Acer wants the Aspire 8940 to be your Core i7-packing portable of choice

You'd think you've seen all the Windows 7 holiday laptops to last you through this yuletide season, but in comes Acer with another offering, the Core i7-packing Aspire 8940. The 18.4-inch 1080p widescreen monitor brings with it a NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250M, Blu-ray drive, 600GB HDD, and 4GB RAM. Let's also throw in a webcam, 802.11 a/b/g Draft-N, webcam, multi-card reader, HDMI and eSATA ports and a 8-cell Li-Ion battery for good measure. Quite a hefty number, so expect a little bit of workout if you're wanting to haul this around. Suggested price is $1,349 and all we know of the release date is "holiday season" so it should be safe to add this to your wishlist.

Acer Aspire 8940 press shots

[Chaosdivine Posted Nov 3rd 2009 12:53PM]

Drool... :P (Shakes head and looks at his Toshiba lappie while letting out a soft sigh...)

[aashish bhagya Posted Nov 3rd 2009 2:15PM]

Wow...At $1350 ,its packs some serious power:)... I heard gts 250 is a re badged 9800 gtx+ so it'll play almost all games maxed out.

I do not think this is targeted as a portable that can be lugged around to work everyday.Its probably designed for people who want serious desktop like gaming/performance on a decent sized screen without the hassles of using a desktop i.e messy cables, waste of space,difficulty to transport etc.

[EzB Posted Nov 3rd 2009 6:09PM]

@ Suigi

I really want to, but I haven't seen Windows 7 drivers yet, and I don't want to pay $200 for the system. Unfortunately I got it in I think July, so I am not qualified for a free upgrade.

[Suigi Posted Nov 4th 2009 3:04PM]

You can get most 7 drivers directly from the component manufacturers (like Nvidia) if they aren't already included in the installation DVD.
And the few bits that don't have 7 drivers will have Vista ones, which work more or less perfectly with 7 (the Realtek audio drivers customized for the 6920G's Tuba bass booster, for example).

See if you can get the Family Pack with some friends and split it - 3 Home Premium licenses for $150 ain't bad.

[Fanfoot Posted Nov 3rd 2009 7:10PM]

Can it handle two hard drives? I'm using an SSD as my boot drive from now on, but still need the space a spinning media disk can give, meaning I need two drives in my lappies for work. My 15" thinkpad handles this fine with a drive adapter in the "media dock" where the optical drive would go. Can this support something like that?

[(Unverified) Posted Nov 4th 2009 7:33AM]

I have the previous Acer 8930g model and It comes with 2x 500 gb hard drives (not partitions) so I would guess that this new model will also be capable of connecting 2 sata 2,5 HDDs