VeryPC Glide Touch review

All-in-one PCs usually offer you one of two choices: a slim yet underpowered system, or a chunky powerhouse. Luckily, the VeryPC Glide Touch manages to find the perfect balance between a compact design and proper desktop levels of performance. It’s not the prettiest all-in-one PC we’ve ever seen, but its neatly curved chassis and matt metallic stand still looks better than a regular Desktop PC.

It also comes with one of Intel’s latest Haswell processors: a quad-core 3.1GHz Intel Core i7-4770S processor that can Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz for a significant boost in performance when there’s enough thermal headroom, and a huge 16GB of RAM. With these high-end components, it scored a hugely impressive 106 overall in our multimedia benchmarks, which puts it ahead of our 3.4GHz Intel Core i5-3570K reference processor. This is outstanding for an all-in-one PC, and we’ve only seen this performance in much more expensive all-in-one PCs.

The only thing the Glide Touch might be lacking is a dedicated graphics chip, but its integrated Intel HD Graphics 4600 is deceptively powerful. As with most other all-in-one PCs, it failed to produce 15fps in either of our Dirt Showdown or Crysis 2 PC tests, but we were pleasantly surprised when it produced a smooth 32.7fps in the laptop version of our Dirt Showdown test on High quality at a 1,280×720 resolution. It’s by far one of the fastest frame rates we’ve seen from an integrated graphics chip, and we achieved a similarly quick 35.9fps when we increased the resolution to 1,920×1,080 on Low quality.

The PC’s 23in display also made a great impression. The optional ten-point touchscreen on our review sample was super responsive and silky smooth multi-touch gestures like pinch-zooming worked without a hitch. If you’re not fussed about touch-support, though, the Glide Touch is also available in a non-touch model for £1,169, which is just £20 more than Scan’s excellent 3XS Mirage AIO245.

Image quality was equally superb, as our colour calibrator showed the screen was displaying 92.8 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut. This is about 10 per cent more than most all-in-one panels, and it showed in our subjective image tests. Reds, greens and blues were rich and vibrant, and the colours in our high contrast test images looked natural and accurate. Its black level was a little high at 0.40cd/m², but our solid blacks still looked dark and inky. The only flaws we could find were some very minor grey patches in the corners of our solid whites. You’d be hard pressed to notice it on a daily basis, though, and it certainly didn’t affect our high contrast test images.

We recorded a contrast ratio of 634:1 with our colour calibrator, which is around average for an all-in-one panel, but we still saw a very high level of detail in our test images. The screen’s glossy finish was quite reflective, but this didn’t stop us from making out finer shadow detail in the darker areas of our photos.