The metallic silver plastic chassis is complemented by attractive black detailing around the screen, sides, trackpad and keyboard. It's not the toughest chassis, but it's certainly well built.

Acer's latest Aspire has the familiar Acer look we've come to expect in recent months but with a few nice tweaks. The metallic silver plastic chassis is complemented by attractive black detailing around the screen, sides, trackpad and keyboard. It's not the toughest chassis, but it's certainly well built.

The keyboard was one of the best and is very comfortable to type on -- each key press is well-weighted and crisp. The trackpad was also favourable, though the buttons click a little too loudly.

The 1280 x 800 widescreen is bright and well-lit giving a clear and crisp desktop. However, even with the glossy colour-enriching 'CrystalBrite' coating, some colours were subdued. Viewing angles were modest too. But lag was minimal and watching movies was enjoyable - unfortunately the same can't be said for gaming. The ATI X1400 Mobility graphics couldn't cut it in our games benchmarks with framerates hovering around 10fps in both Far Cry and Half-Life 2. It's strange because the low-end GPU is flanked by a very high-end 512MB of memory. You'll have to seriously drop detail settings to get the latest releases anywhere near playable. Also disappointing were the tinny speakers which, lacked punch in our tests.

But these are the only real downsides. With its 1GB of RAM and 1.67GHz Pentium M T1300 processor, it scored 0.92 in our benchmarks - just eight percent slower than our speedy reference desktop PC. If you want good-value power on the move, look no further.

Acer also wins in features. Not only is 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi included but a BlueTooth 2 chip is too. Both devices can also usefully be switched off via sliders at the front. A BlueTooth VoIP phone is included which is housed in the ExpressCard slot. There's plenty of other connectivity, too. The front sports three audio jacks (one doubles as S/PDIF), an infrared and a memory card slot which support MS, SD/MMC and xD formats. Four USB 2 ports are catered for and a useful DVI port appears in addition to VGA and S-Video. There's also a rotating 1.3megapixel webcam and a 100GB of hard disk space (though some is reserved for the recovery partition) as well as a dual-layer, slot-loading DVD writer.

Crowning glories include features like Acer's multimedia Arcade which offers Media Center-like functions. We're also fans of the GridVista layout system which organises desktop windows into specific regions of the screen and ePower Management which gives excellent control over power settings, like processor speed and the ability to power down some components.

Battery life was modest, varying from one-and-a half hours to two hours 22 minutes in our intensive use and light use tests respectively. Its 3kg weight also slightly limits portability. But all in all, it's an attractive system and great value at $2532. However, it only just nudged ahead on the Samsung due to its screen, so check out the R65 before you buy.