This notebook served us well for many years as the predecessor to the Lenovo ThinkPad W540 in our living room as a general-purpose computer. Since it doesn’t really need to deliver top performance when searching for things and doing research, it would still be doing the job today – if it weren’t for the well-known and hated cheap display hinges, which eventually break out of the plastic base irreparably.
Even heavy artillery only provided a temporary remedy (superglue, epoxy resin, a combination of both, 3D-printed replacement parts, stronger screws and nuts, etc.). In the end, I removed the 17“ TN display with a resolution of 1600 x 900 pixels, which was not earth-shattering in terms of quality anyway, along with its attachments – WLAN and BT in the form of a mini PCIe card were also removed, along with the antennas. Since then, the headless device has unfortunately been used very little; it was intended as a ”low-power game server” for Windows-based games.
This computer has also been upgraded repeatedly over the years. Our specific model was originally delivered with a dual-core Intel Core i3-2310M, 4 GB DDR3-1333 (2 x 2 GB), and a 2.5″ Toshiba HDD with 320 GB capacity (SATA-II). Even back then, this combination was not exactly lightning fast under Windows 7 Home Premium.
Hardware:
| Base | Acer Aspire 7750G (2011) 17″ Lower mid-range consumer notebook |
| Processor | Intel Core i7-2670QM (SR02N) Sandy Bridge → M (32 nm) Stepping D2 4 Cores, 8 Threads Base clock 2.20 GHz Caches: L1 : 256 KB L2: 1 MB L3: 6 MB 45 Watts TDP |
| Socket | G2 (Mobile) FC-rPGA, 988 Contacts |
| Cooling | Air, Acer OEM Copper heat pipes and aluminum |
| Mainboard | Acer OEM Aspire 7750G |
| Chipset | Intel HM65 Express (SLJ4P) Cougar Point Mobile (32 nm) Stepping B3 3.9 Watts TDP |
| Memory | 16 GB Kingston (2 x 8 GB) DDR3-1333, 9-9-9-24 1T (1.5 Volts) Dual-Channel SO-DIMM (Unbuffered) 2 of 2 Slots used |
| Graphics | AMD Radeon HD 6650M TeraScale 2 → Whistler LE / 216-0810028 (40 nm, TSMC) 1 GB DDR3 VRAM PCIe 2.1 x16 ~35 Watts TDP |
| DirectX OpenGL OpenCL Vulkan CUDA Shader Model | API 11.2, Feature Level 11.0 4.4 1.2 – – 5.0 |
| Audio | Realtek (PCIe, integrated) |
| Boot device | SSD Samsung 860 Evo (500 GB) 512 MB LPDDR4-1866 DRAM-Cache SATA-III 2.5″ |
| Storage devices | HDD Samsung Spinpoint (640 GB) HM640JJ 7200 rpm / 16 MB Cache SATA-II 2.5″ HDD WD Scorpio Blue (320 GB) WD3200BPVT-22JJ5T0 5400 rpm / 8 MB Cache SATA-II 2.5″ |
| Network | 1 Gbit Ethernet, RJ-45 Qualcomm Atheros AR8151 (PCIe, integrated) |
| Power supply | Acer 19V (Round) 90 Watts max. (4.74 A) |
Firmware:
| Manufacturer | American Megatrends, Inc. |
| Type | UEFI 32 Mb ROM (4 MB) |
| Version | v1.21, 09.08.2012 |
Software:
| Operating system | Microsoft Windows 11 Professional German |
| Architecture / Version | x64 / 25H2 |
| Type of boot | BIOS |
| Partition table | Master Boot Record |
Benchmarks:
| PassMark | 947 Points https://www.passmark.com/baselines/V11/display.php?id=308191333698 |
| Cinebench R23 | Single 591 Points Multi 2289 Points |
Screenshots:
