While the Acer ConceptD 7 is a pricey investment, we think it's one of the best laptops for 3D work in particular, retaining high performance without costing the earth.
For
Good value
Impressive specs
Against
Design not for everyone
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The Acer ConceptD 7 is part of Acer's series of laptops and desktop aimed at designers and creatives. It’s a 15.6-inch laptop with a 4K screen that has lovely thin bezels around the side.
Inside it’s fitted with an Intel Core i7-9750H, GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q with 32GB of memory and a 1TB PCIe SSD. It’s a great laptop specification. The Intel Core i7-9750H is a six-core processor, running at 2.6GHz with a 4.5GHz Turbo Frequency.
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The RTX 2080 Max-Q in the ConceptD has 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM and a 735 MHz clock speed, a big step down from the 1,515 MHz clock of a desktop RTX 2080, even though it still has the same 2,944 shaders, 46 ray tracing cores and 368 Tensor Cores.
It’s also well equipped with ports. Unlike a certain fruity company, Acer has sensibly stuck with three traditional USB-A ports, squeezed in a proper Ethernet port, and still offers Thunderbolt connectivity over its USB-C port. HDMI and DisplayPort outputs give you display output options too.
Acer ConceptD 7: Design and display
Do you like the look of it? (Image credit: Acer)
The looks might divide opinion though. While the ConceptD 7 is encased in a solid metal chassis, which feels good to use with a comfortably sized trackpad and keyboard, we found it a tad on the ugly side. Acer has contrasted the white chassis with a bright yellow/orange backlit keyboard, but aside from the two angled corners there are few other interesting design features of note.
More noticeable is the large space directly under the display which makes the screen look as if it’s been squashed upwards. Even though other laptops have the same area under their display, it looks worse on the ConceptD 7 because of the white casing.
The ConceptD 7 has a colour-accurate screen that looks a lot better than most desktop displays, presenting 100% AdobeRGB colour coverage that simply looks fantastic. A colour-accurate display is an oft-overlooked component of a design rig, so its inclusion on the ConceptD is definitely a worthy addition.
Acer ConceptD 7: Should I buy it?
This isn't the only option from Acer, of course. Acer’s ConceptD range also includes a (black) ConceptD 9 Pro, a higher spec 17-inch RTX Studio laptop that swaps the GeForce for a Quadro RTX 5000, the Core i7 for a Core i9 and raises the maximum SSD storage to 2TB.
And at the other end of the scale there’s a ConceptD 7 with an RTX 2060, smaller 512GB SSD and just 16GB of memory for £2,299.
While the ConceptD 7 is still a pricey investment, we think it's one of the best laptops for 3D work in particular, retaining high performance without stepping over the £3,000 line.
While the Acer ConceptD 7 is a pricey investment, we think it's one of the best laptops for 3D work in particular, retaining high performance without costing the earth.
A veteran from the days of the 8-bit ZX Spectrum, Orestis is always interested in the fastest, slickest way to make computers do new and exciting things.
