Acer Aspire C24-865

Desktop PC

Unlike Acer’s pricier S24, a monitor with a PC built into its base, the C24 is a proper all-in-one, with its computer j components in a neat bulge on the back of the screen, the rest narrows to under 12mm thick, which looks impressively slim, even if you’d have to squint to imagine the case was aluminium rather than silver plastic. It’s mounted on a simple two pronged stand with a similar hnish, which has no adjustment except tilt, but feels solid. With narrow bezels, the whole effect is quite elegant.

As with most all-in-ones, the secret to fitting everything into such a small space is using a laptop specification, here based on Intel’s low-power i5-8250U. It’s not the very latest chip, but quad-core and good enough to keep Windows 10 running smoothly in everyday tasks. Compared with desktop processors, though, it’s slower than a current i3, and not what you’d want for jobs like video editing,  e i5 is also let down by other components. Cere’s 8GB of memory (RAM), but of a relatively slow type and arrangement,and rather than an SSD you get a 1TB mechanical hard drive, which happens to be slow even for that type of drive.

You might be surprised at the difference this makes to how fast a PC feels in use. Even web pages take up a lot of memory these days, so Windows is constantly exchanging data between RAM and storage, and even a low-end SSD speeds this up massively.

Although we couldn’t find it stocked elsewhere, Acer itself lists a configuration at $800with both the hard drive and a 128GB SSD, and it could be worth the extra - as galling as it is when you can buy a 256GB SSD for under $35. You could add the SSD yourself in theory, but the C24 isn’t designed to make upgrades easy. Incidentally, our hard drive-only C24 did speed up slightly when we updated Windows 10.

In our tests, the Full HD screen covered 87 per cent of the sRGB colour range with an average Delta E score of 2.73.  ese aren’t good enough numbers for serious graphics work, but with adequate brightness and contrast there’s nothing here to complain about. Two 5Gbps USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0, an SD card reader and an HDMI output should be adequate, and a usable keyboard, mouse and clip-on webcam are thrown in.

Specification

Intel Core i5-8250U processor
8GB memory
1TB hard drive
23.8in 1920x1080-pixel screen
2x USB 3.0 ports, 2x USB2.0 ports
HDMI output 802.11ac Wi-Fi Bluetooth 4.0 Gigabit Ethernet
Webcam
Windows 10
321x540x200mm (HxWxD)
4.3kg
One-year warranty
Price: $600

8/10