The Acer Aspire AZ3-615 features an IPS display with ten-point multi-touch, a beefy speaker system and a built in DVD/RW drive for movie playback and backup. It’s finished in a stylish matt black and silver, but it’s not as svelte as most of the competing AIO systems and comes across as rather bulky. The all-in-one PC is mounted on a simple stand, which offers a tilt adjustment from -5 degrees to 25 degrees. This is fine for a typical monitor, but we’d like to see a much greater degree of tilt on any designed to be used as a touchscreen for an extended period of time. The Acer’s left hand side provides a handy memory card reader and one of two USB 3.0 ports, the second of which is fitted at the rear of the Aspire AZ3-615, along with two USB 2.0 ports and an ethernet connection. There’s also a Mini PCI Express slot available for future expansion, while HDMI in and out ports allow you to hook up a second monitor or use the Aspire AZ3-615 AIO PC as a multimedia display for an external device such as a laptop or games console. Performance-wise the Acer Aspire AZ3-615 AIO PC is rather impressive, being outpaced only by systems costing considerably more. Its 1.9GHz quad core Intel Core i5-4460T is a low-power model which can turbo boost up to 2.7GHz as required. Interestingly the Acer system outperforms HP’s ENVY Beats All-in-One, despite the HP system featuring a faster Core i7 chip with Hyper-Threading. The Aspire AZ3-615 is also one of only three PCs we’ve recently reviewed to feature a discrete graphics processor. The installed nVidia GT480M is the least powerful, but it’s enough to give a very noticeably performance boost over the standard Intel HD Graphics integrated into the processor. This is no gaming PC, but if you set the quality settings low enough, you’ll get away with playing games less systems simply can’t cope with. The display quality is reasonably good, the IPS panel delivering wide viewing angles and reasonably accurate colour with a good, if not outstanding, level of contrast. We were rather more impressed with the AIO PC’s built in speakers, which delivered considerably volume levels without distortion and good bass response – although nowhere near as good as the HP ENVY Beats with its eight speaker system.
