Acer Aspire 7600U review

At £1,600, the 27in Acer Aspire 7600U is one of most expensive all-in-ones we’ve seen, and as such, we expect nothing short of the best. Unfortunately, it doesn’t get off to a good start.

Inside, the Acer has the same Core i5-3210M processor as its smaller (and £600 cheaper) sibling, the 5600U. It’s a mobile part with a speed of 2.5GHz and only two physical cores; its 0.64 result in our benchmarks lags well behind the Acer’s fastest rivals, including the Dell XPS One 27.

The lack of processing grunt has a negative impact on gaming capability, too. The Acer has the same Nvidia GeForce GT 640M as the Dell, but it’s unable to deliver the same level of performance. A score of 49fps in our Medium quality Crysis test isn’t bad, but its rival scored 55fps in the same benchmark.

Elsewhere, the Acer sports 8GB of RAM, a Blu-ray reader, dual-band 802.11n wireless and a dual DVB-T TV tuner.

For storage, there’s a 1TB hard disk, and while the capacity is fine, performance is far from acceptable. It’s a 5,400rpm mobile unit, and sequential read and write results of 97MB/sec and 96MB/sec are sluggish compared to more powerful machines.

So where is all that extra money going? You might assume that Acer had spent most of it on getting the display right, but it’s only middle of the road, suffering from the same problems as the 5600U. The screen has a low black point and good brightness, delivering a high contrast ratio of 2,160:1, but colours look washed out.

On the positive side, we like the way this all-in-one looks. The chassis is slim, and the angled kickstand makes it attractive from the rear as well.

The stand goes all the way back until it’s at a 30-degree angle from the desk, and the rear panel can be removed for access to all of the Acer’s components.

The Acer Aspire 7600U needs to offer an awful lot more than this, however, to justify the huge price. The screen and chassis can’t match the Dell XPS One 27 for quality and, under the hood, the 7600U is underpowered. If it’s a 27in all-in-one that you crave, we suggest you buy the Dell XPS One 27 instead.