Acer’s Veriton L series of commercial desktop have been a trendsetter in term of its design and extremely small footprint. The new Aspire L3600 brings the same technology to consumers and continues to up the ante with a new chipset and faster processors which translates into better overall performance. This 3-litre Ultra Small Form Factor (USFF) design is particularly popular in certain markets like in workplaces with space constraints, but it is also gaining acceptance in the living room, thanks to its great looks and space-saving design. It also meets Intel’s VIIV platform requirements, but unfortunately this is not a good news to everybody because VIIV related online services are only available in North America.
Like the current Veriton L360, the Aspire L3600 uses Intel’s G31 Chipset which support 800MHz Front Side Bus processors. Our test unit had the Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 CPU, which is lower end Core 2 Duo processor running at 2.2GHz and has 2MB of L2 cache. Unlike the E3600 series of c2D processors, the E400 series lack support for Intel’s Virtualisation Technology, but for home users, this isn’t anything to cry about. The G31 chipset is paired with the ICH7 Southbridge which is slightly older than the current ICH8. One of the main differences between the two is the latter’s support for two additional SATA devices which is pointless since there’s no space in the chassis for another hard disk. This unit came with 1GB of DDR2 667MHz memory, occupying one of the two DIMM slots. In addition, it had Windows Vista Home Premium installed.
With hardly any room inside, it is therefore understandable that Intel’s integrated graphics solution is utilized. The Graphic Media Accelerator 3100 is equivalent to the one found on Santa Rosa notebook and performs well with office and multimedia tasks. Games with complex graphics won’t run well on the GMA 3100 but this isn’t what the Aspire L3600 is designed for anyway. There’s no monitor bundled with the Aspire L3600 but Acer offers a wide range of displays for users to choose from.
Despite its small size, Acer provides a whole range of ports and connectors. This includes six USB 2.0 ports (two in fron, four at the rear), two Firewire port, Gigabit Ethernet, a DVI as well as an analogue D-Sub VGA port. There are five audio-out ports plus a microphone jacks. There’s also a multi-format card reader here. The Aspire L3600 has an FM/TV tuner card so there are also coaxial connectors for external antennas. Users can also plug in an S-Video or Composite video signal via a breakout cable(which is provided). The 320GB Western Digital Caviar SE hard disk drive should prove to be big enough for most users and the slot loading Pioneer DVR-K06RS DVD writer further helps reduce the unit’s size. Using a notebook hard disk would have freed up more spaces, but these are more expensive and capacities above 160GB are still quite rare and rather expensive.
In term of build quality, the Aspire L3600 is top notch. The twin fans at the rear extracts hot air from inside the chassis and due to their small size, they are relatively quiet. A very fine honeycomb grille at the top also allows hot air to exit. Indicator lights for power, hard disk and LAN connectivity are located at the front, partly hidden by the bezel’s shiny black polish. The front ports are covered by plastic cover; the ability to detach that would have been nice, but that’s not possible. The base is attached via a large screw which can easily be removed if users want to place the unit flat instead of upright.
Being a full-fledged system, we expected the Aspire L3600 to perform well and indeed it didn’t disappointed. Its CPU score came in at 5,453 points which is similar to the T7500 notebook processor running at the same speed. The memory score of 4,068 is slightly slow and we’d highly recommend putting in at least 2GB of RAM. The graphics score of 1,23 is rather small dismal, even for systems with integrated graphics. The fact that this test unit only had 1GB of RAM (and on top of that running Vista Home Premium) probably had something to do with this low score. Finally, the Western Digital hard disk drive turned in a score of 5,190 points which is an average score.
As a home entertainment system meant to be paired with a flat panel TV, the Aspire L3600 will perform admirably. However, the lack of HDMI connector is a real pity as users will need to use multiple cables for the same task (HDMI carries both video and audio signals on the same cable). If you have need for a very compact but yet reasonably powerful living-room PC, give the Aspire L3600 a closer look.
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