ACER: ACERPOWER SD PC

ACER: ACERPOWER SD PC

Acers Sd PC features a tiny case and quality peripherals, but it has some shortcomings in the performance department.

The Sd PC has the smallest case presented in this months Labs. Small cases have pros and cons: theyre better suited to being used on top of (rather than underneath) a desk, which
is great for people with limited floor space. On the other hand, if you want your PC on the floor, then the CD-RW and power button become difficult to reach.

This machine comes with the fastest graphics card of the lot: a GeForce4 Ti4400.

Unfortunately, the Celeron 1.8GHz CPU doesnt really do it justice, and it constantly performed under the level of faster machines.

While its overall 3D performance was pretty decent and definitely above the GeForce4 MX cards it still lagged behind all the Ti4200 systems.

It fell close to 9% behind the Altech Silver RAID (equipped with the Xmicro Ti4200) in 3DMark2001, and was over 20% slower in the PC Authority Quake 3: Arena Benchmark.

In SYSmarks office and multimedia benchmarks, the Acer came second from the bottom, scoring just above the Viewmaster system. Once again, this is mainly due to the limitations of the CPU: the Celeron has a quarter of the L2 cache of a full Pentium 4, and this is seriously detrimental to system performance.

The system has good overall build quality, although the size of the case and the use of a micro-ATX motherboard means it can be difficult to get at things like the CPU and RAM if you want to upgrade, and its not to crash hot when it comes to overclocking features either.

With a full Pentium 4 CPU the AcerPower Sd PC could very well have been a great system, both in terms of features offered and overall system performance. As it stands though, the Celeron processor is unable to live up to the superior quality of the rest of the components.