Acer Aspire 5043 WLMI Series Laptop - Video
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Two details that stand out about this laptop are the presence of the ATI Mobile RADEON x1300 video adaptor and the full gigabyte of memory available.
The ATI Mobile x1300 video card provides the system with phenomenal video rendering ability with its onboard 128 MB dedicated video memory and 90 nanometer GPU. A notable feature of this particular video adaptor is the use of the PCI Express 16x interface. The x1300 moves data through four pixel shader pipelines and two vertex processors, providing a significant amount of visual performance. The video adaptor produces a very crisp and full-featured image on the 15.4" widescreen display and has support for both High Definition (HD) and Standard Definition (SD) external displays.
What makes this particular video adaptor unique is how it can work with the installed system memory. The ATI Mobile RADEON x1300 comes incorporated with ATI's Hypermemory technology to provide a measure of versatility often lacking in mobile PCs.
What is Hypermemory technology? Hypermemory is a technology designed by ATI to improve the performance of onboard video adaptors without compromising their overall performance. The Hypermemory technology allows more efficient use of all the available system memory in PCs that include the PCI Express technology. This will allow your video adaptor to "borrow" from the system memory to complement its own onboard memory for faster real time processing between the graphics card and the CPU.
What does this mean for you? Well, when running any graphics intensive program or application, the standard limitations of onboard video adaptors can be circumvented to be able to produce the highest quality graphics possible. Digital photo editing and 3-D gaming, once the forte of only higher end desktop PCs, now become a viable option in a mobile platform at a more affordable price. In the laptop's BIOS you can adjust the video memory from 64 MB up to as high as 256 MB of video resolution (the default setting is 128 MB).
The hardware mix on the 5043 WLMI laptop is rounded out with a DVD +/- RW, an 802.11 b/g wireless adaptor, a v92 modem, and a gigabit network adaptor. It is often a treat to find a DVD +/- RW incorporated in any PC as anything less than this is a serious weakening of what could be a quality product. A number of portables are still being offered with either a DVD-ROM or CDRW/DVD combo drive. When you consider that there are literally less than a handful of dollars separating the cost of one of these devices from a decent DVD +/- RW, it is frustrating to see those reduced function devices still being incorporated into new products. The drive features the ability to produce dual layered DVDs to store nearly 8.5 gigabytes of data and is compatible with nearly all media formats.
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