Acer Aspire X3200 Review
January 27, 2009
By Eric Grevstad
Enjoy the View
Somewhat better than the speakers are the X3200's bundled keyboard and mouse. Both are USB corded (not wireless) devices matching the system unit's matte black color scheme, with a rather fetching gray stripe accent on the mouse. The mouse is a standard optical unit with a scroll wheel but no extra buttons for undo, Back, or other functions.
The keyboard features multimedia control (play/pause, stop, next, previous, mute) buttons and a volume dial, as well as buttons to launch your browser or e-mail or put the system to sleep. Key travel is satisfyingly deep, but its typing feel is a little stiff.
Acer teamed our test system with its P244W, a 24-inch widescreen LCD monitor priced at $339 that boasts a 20,000:1 contrast ratio, 2-millisecond response time, and 300 nits of brightness. Tipping the scales at 12.5 pounds and measuring 22.4 by 16.5 by 8.2 inches, the display has one VGA and two HDMI inputs -- like the Aspire, it has no DVI port -- and draws 75 watts of power.
Except for a button that lets you rotate through preset standard, graphics, movie, and text brightness modes, the P244W is close to generic -- its detachable stand offers tilt, but no swivel, pivot, or height adjustment capability. But it's a handsome, glossy black unit, and its 1,920 by 1,080 resolution made a Blu-ray movie look sharp, with strong colors.
Our only problem with the movie was with Acer's Blu-ray player software, which oddly offered mouse control for its own menus but obliges you to use the keyboard for movies' menus; Acer preinstalls a suite of numerous house-brand multimedia programs, but we found them unimpressive compared to their counterparts from CyberLink, Corel/InterVideo, or Nero.
Other bundled software includes trial versions of Microsoft Office Home & Student 2007 and McAfee Security Center, along with Microsoft Works, NTI Backup Now and Media Maker, and the eSobi RSS feed reader and article organizer.
Anything But Gaming
Neither our system's Phenom X3 nor the newer SKU's X4 is one of AMD's new larger-cache, smaller-die-size Phenom II processors, but the X3200 motors along nicely enough without that. Everyday performance feels perky, while most benchmark scores are fair to middling. The system rates a 4.4, with suitability for Vista's Aero graphics dragging down impressive CPU, memory, and hard disk numbers, on Windows' 5.9-point Experience Index.
On the minus side, its Nvidia integrated graphics keep the X3200 well clear of the gaming arena. While the Acer rendered Cinebench R10's sample scene in a respectable 2 minutes and 21 seconds with all three cores on the case, even at lowly 1,024 by 768 resolution it was lucky to average 15 frames per second in HOCBench's Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and Unreal Tournament 3 flybys.
If it came with a remote control and didn't come with proprietary software instead of Windows Media Center, the Aspire X3200 would get our enthusiastic endorsement as an off-the-shelf, no-tinkering-needed solution for living-room or home theater PC seekers. Even with those quibbles, it's a solid deal for anyone who doesn't have a lot of spare desk room and who'd like to include Blu-ray viewing -- whether on the P244W monitor or an HDMI-equipped HDTV set -- as part of their general-purpose computing experience.
Add www.earthwebhardware.com to your favorites Add www.earthwebhardware.com to your browser search box IE 7 | Firefox 2.0 | Firefox 1.5.xReceive news via our XML/RSS feed
Events
IE 7
Firefox 2.0
