Acer Veriton 1000 review

It's taken some time, but manufacturers are finally waking up to the fact that PCs don't have to be big, chunky lumps of plastic.

Acer's Veriton range of PCs are aimed at business users, but whereas many business PCs are dour, unimaginatively designed workhorses, the Veriton 1000 is an altogether classier affair. If you need a PC base unit that's powerful, small and good looking, Acer's offering could be just what you've been looking for.

When most companies decide to build a mini PC, they end up having to use barebones cases made by a third party. Acer is an exception to the rule as its Veriton 1000 is clad in its own bespoke case. It's nowhere near as tiny as a Mac Mini, but it's still about half the size of Shuttle's shoebox-sized barebones systems. Even when lying horizontally it takes up impressively little room on the desk, but if you're really pushed for space, the supplied stand allows you to safely rest it on its side.

Small but powerful

For such a modestly proportioned PC, Acer has managed to shoehorn in a powerful specification. The Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 processor has two processor cores running at 1.83GHz and is partnered with 1GB of DDR2 memory. Considering that the Veriton 1000 is a serious, slimline business PC this is a pretty generous roster of components. Performance was a smidgen behind similarly-specified full-size desktop PCs, but an overall score of 119% is still spritely. The Core 2 Duo processor makes the Veriton more than capable of taking on anything you can throw at it - except perhaps creating a feature-length Hollywood quality animated movie. We'd buy something a bit less compact if you have that in mind.

Store crazy

Take a quick peek inside the Acer's tiny frame and there's literally no room for any upgrades at all. There are no PCI slots and the memory slots are hidden behind the optical and hard disk drives. Impressively, Acer has managed to fit in a full-size SATA hard disk, although we were a bit perplexed by the choice of an 80GB drive. Considering that there's room for a full-size hard drive and a 200GB drive costs little more than £50, we'd have liked to see something a bit roomier. But we can forgive the Veriton 1000 for this one minor oversight as it's aimed primarily at a business audience who really don't want to pay for a hulking hard disk in each and every workstation. Were the Acer equipped with a graphics chip that encouraged buying and installing the latest hard-disk swallowing games 80GB might prove excessively restrictive. But as the Intel integrated graphics wouldn't even allow Call of Duty 2 to load this just isn't an issue.

One handy component that's conspicuously absent from the Acer, apart from its very obvious lack of a monitor, is a DVD writer. The optical drive is hidden behind the smart front flap, but it's just a plain DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive. It'll still come in handy for burning the odd audio CD or archiving collections of old files and photos, but we'd have much preferred a DVD+-RW drive.

Acer has seen fit to include a USB keyboard and mouse in the box, too. Neither are particularly remarkable, but the keyboard is adequate and the selection of shortcut keys lined up along its top edge are handy. The optical wheel mouse is similarly functional. Adding much more exciting USB devices isn't a problem though, as the Veriton has four front-mounted USB ports in addition to the four at its rear.

Acer's Veriton is a delectably pint-sized PC. It's got enough power for most people and even the 80GB hard drive shouldn't prove much of a limitation. If good looks and small size are necessities and gaming is of no concern to you at all, then the Acer has a lot going for it. You can't escape the fact that a larger, uglier desktop PC will have a better specification and greater upgrade potential for the same money or less, though.

Author: Sasha Muller