Gadgetory

hi I'm rich Brown for CNET today we're going to take a look at the Acer Aspire 7600 u so this is a 27 inch touchscreen Windows 8 all-in-one from Acer cost 1899 and it certainly has the appearance of a high-end slick looking PC you can see here it has the familiar edge to edge glass and a nice big display this is a 27-inch screen that's 1920 by 1080 resolution it's a touch screen and it's also pretty responsive doesn't have some of the drag you get on other touchscreen designs and in general we're pretty happy with the way there's reacts to our input at least in terms of our input on the screen now there's actually a gesture recognition feature that comes with this PC and it doesn't work that well it's not that responsive so the gestures are kind of confusing and in general it's probably best left forgotten so although the system has some pretty great looks and actually has some interesting features overall it's pretty overpriced so one of the big downfalls of the system is its resolution now Dell has a system that's XPS one 27 it's also 27 inch touchscreen all-in-one that it's kind of a spoiler among the new Windows 8 PCs that system has a 2560 by 1440 screen resolution for roughly the same price and it really makes these 19 by 10 screens look kind of inferior now another problem with this system is its core features it has a mobile grade Core i5 CPU that's really not that fast particularly for its price otherwise it's pretty well equipped but again not enough to justify its high-end price tag it has eight gigs of RAM a terabyte hard drive although the hard drive is slower it's a 5400 rpm model you get 7200 rpm in most other pcs it also has a geforce GT 640 m graphics chip now that chip does give this PC decent gaming capability but you can certainly find more on other pcs in the same price so this is not to say the system doesn't have some positives there's some USB 3 ports on the side here which is great SD card input couple analog audio jacks nothing too surprising there but you look on the back you'll see a nice clean design as well as a series of ports that really give the system some nice multimedia flexibility there's a couple more USB ports on the back as well as an Ethernet input there's also two HDMI inputs as well as an HDMI output that lets you connect all kinds of external devices to this PC to use as a secondary display and with HDMI out you can actually connect another monitor the system expand your display space that really makes it pretty flexible now you might also be drawn to its design you can see it has a pretty clean line front here this transparent chin if you will it's not maybe for everybody but it's certainly not terrible the one downside is these three branding stickers here no other windows 8 all in ones have gotten rid of those and moving them to other places that are not quite so obvious now along with other big screen touch on ones there is sort of the temptation and want to use this system without walking up to it and sitting down in front of it to use a keyboard and mouse so to facilitate that acer has made a pretty decent stand on the back here so it's a glossy plastic design that you can see it has the power cable going right into the bottom here that's kind of interesting but not really that functionally important but what's nice about the stand is how easily adjustable it is now you definitely need some desktop clearance in order to really use it but you can see it drops down and comes back up with very little hassle so you might have heard that acer is trying to revamp its images sort of a bargain-basement PC vendor and this system is pretty good evidence that it's starting to pay attention to design and really make a nice looking computer but while it might hit some of the right aesthetic notes overall the system doesn't have enough value to justify its price so I'm rich Brown this is the Acer Aspire 7600 you