TechRadar Labs

Cinebench 10: 8,827
3D Mark '06: 3,279
Battery Eater '05: 149 minutes

The real selling point of the Acer Aspire S3-951 is the impressive set of components stuffed in its tiny gullet. Gone are the days of clunky low-voltage CPUs plaguing ultra-portable laptops.

The dual-core Intel Core i7 2637M processor stormed through our Cinebench tests, proving well matched to any task we threw at it.

Backed up by 4GB of memory, we had no problem multitasking with all kinds of software. Applications loaded quickly (helped in part by that speedy solid state drive) and ran smoothly. In fact, the Acer Aspire S3-951 proved to be the most powerful ultrabook we've reviewed, narrowly beating the Core i7 Asus Zenbook UX31.

Graphical performance is dependable, thanks to the flexibility of the Sandy Bridge chipset. Although the GPU is integrated, it's still capable of running multimedia software such as photo and video editing suites, without suffering from glitches or crashes.

Of course, you aren't going to get any serious gaming done on an ultrabook. Older games will run as expected, and you won't have any trouble smashing your mates at a game of online Scrabble. But try testing it with a recent FPS game and you'll meet a stuttering mess.

Even when we ran fairly demanding software, we were impressed by how cool and quiet the Acer Aspire S3-951 remained. The SSD obviously helps, because there are no spinning discs to contend with. The area around the vents (positioned at the rear of the laptop) remains cool at all times.

Unfortunately the battery life was a lot less impressive. We ran HD video on loop and were disappointed when the Acer Aspire S3-951 died after just 149 minutes. This isn't a disastrous performance, but it is below average for a modern laptop - we usually get around three hours of movie action before the screen fades to black.

Considering this is an ultrabook built for portability, the result is even more disappointing. The Asus Zenbook, for example, survived for over four hours with the same test. If you're looking for a new laptop, you'll have to seriously consider what's more important to you - performance or longevity.