Gadgetory

hi I'm rich brown senior editor for CNET today we're gonna take a look at the Vizio CA 27 a 1 now you might know Vizio for making low-cost TVs but this is actually its first desktop PC among an assortment of computers that came out with this year so this particular model is an 11:49 desktop it comes with a 27 inch display and some interesting design choices around some of those accessories and as well as the overall design of the system so the base of the unit is very small Vizio has really gone to great effort to make this sort of a minimal piece of hardware there's some sacrifices that come with that though which are kind of for better for worse now the riskiest decision Vizio made with this PC is to ship it with a touchpad instead of a mouse now it comes with Windows 7 right now but of course you can upgrade to Windows 8 when that comes out later this year and that's a much more touch oriented operating system now we can't report on the windows 8 experience with the system right now because what touch comes the whole series of gestures and that software is not available yet but I can say at least in Windows 7 the touchpad really doesn't cut it as a mouse replacement you can put it's just far too laggy and not precise enough that said the problem is easy enough to fix by supplying our own mouse now of course it also comes the wireless keyboard it's a pretty good design here it feels nice and sturdy with some interesting buttons at the top here in particular is Vizio button it brings up sort of a support page the others is video input select button now the system comes with two HDMI inputs which means you can connect a cable box or a game console or any other external video source and use this system is sort of a home entertainment hub now it's a great feature that we like to see in all in once and Vizio has certainly gone to good effort to put that at the forefront of this PC now the third input device is this remote control it's a pretty straightforward piece of hardware it has a power button that controls just the power for the display so that's useful now you might notice this big box over here now that's not only a subwoofer and it puts out decent audio but not really more than we expect from $1000 desktop but it also doubles as the power supply which is kind of good and bad it's good because it means as base unit can be nice and small it's bad because you have the separate subwoofer power supply thing connected to your computer and a power cord from the PC has to run through it in order to connect to the wall now the last real risky decision that Vizio made the system was to leave out an optical drive entirely of course you can add an external optical drive whichever kind you want through the USB ports with no DVD or blu-ray drive built into the system it sort of has some compromises if you want to use it as a home entertainment PC now granted not everyone will miss DVD drives not everyone uses blu-ray and you can easily replace that functionality with a game console or even a standalone optical player now if we look at on the base of the unit you'll see some pretty familiar looking PC ports you've got some USB 3 inputs which are great a couple of HDMI inputs like we mentioned it also has an eSATA port here in the back and if you look on the right side it's got an SD card input as well as another USB 3 jack comes with a reasonably fast Core i5 chip so it can keep up with any application you want to throw at it it also comes to the lower end Nvidia graphics chip a g4 640 ml a chip but you may notice that with some more advanced PC games or when you bump up the image quality settings performance is not quite what you want it to be there is one minor compromise in terms of its PC hardware it only has four gigabytes of RAM now six and eight are pretty common at this price range and with four you may be lose some power in terms of multimedia editing particularly in more recent versions of Photoshop Visio put some clear effort into the design of this system and it also took some interesting risks for better for worse if you're willing to go along with those risks or if you're willing to add your own hardware to sort of make up what they lack this system actually could be pretty good if you're looking for a budget large screen all-in-one for more traditional PC users we probably recommend a system from someone else sorry much Brown this is the Vizio see a twenty seven a one