in this group, but it's firm and has a standard layout. Acer has squeezed in a number pad, and as a result the keys are slightly smaller than those on other models here. They're made of a shiny plastic that feels slightly sticky, but their action is light and crisp with good feedback. The large touchpad is simply an indentation in the case, and is smooth and responsive.

The 6530G's 16in widescreen display has a resolution of 1,366x768, with excellent colour accuracy and brightness. Contrast was also good. There's an HDMI port if you'd prefer to show Blu-ray movies on a TV.

The 6530G has an eSATA port that doubles as a USB port, plus an S/PDIF output. With Dolby Home Theater audio processing, the built-in speakers produce decent sound with good stereo separation, but the S/PDIF output gives you the option of plugging in a home cinema amplifier. There's also a decent ATI 3650 graphics chipset, which produced the best scores in our gaming benchmarks for this price category. It's not powerful enough for the latest action games, but it'll bring the best out of slow-paced strategy and adventure games.

The 2GHz AMD Turion RM-70 processor isn't very fast, and this laptop came bottom in our Windows performance tests, despite having 4GB of RAM. It's fine for standard Windows applications, but tasks such as editing HD video will be too much for it.

Despite this, the 6530G is an outstanding budget laptop. The Blu-ray drive, high-quality display and battery life of just over three hours make this laptop our clear Budget Buy winner.