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Acer’s Veriton N282G mini PC has a dual-core 1.8GHz Intel Atom D525 processor, 2GB of RAM and Nvidia Ion graphics. Its performance is much as you’d expect, but there are a few features that set this mini PC apart from its rivals.
Its design is fairly standard, although Acer has opted for a slightly diamond-shaped chassis instead of a generic rectangle. It’s small and slim, which means that there isn’t much room for ventilation, so the PC can become rather warm. It’s almost entirely silent, which is typical for a mini PC. A VESA mount, with which you can screw it to a monitor, is provided, as is a desk stand.
What’s interesting is that despite its relatively low price of just over £300, the PC comes with a full copy of Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. This is particularly impressive because many similarly priced mini PCs come with no operating system at all. You don’t get operating system media with the N282G, but its 320GB laptop hard disk has a recovery partition and pressing a recessed button during boot time accesses it. This only works if you don’t reformat the hard disk to install a different operating system, though.
The N282G has five USB ports, which is more than most compact systems provide, although none of them support USB3. It also has a multiformat card reader that supports SD, SDHC, SDXC, MMC, Memory Stick and xD cards, and that’s a wider range than you’ll find on most PCs. What’s particularly unusual is the serial port on the back of the system. It’ll be useless for most people, but some specialist hardware, including CNC mills and digital multimeters, still require an RS-232 connection, making this budget PC particularly interesting for some small business users. The rest of us can happily ignore the extra port. Also located on the rear of the PC are VGA and HDMI graphics ports, as well as a Gigabit Ethernet port. The obligatory 3.5mm microphone and headphone ports can be found on the PC’s front panel.
The N282G is powerful enough to browse the web, play casual games and watch standard definition video, but it’ll struggle with Full HD video. Our 720p test files played perfectly, but we experienced a lot of skipped frames when we played both an MPEG4 file and a full Blu-ray film. The system’s multitasking capabilities are also limited, but this is exactly what you’d expect from its Atom processor, which achieved an overall score of 12 in our benchmark tests.
Unlike most mini PCs, the Veriton N282G comes with a keyboard and mouse. Neither is particularly fantastic, but the keyboard, although a little loose, is comfortable and accurate to use. The mouse is rather small, but it worked perfectly. As far as the near-identical slew of Atom-based mini PCs goes, the Veriton is particularly good value thanks to extra features such as its mouse, keyboard and preinstalled operating system. At around £300, it’s a great buy if you need a small, basic, no-frills PC that won’t eat a lot of power, but Lenovo’s Q180, with its Blu-ray drive and large hard disk, is a slightly better deal if you have a little more to spend.
