Acer Offers Budget Mobile Workstation

Aspire 1710 is heavier than competing models, but its price is light.

Acer America came out with a new notebook Wednesday that offers the performance of a workstation at a price that helps make up for the system's significant weight, the company said in a release.

Heavy desktop replacement notebooks are nothing new to the PC market, having driven much of the consumer demand for PCs over the past year.

Competitive Pricing

True mobile workstations for traveling business customers, however, are generally more expensive than the $1499 Acer Aspire 1710 introduced Wednesday.

At that price, the Acer notebook includes a 2.8-GHz Pentium 4 processor from Intel, a 17-inch wide-screen display, 512MB of memory, an 80GB hard drive, a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive, a GeForce FX Go5700 graphics card from NVidia with 64MB of video memory, and built-in 802.11g wireless LAN technology.

Dell offers a low-end configuration of the Precision Mobile Workstation M60 for $2446, but it features Intel's Pentium M mobile processor, more memory, and a higher-end graphics card. Hewlett-Packard's Nw8000 Mobile Workstation also comes with the Pentium M processor and more memory than the Acer system but is priced at $2699 in a low-end configuration.

Hot and Heavy

The Pentium M is more power sensitive than the desktop Pentium 4, preserving battery life in mobile systems. Intel's newest Prescott Pentium 4 processors are especially power hungry compared to older versions of the Pentium 4.

Acer will release other configurations of the Aspire 1710 with the Prescott processors. The base configuration of the notebook comes with the older Pentium 4 processor based on the Northwood core.

The miserly power consumption of the Pentium M also allows notebook manufacturers to make lightweight systems. Desktop replacement notebooks with desktop processors need more elaborate cooling technology and heavier heat shields to protect the system against the heat given off by the processor.

The Aspire 1710 weighs 15.7 pounds, much more than the Dell or HP systems. Dell's Precision M60 weighs 7 pounds while HP's Nw8000 weighs about 6.5 pounds.