Acer Aspire 8940 drops a big one on the holidays

The Acer Aspire 8940 is an 18-inch beast that packs Intel's newest and Microsoft's finest in time for multimedia gift giving.

Acer has announced their newest Aspire notebook, the Acer Aspire 8940. Like the previous Acer Aspire 8930, the Aspire 8940 packs a massive, 18.4-inch, widescreen display, which can easily handle 1080p high-definition content. The screen will use LED backlighting. To watch bleeding-edge videos on the new Aspire 8940, Acer includes a Blu-Ray drive as well as five speakers built into the chassis. So, theoretically you could stick your head in the middle of all that sound and get a true, portable surround experience. To connect the machine to your home system, Acer includes HDMI output, and you can store plenty of extra media files on an external eSATA drive, thanks to the included port.

The Acer Aspire 8940 will also pack Intel's latest mobile processor, the quad-core Intel Core i7 720QM, running at 1.6GHz with a 6MB L3 Cache and 1.333GHz on the frontside bus. The monster machine will ship with 4GB of DDR3 RAM, as well as a 500GB hard disk drive. Of course, Windows 7 will ship standard with the new notebook, or rather desktop replacement.

For graphics and gaming, the new Acer Aspire 8940 will use NVIDIA's GeForce GTS 250M chipset with a full 1GB of dedicated DDR3 VRAM. There's a Web cam, Acer's Crystal Eye integrated camera, and Acer's own touch-capacitive media control interface on the inner shell. Fast home networking comes through the Draft-N certified Wi-Fi radio inside.

To power this behemoth, Acer is including an 8-cell Li-Ion battery with a 4800mAh capacity. For ports, besides the eSata and HDMI, the machine will get 5 USB 2.0 ports as well as a multi-card reader built-in. Of course, specific specs and prices will vary, but Acer says buyers will be able to find an Acer Aspire 8940 with the Blu-Ray option, 4GB of RAM and half-Gig of storage, with the fully-loaded NVIDIA graphics, for $1350. The Acer Aspire 8940 should ship in time for the holiday season.