Unlike its more generic Aspire range, Acer’s Ethos laptop line-up is a much more focused on multimedia. The latest model, the 5951, is packed with the latest technology and plenty of clever design touches that make it stand out from the competition.

Adorned with a brushed metal lid and built with lots of high-quality materials, the Ethos 5951 is rather heavy for its size; despite having a 15.6in screen it still weighs over 3kg. This doesn’t make it completely desk-bound, but you’ll certainly notice it in your bag when on the move. You’ll also need to factor in the weight of the power supply, as the average battery life of four and a half hours isn’t enough to last all day.

This is partly due to the internal components, which are easily powerful enough for most tasks. Intel’s Core i7-2630QM usually runs each of its four cores at 2GHz, but Turbo Boost can increase this up to 2.9GHz for even more performance. It powered through our multimedia benchmark with a score of 77, making it one of the fastest laptops we’ve seen.

3D performance was, if anything, even more impressive thanks to the dedicated graphics card. With 2GB of dedicated video memory, on top of the already extensive 8GB system RAM, the GeForce 555m is Nvidia’s fastest current-generation mid-range card. As such, we expected it to cope well with our Dirt 3 benchmark; it passed easily, producing a solid 55.5fps at our default settings, it could also cope with higher detail settings without dropping below a playable frame rate. Unsurprisingly, it had no trouble playing Blu-ray films via the optical drive, either on the laptop itself or on an external display.