The Acer Aspire 5560G takes one of AMD's new quad-core processors with integrated graphics, joined by an additional discrete graphics processor for gaming duties. See also Acer Aspire 5560G review
As a gaming laptop the Aspire 5560G is a decent bet, but we can't help but be disappointed by the application performance of the Acer in our benchmark tests. You probably wouldn't notice the lack of speed in most day-to-day applications but if you want to run more demanding software programs, a model using an Intel Core processor would be faster. The price is not especially competitive andt you can get more for your money elsewhere.
A WorldBench 6 score of 85 suggests that the A8-3500M can't even compete with many of Intel's dual-core i3 and i5 models in the performance stakes, although four cores is generally better than two should you want to run several programs at the same time. The generous 8GB of RAM will help here too.
The gaming performance, though, is much better than the application performance - a frame rate of 53fps in FEAR at Maximum settings is a very decent result.
The strong graphics performance is down to the dual AMD Radeon HD 6740G2 graphics setup. This actually consists of a dedicated AMD Radeon HD 6650M processor with 1GB video memory, and an integrated Radeon HD 6620G chip, configured together in a CrossFire array. This means that alternate frames are rendered by each card, which has potential performance benefits, although does also make it less power efficient.
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