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Trying to have it all: Acer’s Timeline M5 gaming Ultrabook


The Acer Aspire Timeline Ultra M5-481TG. If only it had a longer name.
Andrew Cunningham

It's hard to believe that Ultrabooks cropped up a little less than a year ago. Since the first models hit the market, the Ultrabook moniker—originally created to denote a thin, light laptop using a low-voltage Intel processor and a fast solid-state drive—has come to encompass just about any laptop that is thinner or lighter than usual.

Acer's Aspire Timeline M5-481TG is one such computer. Acer officially refers to it as an Ultrabook, but its 14" screen and 4.3 pound weight definitely push the limits of the term. That said, the M5 uses the extra size and weight to its advantage, packing a dedicated graphics processor and a DVD burner into a relatively thin-and-light frame. It's not the fastest gaming notebook on the market, and it's definitely not the thinnest and lightest. But can this laptop's specs make it a solid all-rounder, or does the approach simply produce a chunky, compromised Ultrabook?

Specs at a glance: Acer Aspire Timeline Ultra M5-481TG
Screen 1366x768 at 14" (112 ppi)
OS Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
CPU 1.7GHz Intel Core i5-3317U (Turbo boost up to 2.6GHz)
RAM 4GB 1333MHz DDR3 (officially supports up to 6GB, reports say it can support 10GB)
GPU 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M LE and Intel HD Graphics 4000 (switchable)
HDD 2.5” 5400RPM 500GB hard drive, 20GB SSD
Networking Gigabit Ethernet, dual-band 802.11n, Bluetooth 4.0
Ports 2x USB 3.0, HDMI, card reader, headphones
Size 13.4" x 0.8" x 9.6"
Weight 4.30 lbs
Battery 3-cell 4850 mAh Li-ion
Price as reviewed $779.99
Other perks Webcam, backlit keyboard, DVD burner, 1 year warranty

Design and build quality

The M5 is constructed entirely from plastic—the lid, display bezel, and top case are all dark gray and have a faux-brushed metal look, while the bottom of the laptop is a black, textured matte plastic. There's a bit of flexing in the top case, especially in the lid, but the laptop has a nice dense feel to it and doesn't feel overly cheap in spite of its construction. The M5 is of a uniform, 0.8" thickness throughout, with none of the tapering seen in many Ultrabooks, and the laptop's lid sits flush with its slightly raised LCD hinge when closed. The hinge itself feels sturdy, but not so stiff that you can't open the laptop without holding the bottom down.

Enlarge / The M5 (second from bottom) is definitely thinner than something like the Dell Latitude E6410 (bottom), but thicker than the tapered ASUS Zenbook Prime UX31A (second from top) and the MacBook Air (top).
Andrew Cunningham

What primarily separates the M5 from other Ultrabooks is its weight, which at 4.3 pounds really makes this an Ultrabook in name only. It's thinner and lighter than more traditional laptops, but many other computers being marketed as Ultrabooks are at least a pound lighter. You can feel that difference if you're carrying the M5 around in a shoulder bag all day.

Enlarge / The LCD bezel is a bit bigger than we would like, and its 1366x768 resolution is unimpressive. You can also get a taste of the display's poor viewing angles in this picture.
Andrew Cunningham

The screen itself is a glossy 14" panel with a 1366x768 resolution, and being a cheap TN LCD panel, the vertical viewing angles are pretty poor. The screen also has a cool (cool as opposed to "warm," not cool as in "awesome"), blue-ish tint. The LCD has a larger bezel than I'd like—the bottom of the bezel in particular is especially large, and there's an additional black strip going around the LCD. As is always the case with any laptop larger than 11", I'd love to see a better panel with a higher resolution at least available as an option. The best that can be said of the screen itself is that its resolution is well-matched to the computer's GPU, which we'll see a bit later in our gaming benchmarks—the screen of the Zenbook Prime we reviewed was its best quality, but the screen on the M5 is one of its worst.

Enlarge / The M5's ports are grouped together on the back of the laptop, and the USB ports are a bit too close together for comfort.
Andrew Cunningham

Most of the M5's ports—two USB 3.0, an HDMI, and an Ethernet port—are all huddled together on the back of the computer, in one of my least favorite design decisions. Aside from the hassle of not having easily accessible USB ports on the left and right sides of the laptop, the two USB ports on the back don't have much clearance. If you're using anything much wider than the port itself, you may have trouble actually using both ports at once.

Enlarge / The SD card slot and headphone jack are the only thing on the right side of the laptop.
Andrew Cunningham

The laptop's left side houses its DVD burner, the SD card slot and headphone jack are on the right, and the front side has two status lights (one to indicate that the battery is charging or charged, and one to indicate the laptop's power status) and a power button that seems like it might be easy to bump while carrying the laptop around in a bag.

Enlarge / The M5's power button and indicator lights on the front of the laptop.
Andrew Cunningham

The underside of the laptop is relatively unadorned: there are holes on the left and right front corners for speakers, which are extremely loud. There is some distortion when the volume is cranked, but it's still loud enough to fill a small room even at half of the maximum volume. The bass is predictably poor, but you won't have any problem with volume.

There are also some vents for the system's single fan (another, larger vent is on the back)—while sitting at the desktop and performing non-gaming activities, the laptop doesn't get very warm, and its fan noise ranges from quiet to silent. Playing a game that taxes both the GPU and CPU simultaneously makes the fan straight-up loud, and some areas (primarily above the keyboard and around the air vent itself) get warm enough to make the laptop a bit uncomfortable to have on your lap.

Keyboard and trackpad

Andrew Cunningham

The M5-481TG includes a backlit, island-style keyboard and a buttonless multitouch trackpad from Synaptics. To my eye, the keys seem just a bit narrower than they are on other chiclet keyboards I've used, and the spacing between the keys slightly wider, though in practice it didn't affect my typing speed. The keys on the right side of the keyboard are a bit bizarre, though—there's no space between the Enter key and the backslash key, creating the illusion (but not the actual functionality) of an old-style backward-L-shaped Return key, and the right shift key is nearly twice as long as the left shift key. This takes up space that could have been used by full-size arrow keys—this keyboard uses half-height arrow keys instead. A vertical row with the Delete, Home, Page up, Page down, and End keys rounds out the keyboard.

The backlight on the keyboard is excellent—it's nice and even, and it's not too bright, which is good because the brightness level can't be adjusted (the backlight is either on or off). There's no ambient light sensor to activate the backlight automatically—it defaults to always being on and can be toggled manually using the Function and F9 keys.

Enlarge / The backlight on the M5's keyboard is nice and even, but there's no ambient light sensor to turn it on and off automatically.
Andrew Cunningham

The laptop's multitouch trackpad, which appears to be more or less identical to the trackpad in the Aspire S3 we reviewed late last year, works fairly well with the latest drivers from Acer installed—it's a bit stiff, but otherwise there's not much to gripe about. Clicking the lower-left and lower-right corners (where the buttons would be on a traditional trackpad) gets you a left and a right click, and you can also click with one or two fingers anywhere on the trackpad to do the same thing. Gestures like two-finger scrolling, tap to click, and pinch to zoom also work fairly well—Acer even makes an attempt at inertial scrolling, though the behavior is a bit less consistent than in an operating system with that behavior baked in.

The trackpad isn't centered on the notebook, which can cause some problems while typing—your left palm and wrist are going to rest on the left side of the trackpad, and while the Synaptics drivers are good at palm rejection, I did occasionally experience some cursor jumping as I typed. Turning down the trackpad's sensitivity in the driver's settings fixes most of the issues, though.

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