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There’s no denying that the Acer Aspire 7600U is one of the most striking all-in-one PCs that we’ve ever seen. Its large 27in display has a gorgeous edge-to-edge glass bezel that extends all the same down to its transparent base, and its slim handle-like stand flips out the back to support it.
It’s height-adjustable, too, with 80 degrees worth of screen tilt. It doesn’t lie completely flat, as with some rival systems, but getting the 7600U into a position where the screen is comfortable to read is simple. All it takes to lower the PC is a gentle push from the top of the screen and the retractable stand does the rest of the hard work for you.
Raising it back up to a standing position was a little more precarious, as the slightly slippery edge of the 7600U’s glass base doesn’t have any grip. We could just about do it with one hand pulling from the top, but we felt safer keeping our other hand on the base of the 7600U to prevent it from slipping forwards.
You’ll need a lot of space to lean the 7600U backwards, but its viewing angles were particularly impressive. When we lowered the screen to its full 80 degrees, we barely noticed any shift in contrast when we were sitting down, and it looked great from all but the most extreme angles.
We were also pleased with its overall image quality. Its sRGB colour gamut reading of 81.8 per cent is fairly average for an all-in-one PC panel, but its colour coverage was spread much more evenly across the three main colour areas than other all-in-one screens we’ve tested. This gave colours a more natural appearance onscreen, and our solid reds, greens and blues all packed plenty of punch. We didn’t see any traces of grey in our solid whites either, and its exceptionally low black level of just 0.08cd/m² saw some very deep and inky blacks.
Our colour calibrator also recorded a huge contrast ratio of 2,557:1, which is almost five times as high as your typical all-in-one PC screen. Unsurprisingly, our high contrast test images looked great. It was a little tricky to make out some of the darker shadow detail at times, but this was mostly due to the screen’s glossy reflective finish
The 7600U is one of the most versatile all-in-one PCs we’ve tested thanks to its huge range of ports. On the sides, you’ll find two USB3 ports, one of which can charge devices while the PC’s in sleep mode, a multi-format card reader, headphone and microphone jacks and a Blu-Ray drive for watching movies. The ports round the back are a little more difficult to access, but here there are also another four USB ports; two HDMI inputs, so you can use the PC’s screen for other devices; an HDMI output for connecting the PC to an external display; a Gigabit Ethernet port; a TV tuner and a digital optical S/PDIF output.
You’ll have to sacrifice one of the USB ports to use the bundled wireless mouse and keyboard as there’s no internal wireless receiver. This isn’t too much of a problem, as you’re still left with five other USB ports. The keyboard could have done with a little more tactile feedback, but was perfectly useable and matches the 7600U’s design. The mouse was very responsive and just the right shape for our hand.
The Aspire 7600U has some great hardware packed behind its screen, but it feels a little underpowered compared to other similarly priced systems. Most all-in-ones we’ve seen that cost more than £1,000 have faster quad-core processors to give them a huge boost in performance, but our review sample came with a dual-core 2.5GHz Intel Core i5-3210M processor and 8GB of RAM. This still produced a respectable score of 51 in our multimedia benchmarks, which is very good for a mobile processor, but we’ve seen more powerful systems at this price.
The 7600U’s trump card over other dual-core systems is its dedicated graphics chip. With a 2GB Nvidia GeForce GT 640M at its disposal, this actually turns the 7600U into a competent gaming PC. While it’s nowhere near powerful enough to handle the PC version of our Dirt Showdown test on Ultra quality at a 1,920×1,080 resolution, it produced a very smooth 48.7fps in the laptop version, which runs at 1,280×720 on High quality.
This is one of the best frame rates we’ve seen from an all-in-one on these settings, and we managed a full 60fps when we tried the test again at its native 1,920×1,080 resolution on Low quality. The PC can just about handle demanding games like Crysis 2 as well if you’re not too fussed about playing with the best-looking graphics, as we managed a steady 28fps on High quality at a 1,920×1,080 resolution.
The Acer Aspire 7600U sits at just the right junction between price, performance and features for an all-in-one PC. The combination of a superb display, dedicated graphics and a huge range of ports is fantastic for £800 and you get much more for your money than the similarly priced Toshiba Qosmio PX30t-A-11C. If you want a little extra without going over £1,000, the Acer Aspire 7600U is the all-in-one for you. It wins a Best Buy award.
